Pictures (continued)

Okay, I've managed to load some more pictures from yesterday at the farm, so here they are.


This is Mr. Khai's wife (right) along with two of the students folding the coconut we had shaved earlier into the white dough and then wrapping them in banana leaves to steam. We're sitting in the house at the farm, which has actually expanded quite a bit since I've arrived. The area where we're sitting used to be bare ground in front of the house but they extended raised platform out from the front of the house for people to sleep on (it has to be raised or it would get wet during the rainy season).








All the students were really happy to be able to spend the day at the farm. You can see the shaved coconut in the pot in the middle of the semi circle, and the girl on the right is kneading the dough.

I really like this picture. I had to ask Mr. Khai to take it because I wanted to be in it (I'm not in very many of my pictures). We were all just sitting down to lunch.

That's Lutai on the left, one of the men who works at the farm full time, and the gentleman on the right is a friend. He comes to the farm quite a bit and is quite a joker. He's always got everyone laughing. Greg and I can't remember his name so we just refer to him as 'Animal' as in 'party animal'.

The planting of the rice. This was probably one of the highlights of the day. The rice had been germinated in the bag (you should be able to see the small white shoots coming out of the grains if you click the picture to blow it up), and then would be planted in the paddies.Everyone waded into the muddy rice field and used their feet to mix up the mud and puddles of water and to crush any hard lumps in the soil. You had to be careful of snails though, becuase they were everywhere burried in the mud and you were constantly stepping on them. When crushed, their hard shells are very sharp and thanks to them I have small cuts all over the bottoms of my feet.

This is me building working on my Arakan (one of the Burmese ethnic groups) traditional cooking skills. It's not as easy as it looks, and your fingers get really sticky from the coconut so the dough sticks to them. Or at least it did to mine. Somehow the women were doing fine. In the background you can see one of the guys who had come to the farm for the harvest celebrations on the guitar. He was playing with one of the other younger guys on the farm who's just off screen to the left. I don't remember the young guy's name, but we're told he is a very popular Burmese singer and is here to learn about agricultural and political issues and then wants to go back to Burma and use his music to spread the message. How cool is that?

This is that same dish cooked and ready to eat. You had to unwrap the banana leaves before eating and they were fresh out of the pot so they were piping hot (you can see Mr. Khai's daughter in the background trying not to burn her tongue). It was terribly difficult though, because they were so amazingly delicious that you wanted to stuff it in your mouth all at once.

I'm really happy this worked! This is one of the videos I took of people singing and playing the guitar during the afternoon. Best. Day. Ever.