6am. We slowly wake up, a little late, what with the weekend and meeting the new volonteers who are not yet in the working rythm. No pasture chores this morning, the goat have taken their summer quarters inside the now closed field so they don't require feeding anymore. Still two goats have escaped from the field and wade back to the farm where the grain is. They are very well aware about its location. 

The project for this week is to dig a canal to deviate the water that pours down from the top of the mound, coming from the neighbouring fields. It is important for the organic certification because the rain water is draining through the neighbour's field which isn't necessarily doing organic farming. This water could contaminate the fields of the farm. We leave for the mound, 3 girls, Tom and Jorge. At the farm, there is an American couple who arrived, students in the field of agriculture who seem to master the topic very well. They convinced Allan to attempt a new project, making biochar. You can have a look at the video here to discover what it is! In any case, it is definitely less physical work than that of digging a canal on a slope, i can tell you that.

Tom creates the canal with a pickaxe going up, us girls we take away the dirt and dig and Jorge consolidate and finishes the contouring the way he wants it. We move up slowly, along the slope. The girls remaining at the farm are repairing the grid of the chicken's park. The net is there to prevent predators to get to the chickens rather than prevent them from coming out as they are sneaking through everywhere. It looks as if Nurieth has taken the lead and occupied everyone.

One afternoon, Nurieth takes us all in the car (except Valery who stays at the farm to take care of the children and because the car is full). Out to the frigoles fields (red beans). We eat them avery day, at all three meals, so it is not without a bit of excitment that we are finally going to discover how they are grown. Imagine a field. Right. See beans how they normally grow? They climb and it's thin. In France, we prop them up on a stick or a net. Roughly, in my imagination, it is a big flat space with rows of beans that we can then harvest by picking them. Picture it? Well now forget it all and visualize rather small hills (when you have been up and down them tens of times I assure you the word "small" loses its meaning) completly covered with low bushes and undergrowth, with a steep slope (that you slide down on your bottom if you lose your balance). Got it? Well, that's the frigoles field. And there are three hills to harvest. We discover them on after the other. Two weeks before, the previous volunteers came there and pulled off the red beans plants and left them on the spot. Now they are dried up by the sun and it is our task to pick them up and bring them down the hill so that they can be threshed (with hand and bambou). Let's go. We end up organising a chain to limit our movements, those up the hill collect the dried plants and then we pass each other the bunch down the hill. Nurieth notices and forbids us to do this, each person has to pick up and bring down its own bunch of dried plants so that we don't lose them. The beans themselves are easily falling from the dried up plant, the pods sometimes already open. We grumble. It doesn't change much with regards to the beans falling down. Nurieth, seeing our reluctance to adopt her instructions, goes up and starts bunching the plants together and handing them to us. They are so big that we lose as many going down with them anyway. The bunches are then put together on a big tarp.Jorge uses two strong bambous sticks and threshes the plants to let the beans out. The strength and endurance he shows off during the threshing is impressive. Going up and down, sliding, heavily loaded with frigoles bunches under the crushing sun and engulfed by the jungle moistness is exhausting. At the end of the three hills, we are done with and our smiles even as well sometimes. As such Nurieth decides to pack off early. The threshing will be finished tomorrow. The already collected beans are placed in big sacks. Tom, Jorge and Nivesse will go back to finish the work. Nivesse is an italian volunteer who even with her age being more advanced than the others has a truly amazing well of energy. It is to a point that an american girl of only twenty years old tops tells it to me with an admirative tone, as we were both already exhausted and as Nivesse was still up to the hill working like crazy, bending to pick the frigoles and bringing it down.Tom will thresh along with Jorge and end up breaking the threshing sticks. The harvest: 350-400 kg of frigoles. 

This week, there is Valentine's day. Tom announces proudly to Nurieth that the day after we will not have dinner at the farm, winking eye and all. That is sure to get a good laugh from Nurieth. We go to the gourmet restaurant of the valley at a 40-minute walk, the Descanso of San Girardo de Rivas. The restaurant has small vegetable garden in front, lush and well-kept. Basil, chili and beautiful salads go together nicely. The small area is nearly the same as the vegetable garden of Cielo Verde and is more productive. THe young who holds this restaurant makes a good refined cuisine, quite creative and with local products, some from his vegetable garden and some additional exotic touches. It is delicious. Tom starts with the Chirripo salad, a raw beetroot carpaccio with nice purple red patterns on white, these are interlaced with thin mango slices and powdered with mint and arranged with an orange juice based sauce. Amazing. I take a cucumber velouté. It has garlic, fresh yoghurt and some olive oil (an exotic touch here!), a fresh classic very welcome after the warmth of the day. As an exquisite detail, I find in it small slices of crispy radish which give to the meal a sophiticated look with a nice flashy pink touch in the middle of the creamy white velouté. We speak about our world travel project and its website, define for the first time its concrete shape on my little notebook on the corner of the table. The logo for the association will also be born that evening in between two glasses of red wine along with further delicious meals. It is a great evening. We delect in the present while speaking about a beautiful future that we are very enthusiastic about. It is good moment and an excellent memory. 

