Avocado Festival!

This weekend Craig, Ngaire and I went to the Avocado Festival. I didn't really know what to expect, but it turned out to be very similar to Dedham's Craft Fairs. Different artists had tables set up with jewelry, clothes, pottery, preserves, snacks, and of course, avocados. In addition to all of this, there were some live performances, including the band of Ukelele players below, and four girls who opened the festival with Hula dancing.

The festival took place on the green of a local Resort. Ngaire told me that it is owned by a Hawaiian family with royal heritage. That gives them some wealth with which to own the hotel, and it also means that they have a more sustainable, Hawaiian friendly, management than some of the other tourist attractions around. The resort is located right on the water front, giving me my first encounter with the Pacific (as seen from Hawaii anyway). I was able to walk down to the beach and wet my feet in the tidal pools there.

Just when it seemed like this moment of window-shopping and ocean-enjoying couldn't get any better, I found out that my turtle, Merlin, has been moved into his new big tank! I got the tank for Christmas and subsequently got a filter for it, but didn't manage to get it up and running before I left for Hawaii. My mom has been an amazing turtle sitter and she got him all set up. I'm so grateful to everyone involved with that endeavor.

ok, on with the pictures!

My feet in the tidal pools at the resort's beach

The resort and one of the vendor tables

A band of Ukelele players!

That's all for now! Thanks for reading!

Pictures

There are new pictures up on facebook, feel free to check them out, or shaer a screen with a friend. If facebook isn't really your style, here are the main highlights:

"Chocolate is Aloha!"

Chayote! A vegetable I am learning to prepare and enjoy here.


A gecko looking for a snack after church. Pretty cute if you ask me!

And having a sip of coconut!

Machete Lessons

Here we are on the brink of week three! The beginning is almost over! Here are a couple of lessons that I have been learning over the last week or so:

Give it a full swing:
So I have been learning to use some tools that I previously had very little exposure to. Chief among these are the machete, hatchet, and O-o bar (a big metal pole that you throw/drop into the ground to make a hole). After the first day of using some of these tools Craig said, "I notice you can be sort of delicate with your work" (Side note: I appreciate that he chooses such positive wording. He also says that I have a very "fresh" perspective). I have been a little tentative with these tools. I realized I'm not really accustomed to fully extending my arms for a good downward swipe, for example. I'm not really used to fully extending my body. I got to dig several holes for tea trees today, which was good practice with the O-o bar. I can still get better at fully exerting myself.

Weeding vines:
I have spent a good chunk of time weedin vines. Craig and I agree that you really could use up all of the intern hours just pulling up vines. That means we kind of have to chose our battles. You can do a pretty good sweep over an area, but some of the deep strong roots will still sprout more vines in a few months. However, every time you weed out the vines they get a little weaker, as log as you stay after them.

I won't make analogies with everything I am learning on the farm, but I think this translates really well to dealing with our hang-ups. There needs to be a balance of diligence in really trying to better ourselves and also patience knowing that significant long lasting change takes a long time. Anyway, it's a good way to justify weeding!

Hand saws are not for big trees:
This week I was pruning, and I had this 7" diameter tree that I needed to take down. I started cutting it with my hand saw and even though the handsaw was bending a little bit, I kept going. Sooner than not, I chipped about a half inch off the tip of the saw. I felt very frustrated and a little dumb. Still, I changed my tree-demolition tactics and I did finish taking down the tree successfully. Craig was very cool about the damage to the saw. He said he expects some wear and tear to happen. Learning experience!

So! What new lessons and challenges will this week hold? Only time will tell. In the mean time, good food, good views, and good internet! :)

Thanks for reading!

A few meals thies week

Welcome to the kitchen!




One week in, I've stocked up the kitchen a little at the grocery store and farmer's market. I have also slowly remembered that ancient and time honored tradition of actually cooking your own food. Here are a couple of the more successful examples from the week:












Lunch:Pasta salad
some leftover wheat penne with Okinawa spinach, cheese, green onions, canola oil, salt and pepper.









Dinner: Intense Burgers
Basically, ground beef with the whole kitchen mixed in, soy sauce and is spicy tomato mole sauce, dried mushrooms, green onions, cheese, and okinawa lettuce



Below we see one of the burgers crumbled up and mixed into mac and cheese (with some tomato, green onion, and spices). and...

Breakfast: oatmeal with banana, half a strawberry papaya (surprisingly bland compared to regular papaya) and sweet and spicy tea.

Remembering the Tough times

I recently read an article that Elin, the last intern here, wrote about how her experience transitioning from Sweden to Hawaii. The article was mostly about the changes in diet, but one of the things I really appreciated about the article was how honest Elin was about the initial difficulties, and how satisfying that made her ultimate success.

