Drip Irrigation Seminar

In cooperation with Healing Hands, this week Mission Lazarus hosted a drip irrigation seminar for some men in the area. The guy teaching works for Healing Hands and has travelled to over 85 different countries. He was pretty interesting, and knows a lot about irrigation. Anyway, this guy is from Tennessee and doesn't speak Spanish, so I had the privelege of translating for him a few days this week. I learned more than the average person would probably ever want to know about composting, digging raised beds, and drip irrigation.
For example: To build a compost heap, there are several principle things that you need, such as organic materials, water, bacteria, heat, and pressure. To start, you build your base, about 2 meters by 2 meters, and build your first layer with coarse materials, such as small sticks or bamboo or something like that. Then, you cover with a layer of palm leaves, or some such thing. Pour on a layer of water, then continue to cover this with some type of large leaf, like a banana leaf. Continue with some mud, perhaps with a little manure mixed in, throw on some food scraps, maybe a little more water, some light material like green grass, or sawdust, add water, and continue to add layers...alternating between heavy layers like mud and manure, and light layers like grass and sawdust. It's important to remember that green grass is better than yellow because it's still alive and still produces certain bacterias that help the heap to decompose.

And that's leaving out the details.....