Welcome to the Permaculture Farm

Project Bonafide is an NGO Permaculture farm located on the side of a volcano on Omatepe Island.

Getting to this remote, secluded farm was difficult, to put it lightly. We had to take an hour long taxi ride from Granada to San Jorge, an hour long ferry ride to Omatepe Island, and then another hour long ride on dirt trodden paths to Finca de Magdelina- from there it's a hike through pastures, gates, and barbed wire until finally you stumble upon straw-thatched huts, compostable toilets, sinks and running water, hammocks, medicinal gardens and more plants than I knew existed. This is Finca (farm) Bonafide. My favorite spot is a wooden platform over the shower area that overlooks an active volcano--but not to worry, the volcano rarely erupts and if it does, there is a 'route de evacuacion' highlighted by a yellow sign that I passed on the way up here...

12 other volunteers are here for various duration and we all act as a close knit family, dividing up the chores and tasks on the farm such as watering the medicinal garden, cooking dinners with the various produce we grow on the farm, and other 'household' chores. My favorite task is taking the compost down to the pigs and watching them guzzle down fermented mangos while I clean up after them and bring them clean water. Maybe it's because they remind me of myself- always covered in mud and eating.

I am so sore from my first week of farming that it hurts to laugh or even fill up my canteen with water filtered from THE CERAMIC WATER FILTERS MANUFACTURED IN MANAGUA, yes we have THREE of these filters on the farm and they are AWESOME and this is how we get clean drinking water, although the water is fairly clean because it is pure volcanic water- pretty cool.

We work for an hour from 7 AM until 8 AM and then have an hour break for breakfast, and then continue to work until noon Monday through Friday. We have weekends off, but it's pretty expected that during one's time off they will be working on some sort of project like solar powered stoves or something of the like or working down at the community center in town. I've been enjoying my time journaling and reading as much as I can from my tree house when I'm not working.

My tasks on the farm that have made me feel like the 80 year old woman I am this week are as follows:
This week I....
-gathered water hyacinth from the 'pila' water storage tank and used it as mulch around coconut trees
-picked up rotten mangos and dropped them off at the mango pit (la tomba de los mangos)
-cleaned up after the pigs, fed them our compost, and then fed the goats legumes we macheted down for them
-unloaded and reloaded coffee plants from a Chris's truck (the Man of Project Bonafide)
-planted coffee plants by digging about 10'' holes with a pic into the ground, and tagged them with pink ribbons to be identified later (sort of an old-school GIS system if you will)
-learned how to cut, smooth, chop and tie up bamboo beds ! A very practical skill !
-made my community dinner of Thai-esque soup, a salad from our own garden, and of course- beans and rice.

Upon arriving to the farm, I realized oh, what a mistake I had made by packing all of the processed, non-local, absolutely non-organic soy sauce, hot sauce, granola bars, wasabi peas, and dried apricots and cranberries I brought (remember how horrible the food was in Ghana? Could you blame me?)- and was faced with my first moral conundrum- should I tell this new community about the contraband I had brought?

For fear of bugs, mostly, I told the farm community about the contraband I'd brought and Mitch, the dread-headed volunteer coordinator, was estatic- as was everyone else, minus one of the guys here who commented on the high fructose corn syrup content in the barbeque sauce. And OK, as I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's 'Animal, Vegetable, Mineral' right now; I agree with him- but a gal's gotta have her condiments to add some variety to beans and rice, right?

Today we hiked the most difficult hike I've ever hiked- the volcano we live on. It took us 8 excruciating hours of mud, sliding, falling, and cursing myself for agreeing to hike on my day off. In the delirium of hiking down, I was making promises with Earth Goddesses that if they let me survive I will vow to never hike ever again and other insanities of being dehydrated and having my legs feel like guava jelly. I decided that like a cow, I can be led up a volcano; but coming back down seemed to be even more challenging- like I've heard how cows can be led upstairs and not down them. I figure that the grueling huffing and puffing in extreme humidity for 7.5 hours for a 30 minute awesome view at a volcanic lake, enough time to snap some pictures- probably wasn't worth the pain I'll be in farming for the rest of the week.

Some scorpion kills in our hut later, and apparently getting peed on by a bug that left something of a third degree burn on my leg (youch!), I find myself sitting around the dining room table; on the internet run by solar, overhearing my favorite Farm Mates discuss the goings-on. The most beloved of the volunteers of mine has to be Cameron, the 59-year-old Australian who has been everywhere in the world and says that every day his heart grows younger even though his body is growing older. I feel like I am the old soul and he is the one with the young spirit.
*Shout out to my sister, Katie- he IS the guy on Lost (I forget his name, only saw a few episodes, sorry) who brings all of the knives to hunt Australian outbacks before the plane went down. Seriously.