So, I thought it would be helpful if I share some of the difficult things about my first week living in Hawaii. I don't usually like to dwell on the difficulties in posts like this. In this case I think it will be helpful to see how things change over the course of the internship. Also, I expect these challenges are a good practice run for the Peace Corps. So, tuck your cloak into your belt, and here we go:

Homesickness:

For the purpose of future wisdom, I will admit it. I have never been so homesick before in my life. Not when I went to college, not when I was in the Middle East for 5 weeks, not even when I went to Tokyo for two weeks in high school. This is just the most out of my element I have ever been. I didn't really know anyone before getting here, having only emailed and briefly spoken with Craig on the phone. I am very much a beginner when it comes to agriculture, so I've been pretty unstable on my feet there. I don't have a car, and the fruits and vegetables that surround me are utterly new.

Ok, I can't help myself, here's a little of the bright side already. I have been able to call, text, and video chat, so staying in touch has been reasonable. Craig is really patient and a good, diligent teacher/question answerer. I am getting more familiar with the farm work and the fruits and vegetables every day. I'm also getting reasonably good at walking, -up hill both ways- to the convenience store and post office.

Eating:

In Elin's article she mentioned that people are more likely to ethnic food at home, and home-comfort-foods when they are away. Foods that remind us of home create a safe island when a lot has changed around us.

Well I didn't learn that information until Sunday. I arrived in Hawaii thinking it was really important to be eating the local food. I was worried that if I just ate foods that were familiar to me, I would seem closed-minded and unhealthy. Now, it is true that I do hope to include more and more local foods in my diet. However, in this first week I think I put a lot of stress on myself by missing foods from home and feeling like I was wrong for eating the familiar foods I was eating.

Full disclosure: When we did make it to the farmer's market and grocery store I grabbed up some ground beef (which turned out to be 85% lean, not 95%, like I usually choose). That night I made burgers with glee (but not relish). And that night, I had terrible indigestion. The burgers were so much greasier than the fruit, quinoa, and canned salmon I had been eating! You can't win 'em all...

Bugs:

There are bugs everywhere. Most of the time this doesn't bother me. They really could be a lot worse. There is a bare minimum of mosquitoes, not too many bees, and apparently the spiders aren't poisonous! Also, most of the time I am outside with the bugs, they aren't indoors with me, so that takes some of the shock and horror out of any bug encounter. Still, I have had a couple surprise creepy crawlies that I did not appreciate. I'm just getting to be ok with seeing spiders often.

Things that go bump in the night:

Ugh! This was a big one. After the very first night, (during which I slept like a rock) I woke up every night in the first few nights hearing creatures tromps around outside my cabin. Now, realistically this is not a big deal. I lock my door at night so no animals can get in, and we have an electric fence that keeps out our only possibly serious intruder, wild pigs. Most of the noises are generated by a male and female pheasant. I often see them during the day strutting around my cabin. Still, at night, when the whole world is quiet (except for the crickets) and the brain is over active, crunching leaves can be a scary sound.

I finally had to be tell myself, "You know what, pheasants can walk around at night, it's ok. And even in the worst case scenario, even if wild pigs somehow got in, they wouldn't care about my cabin. They would just eat some of our plants and in the morning we would realize and fix the fence." Since I finally gave myself that pep talk, I've been sleeping through the night.

Transportation:

So I don't have a car, and a bike would be a challenge all it's own on these steep hills. I knew this going into the internship. However, I have felt some real tension here. On the one hand I have been anxious to stock up on groceries and get more Peace Corps paper work in the mail (erg arg). On the other hand I wanted to seem self-sufficient and be compliant to Craig and Ngaire's schedule and preferences. While I am still getting to know them, I really wanted to be amiable and I didn't want to do anything that would put me on the wrong foot with them, even though I really felt pressure to get the Peace Corps stuff out, and was eager to take a big chunk of time to stock up the kitchen.

Fortunately, I was eventually able to get the Peace Corps stuff in the mail. As for food, thanks to many trips to Market Baske,t I kind of owned the 45 minutes I had, and am feeling like I have a good supply of food.

Ok, I think I have nicely worked disclaimers throughout, but hopefully you and my future self can appreciate some of the challenges. All the same, let me close out with 5 things that are already awesome about my Hawaii internship:

1. Watching the sun set from the outdoor shower.

2. I'm getting a good workout everyday.

3. I am learning skills that I will be able to use to teach and aid people in the Peace Corps and beyond.

4. I'm where my Father in heaven wants me to be.

5. The coffee is amazing.

That's the rundown folks. Thanks for reading!!!

-Lauren

Pictures of my street

The farm that I live and work on is about a 15 minute drive from a pretty major town with a Costco and Walmart and all that fun stuff. The farm itself is in the smaller town of Holualoa. The town center has a post office, convenience store, and several artist galleries. Holualoa town center is a pleasant 15 minute walk away if you are in shape. Turns out I'm not in shape. It was over 20 minutes of hoofin' it each way. However, I did stop to take some pictures.

