BENGARLAND!com

So… a little change in schedule.

Tuesdays I’m now talking a Food Processing class. The professor who teaches it is totally crazy. She’s this really short woman who has the energy of someone 10 times her size. And thankfully, she speaks very clear spanish so I can almost understand everything.

Last week, in the lab, we tested the fat content of milk. And checked processed meat for degree of additives. And observed the effect of various preservatives on fresh fruit. We wear lab coats and hair nets like the geek scientists that we obviously are.

On Wednesdays, I now go work on an organic farm in the community. The family that runs it is really nice (and the mom cooks really good food). They have three of the cleanest pigs I’ve ever seen, a few cows, and a horse or two. It turns out that this farm is one of the places I am going to visit later this summer as part of the UGA Agroecology study abroad… weird! By that time, I’m sure, I will be like family.

On Thursdays, I have a class in Organic Horticulture. We have a few interesting field trips coming up. Unfortunately I missed the first one, because nobody told me exactly when and where we were leaving until it was too late. They sent a guard to my room to wake me up, but apparently he didn’t knock loud enough for me to wake up (I probably had my earplugs in). Next time, I will make sure to know a week ahead of time what’s going on.

Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays I am working at the organic farm here on campus. They have put me in charge of setting up a biodigester for the pig manure. So I have to find plans, make a materials list, and put it all together. Then we are going to measure the methane output and determine how many hours of stove use you can get per day of manure input. Interesting.

I really like it here. I finally have friends so that most of the time when I go to dinner, I see someone I know and can talk to. There is still a lot of free time, which I have so far spent mainly taking photos and reading books. So far I’ve read The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and I’m about 1/4 of the way through The Long Emergency by Howard Kunstler. Interesting stuff.

It doesn’t seem like I’ve been here almost 3 weeks already. But in other ways it does. I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer, but I also can’t wait to come home. I miss certain aspects of American life… as much as there is to love about Costa Rica, there are a lot of things I don’t like about Latin America in general either… but mainly, I just miss my family and my girlfriend.