It was a hot hot day in July...

I've been shamelessly lazy with posting for the last little while for a number of reasons, but I am back and will try to write with greater frequency now. I've got the day off today because it's the first day of Buddhist Lent, so Thursday and Friday are holidays. In celebration a bunch of my friends decided to go to the nearby town of Pai to blow off steam for the long weekend, but I declined with hopes that with fewer distractions i'd be able to get more work done. It's working okay so far. There are a ton of things that have happened, many of which I made a note at the time to blog about, but as so often happens I can't recall a single one now that I've actually sat down in front of a computer.

Things at the farm are going all right, although the rainy season is wreaking havoc on the crops. As you can see from the picture, things are pretty well flooded at the moment, and the only ones who're happy about it are the fish and the rice. We spent a lot of yesterday transplanting the banana trees which were growing in between the rice paddies because they were dying from being partially submerged in water all the time. Banana's don't mind a lot of water, but they certainly aren't water plants. The okra also seems to have developed a strange yellow discoloration which we fear is the mosaic virus, a disease which is being spread by these little black and red bugs that you see constantly on the plants. They're not eating it, it's just causing leaf discoloration.

Also, the passionfruit seeds we planted a few weeks ago have germinated beautifully, so it looks like we will be able to plant them in another few weeks. We're planning to put them up on the trellis we built a few weeks ago over one of the fish ponds at the farm. The shade will keep the water cooler and the fish happier, and any insects that fall off the leaves into the pond will supplement the fish food as well. Not to mention we've increased the efficiency of land use by using the space above the fish ponds for growing. Everybody wins!

Attended a meeting about the CUSO 1% Fund, and it looks like I am going to be on the organizing committee for Thailand. To explain, the 1% Fund is a volunteer-run fund set up by CUSO volunteers, where every CUSO member can elect to pay 1% of his or her salary to this 'fund', which is avaliable to all the organizations that CUSO works in partnership with. The fund is used to give small grants to organizations who submit project funding proposals, no more than 20,000 baht, or roughly 600 dollars per organization/project. Recently, an email was sent out saying that the fund would be discontinued, but a number of volunteers (including myself) expressed that we'd like to see it continue, so we set up a meeting to discuss how we were going to do this.

I'd worked really hard on a funding proposal for more seeds and tools at the farm
(SIDENOTE: we broke one of our two remaining digging shovels yesterday, which makes the current tool list:
3 Hoes
1 Digging Shovel (a long heavy pole with a blade on the end which can be lifted and driven into the earth to dig straight downards lossening earth very effectively, but is terrible for actually moving soil)
1 Machete
1 Machete blade with broken handle
4 pairs of boots (purchased by Greg and I)

Yep...that's everything we have to run a 3 acre farm. All of the earth moving that happens on the farm digging is done by hand, one person using the diggin shovel to loosen the earth at the bottom of the hole, and the other using their hands to scoop the earth out of the hole. Money for tools would have been very, VERY nice.

Anway, I'd just polished up my shiny new 8 page funding proposal before going to the meeting, only to find that the 1% fund was in a pretty bad place at the moment. There was only about enough money for 2 projects currently, so before any more money was given out, we would need to at least raise the funds for more projects (if we spread the word that the 1% fund was going back up, and then tons of proposals started coming in, we'd look like fools if we could only fund 1 or 2 before the fund ran out). It made sense, but it was disheartening. We're going to try to raise at least 200,000 baht before starting the fund again, and so I've got to send an email to all the volunteers for CUSO and VSO (the Europe-based Volunteer Sending Organization with which CUSO is merging in the very near future. The results of the merger are really up in the air, nobody knows if they'll have a job past March 31st, so things are a bit confused at the moment, which was another reason the proposal to discontinue the fund went out). Anyway, that's another thing I'm doing in the next little while.