Holualoa is basically on the side of a volcano. So everything is very steep. You can see the ocean from our farm even though we are probably 40 minutes away from it. These roads between the town center and the farm are pretty typical.

"What pretty greenery. Man this is going to be a tough walk on the way back up. Is that the sky or the ocean?"



Almost at the main road! Can you see where the houses end and the ocean begins in the blue out there?

Well, that's part of my walk.
Cheers,
Lauren

Thoughts on being environmentally friendly

Hello everyone,

Today Ngaire (pronounced Nigh-ree) and I had a long conversation about local organic food that made me consider a lot of things that I hadn't before. I will talk about that later, but let's warm up by talking about energy efficient life on this farm a little bit.

The whole farm is solar powered. They have solar panels on the roof of the open kitchen and three hours of direct sunlight completely fills the batteries connected to the panels. This has some interesting implications; It is ideal to do laundry on a bright sunny day, when the panels are picking up more sunlight than they can store.

Other electricity is pretty limited. Because the temperature is pretty awesome and we have a good mix of sun and shade with the trees, there is no heat or air conditioning, just really big screened in windows. So for my little dorm room cabin there is a power line that comes up from the kitchen with two plugs for a desk light and a larger lamp over my bed. I generally don't used the desk light and just charge my laptop there (which is totally cool to do). The phone either gets charged in the kitchen while I am cooking and eating, or in the plug that would be for my bed lamp. There is wifi, which is very awesome. I can't explain the mystical powers behind that one.

The stove is gas powered and we turn off the gas between meals. It turns out that leaving the pilot lights burning 24/7 actually uses a lot of gas. So I am getting really good at lighting pilot lights.

There is also an outdoor shower. Oh man is that cool. Definitely one of the things I know I am going to miss most at this point. However, hot water is definitely a limited commodity, so showers need to be pretty quick.

The Outhouse that is basically for myself is really cool also. For starters it has a real toilet that really flushes. Outhouse doesn't usually have that connotation in my experience. In addition to that it has some crazy innovative system that was the result of a Workshop, where the toilet flushes into a tank that then nurtures plants on the farm. Yes, I have questions about the mechanics of that too, but it works and that is pretty awesome as a means of dealing with waste.

What else? The open air kitchen has running water, though I haven't used the hot water yet. It also has a special tap for filtered water. Fancy. There is also a former freezer now super efficient refridgerator. No microwave though. I am still working my way around figuring out how to reheat food... All in good time.

Oh! We also have an electric fence for keeping the wild pigs out. That is also powered through the solar panels. One of my first tasks was clearing around the fence so that plants that were touching it weren't pulling energy. Alright, alright, we turned the fence OFF while I was clearing.

Well, thanks for taking the energy tour with me. More anecdotes and adventures to follow.
<3
Lauren

Sunhat for the win

This sunhat makes life definitely 5 degrees cooler, even with the humidity. Thanks Grandma!

pictures

Okay so the photos have been posted to facebook for now. Sorry for the inconvenience, I hope to get something else working soon.

Cheers,
Lauren

In Hawaii

Hello World!

I am in Hawaii. It is weird and great. There is so much to say but really I am too jetlagged to do it justice. So, let me sum up.

The trip began with most tedious flight plan of my life (Boston to Chicago, Chicago to Phoenix, Phoenix to LA, LA to Kona Hawaii). Thanks to the prayers of many wonderful people I did infact arrive with all of my luggage. One flight left a half hour late but on in on time, another left on time and got in a half hour early. So not bad at all for time variations. I slept a lot. I also did finish reading The Fault in Our Stars, which was a mistake because in it's beautiful poignant way, that book is such a tear jerker.

Today I woke up in my cabin in Hawaii. I had the first two hours of the day to unpack and get myself situated. Then Craig oriented me with my tools, and the general way things work. He is a very chill guy and easy to get along with. I also met his significant other Ngaire (pronounced nigh-ree) and she is sweet and considerate. She put some eggs in the fridge I use, knowing I won't be able to go to the store until Friday. They also have a dog named Lei-lei and she is even freindlier! She ran up to my door this morning to say good morning (I stepped out side and gave her a good-morning scratch) and while I was making breakfast she dropped a tennis ball at my feet and was like "Play time!" She is really good at catch. There is also a cat, but she is very shy.

Anyway after being oriented, I jumped right into work with some weed and vine clearing tasks. It's good to be doing some farm work again and I'm really encouraged by how much my experience at Fairmount Fruit Farm really informs my work here. There is definitely a different culture here though! No lunch break where the family gathers around the farm kitchen table for the daily soap-opera, that's for sure. It's much more chill here.

I will be posting some pictures. I am considering making a Tumblr and linking to it. Thoughts? Too many websites to have accounts for these days, that's what I say!

Ok, going to bed soon.
Peace,
Lauren