Training

Hey ya'll! All of the new volunteers arrived and we have finally begun training, which feels great. Nic and I have done every chore, which ranges from cute things like giving the guinea pigs new water to intimidating things like throwing bales of hay to ugly muddy water buffaloes. I've been getting pretty familiar with the Global Village and the farm itself. We've continued to get some produce from the Heifer gardens, which rocks, and yesterday I made pizza dough with Heifer eggs. Before that, I baked a chocolate cake with Heifer milk. The point of this is that we are provided with fresh raw milk from goats and cows and fresh eggs as long as they are available. This is a great benefit that myself and several others are very excited about.

There are a great number of volunteers here that enjoy cooking and do-it-yourself type stuff, and the group of volunteers as a whole seems to get along really well. We've organized one communal meal a week, potluck style, and Thursday nights are trivia nights. Boy, how I wish Noah R. was here. That guy is a trivia master. Our team would win every single time. Either way around, I feel great about everyone here and feel privileged to be on the ranch right now.

One of my fellow volunteers has a friend that left for Benin in July, and she was apparently called at the last minute and frantically dragged into the program. I wonder if she replaced one of us?

In the meantime, here are some new photos from the farm.




There are two miniature goats that run wild on the farm and have taught all of the other small goats how to escape from the barn. Here is one of the two escape artists and a trainee. One of the barns is in the background.




This is a photo of our local beer. As it turns out, beer is extremely fricken expensive. Even though we can buy beer on Sundays, it isn't exactly worth the prices. Beer is much more reasonably priced back home. Either way around, this stuff is pretty good.




The farm dog, Pudge, in some fields behind the garden.



This is a fellow volunteer walking our prized camel, Abu. You just get out a leash and walk him like you would a dog. Another fellow volunteer predicts fistfights for the privilege of walking the Camel. Funny thought.








Fellow volunteer Sam took these two pictures of the stone walls that are in the woods behind the farm.