Greg has designed an experiment integrating ducks with rice paddy agriculture, and we've set aside one of the paddies on which to raise the ducks. Basically we're going to observe the amount of time it takes to weed the other, duckless paddies, and then look at how well the ducks control the weeds on their paddy, as well as how the yields compare. The ducks should eat pests and weeds, and their dung should help to fertilize the paddy as well, so if all goes well we shold be able to prove that ducks not only make the paddy more fertile, they decrease the work for the farmer as well. I want to work this into my research but I still don't know how. We spent Monday morning at the farm moving mud from one paddy to the other in a human chain to build up a dry area in the corner on which to build a duck coop and so that the ducks ahve a dry area as well.

As well, there will be a Regional Food Fair at the end of July and NEED would like to set up a booth to raise their profile in the NGO sector as well as to hopefully sell some of the organic seeds produced at the farm as a revenue generating excercise. I've got to write a pamphlet and work with Greg's girlfriend Dale (who's just arrived from Canada to work with NEED as well) to make the display.

I've also been trying a lot of new fruit lately, on the list are green mango, guava, lychee, longan, mango, mangosteen, papaya, pineapple, pomelo, rambutan, sugar apple and watermelon. I'd like you to take a minute to appreciate the time it took me to come up with and then alphabetize that list.
And now a word on Durian.
Where to begin...to plagiarize shamelessly from Wikipedia, here are a few descriptions of the odor and taste:

“The five cells are silky-white within, and are filled with a mass of firm, cream-coloured pulp, containing about three seeds each. This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience. ... as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed.”

“... its odor is best described as pig-sh*t, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia”

"like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."

"Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing with dead people."

After actually having had 'The Durian Experience’ as I call it, I can verify that all of these descriptions are correct. A friend of mine brought it over because I’d told her I’d never tried it before. I could smell it the second I opened the door. I immediately went to put it in the refrigerator. A few minutes later she asked where it was and I said I'd put it in the fridge. A look of petrified horror flashed across her face. "NO! YOU FOOL!" She screamed, and flew across the room to throw open the refridgerator door. She grabbed the offensive package and practically crashed through my back door in her haste to move the fruit outside to the balcony. She informed me later that everything in your fridge will both reek and taste of durian if you keep it in the fridge. I appologized for my ignorance. I had no idea it would be so potent, though it is making a few things make sense. I've seen signs on the front doors of some apartment buildings and stores that say "No Pets, No Guns, No Drugs, No Durian", and have always wondered what this seemingly innocuous fruit has done to deserve such a terrifying reputation. I was excited to try it, but I had to go to the 1% Fund meeting so I figured I would save the fruit until after I'd finished. When I got home it was waiting. And so was the stench. Even though it was on the balcony, I could smell it as soon as I got off the elevator on my floor. I headed straight to the balcony, having convinced Sam to come over to try some durian as well, partly because I was scared to take the plunge alone. Staring up at me, plump and yellow through the saran wrap window on it's styrofoam tray, the durian seemed to smell my fear and feed on it, the stench growing ever more potent as I neared. I unwrapped it, and poked the fleshy mound. It was soft and warm to the touch. The smell was very difficult to describe. I would say there was definitely an oniony armoa in there, but that's about as close as I can get.

I gingerly took a bite.

And felt like vomiting. The taste was unlike anything I've ever had before, and to try to describe it would be like attempting to describe the color turquoise to a person who's been blind since birth. Whatever it was, it was powerful. For some reason I felt compelled to take a second bite though, because I'd read the more you eat the more you like it. It was the strangest thing. The second bite was just sort of confusing. I honestly wasn't sure if I liked it or hated it, so I took a third. And did kind of like it. If you concentrated hard, you could pick out a subtle sweetness to the fruit, though the creamy, custardy, stringy texture was really bizzarre. The fourth bite made me feel like vomiting. After six or seven more bites, I was still going back and forth between kind of liking it and wanting to spit it out. Never before has a fruit so skillfully played with my emotions. It was impressive.

In the end, I decided I couldn't keep it, because the neighbors would complain about the stink (i've already had one complaint, when my window box leaked soil onto the balcony beneath mine during an especially violent rain storm) so I carefully disposed of the rest of the package...in a garbage can two floors below mine, so the soon-to-be offendingly smelly can couldn't be traced back to my room.