Last Day on the Farm

Today was our last day on the farm, we leave tomorrow morning at 7. in the last few days our schedule has been pretty full. We did an activity in the farm called "slum building", basically where we get a bunch of scrap pieces of wood, nails, broken tarp, etc. and we have to build ourselves a home to withstand a rainstorm (which later came in the form of a hose being furiously sprayed at our house). Shuyi got soaked through a hole in one of the tarps and was not very happy (see above).

Yesterday we spent 4 hours cooking our dinner, another farm activity, where we had to make ourselves a meal from basic food supply and had the choice of killing a chicken on the farm. We harvested, washed, and cut vegetables from the farm, built a fire on a "lorena" style stove (outdoor mud stove) and boiled water. We then caught and butchered a chicken by ourselves which was definitely an eye opening experience, and a little hard to watch/do. The food wasn't bad in the end, we created a chicken vegetable rice stew, but I think the point of the activity was to see how hard it can be for some people living in poverty to make even 1 meal. Without access to conventional ovens, stoves, microwaves, people who don't have chicken breasts already cut and packaged for them, people who have to walk a few miles to get water, will make cooking a long and difficult task. It also made us think more about thinking what process took place before the food reached our plates. Whenever we eat meat we have to realize that at one time it was butchered which is a sad thing to see, but it made us really appreciate what's on our plate much more than I think we did before. Overall we were very happy we did it.



We took lots of pictures today, being our last, because we want to remember everything and everyone. A woman who is a friend of one of the interns staying and working here on the farm came to visit so was watching us work and taking pictures with her really nice camera. She offered to take some group photos of us which was awesome. We had fun posing at our photoshoot, and asked one of the interns, Wes, to join us for one. Wes is one of the people that we worked with a lot, he is one of the nicest and most genuine people on the farm and he was likd of like our fake "dad" for the 2 weeks we were here. So we had Wes sit in this big pink armchair outside our porch and we all stood around his chair. It was a little silly and made him look a bit like Santa Clause and I was very tempted to sit on his knee but I resisted. We are all very excited to see the pictures that the woman emails us.



Tonight we finished watching A Very Potter Musical on Youtube, our nightly thing. We then came up with nicknames for all 5 of us which is how we will sign our last post!!! We hope everyone has had an awesome trip. Now we have a 20 hour drive back to Ann Arbor woo hoo!

NASST Love,

The Constant Gardener (Erica),
Anne "Wabbit" West (Anne),
OH Jimmy! (Jimmy),
C-Money (Carolyn),
and Goat Whisperer (Shuyi)