During the week and a free afternoon, we join other volunteers to go to the nearby river. The region does not lack in water, there are beautiful rivers everywhere including the Chirippo. 5 minutes down from the farm, there is a bridge and some huge rocks that allow access to the water. There are youngs from the nearby areas lounging around. The girls on one rock chat aboutand throw half discrete glances to the boys on the other rock who are talking loudly and throwing themselves into the water. One of them running on a rock springs his ankle and seeing the angle of it, I am betting his ankle will surely swell and hurt for a while. He limps a little and sits down, calmed down for the day. His ankle already swells. On our side, we enter the fresh and refreshing water. It is transparent, amazing. The current is very present but not too strong to swim against. I enjoy it very much but already night is falling and it is time to go home.

Another of the afternoons, we fall into political discussions with the americans and canadians who are there. Super interesting. No one here voted for Trump and with a very American optimism, some even say that this enormous mistake has at least the merit to get people down and out in the streets. If it would have been Clinton, no one would have been so outraged against the system that we, all here present, want to change. When we tackle the upcoming French presidential elections, the only known candidate is Marine Lepen. It is our Trump, our scarecrow. We make it our own duty to present our Bernie Sanders and his rebellious ideas of course. It is another good afternoon at the farm.

The atmosphere between the volunteers is good but with Nurieth it sometimes tends to degrade or go through some clouds it seems. It has to be said that the organisation of the second week is better than the first but there is more people to organise and it is still not perfect of course. Moreover the communication , on top of the language barreer (the Americans and Canadians here do master or very little the Spanish language) can be difficult. We would welcome a clear plan on what Nurieth seeks to accomplish with the farm and help her start some of the numerous projects needed to get to it. There isn't one available and so volunteers instead discover daily what their instructions are and sometimes they are contradictory and assigned without explanations, without it being part of a bigger plan for the development of the farm. It is quite frustrating for some and even difficult to bear for others as orders are not very well received by volunteers who, in general, tend to be rather free spirits, sometimes as well creative ones, looking for some meaning or themselves, with a big thirst for learning. Hence, not a very good profile for handling orders without explanations but not missing the will to work either. 

We are redoing the vegetable garden trays in stone. The current ones are in wood and they need to be replaced all the time because they tend to rot with the ambiant moisture here, even during the dry season. Tom, Nurieth and I are making the stone dinder with cement, clay taken from the back of the farm and filtered and water. Conflict arises between Valery, a volunteer from Quebec and Nurieth. Valery refuses the order to clean the dog shelter area. It is not so much the activity that she dislikes but rather being taken away from one to another without being able to finish any of them, along Nurieth's stream of orders. Nurieth does not understand this and is under the impression that Valery is looking at her with contempt and does not want to abase herself to this task. She does not take it well at all. Shortly after, Valery packs up her stuff and leaves. Temperature falls a few degrees even with the ambiant heat of the sunny day. Clearly the human factor has the power to bring down a whole entreprise. It needs to be paid attention to and even more so when you gather people of very different horizons and cultures because communication is then even more complicated and even more essential.

The night before Jorge left the farm. That is why today everyone works at the farm on the vegetable garden trays because Nurieth cannot heandle to separate teams and seems to need to handle us with close control. The canal on the hill goes into hibernation as it is. Jorge has taken with him his dogs and his meager possessions, he left with his companion to go back to a house he has a few tens of kilometres away. We don't know when he will come back with his sister. The lack of means or rather the assignment the existing ones as well as the lack of will to move forward with the farm seemed to weigh on him after two years of his leal services and no grip on the decisions. Human factor, there it is again.

We prep our stuff as well. Rather than make a costly back and forth for the weekend and stay only Monday to finish our two weeks, we leave today after work. Nurieth brings us to the bus. We like her, she has a very direct way of speaking and probably her own reasons for how everything is at the farm. Perhaps the farm isn't the priority but her girls and her family life are, who know what it could be. We could have stayed three weeks and enjoy it but with the departure of Jorge, we don't really see how the volunteers will be managed and so we prefer starting to discover the country.

We retain very good lessons in human management and have taken great pleasure of living at the farm, discovering the daily life, help with different ongoing projects and enjoy the magnificent nature. It is a good first experience. We leave with several ideas for interesting technical videos, everything is done by hand here.

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Check out the related technical videos made on-site here below:

Harvesting and threshing red beans

Venue article : Finca Cielo Verde HERE