Projects
April 17-23, 2006 Great week down here, 30 degrees and sunny! We spent a few days making some new maps for our sites and gathered up wood for the Planet Drum signs that we will be putting up at each of our planting sites. Work has begun on the handrails and stairs up at Bosque en Media de las Ruinas. Wednesday we measured all the […]
April 10-16, 2006 All is well here in Bahia de Caraquez, and we have working hard to get the greenhouse in order while we have a little spare time. Just as you are all thinking about tulips, daffodils and lilies up North, we have next year’s forest sprouting in the greenhouse! It’s been a battle transplanting the hundreds of new seedlings before they get too […]
April 3-9, 2006 In my first official week as Field Projects Manager I can honestly say we had a little of everything on my first day… drought, lack of running water and a temporary invasion of both bats and cats. The most important thing accomplished was that after four days without water we found a delivery truck to fill up the water tank and reprovide the […]
April 4, 2006 Greetings from the land almost down under. In these parts, the heat is having some interesting effects on our operation. This week we have been unable to plant trees as the ground is hard as a rock. As such we have been keeping busy in the greenhouse, maintaining sites that are becoming overgrown and praying for rain. There has been none in […]
March 20-26, 2006 It’s been hectic down here this week in Bahia. Even as we were driving Dan and Valentina to the bus station on Monday night, Mark and Heather arrived to volunteer until May. This weekend we also welcomed Sarah and Catherine into the Planet Drum family. We’re pretty full right now, but are loving every minute of it. Lots of positive energy and […]
March 6-12, 2006 Greetings from Ecuador, I hope my first attempt at these weekly reports lives up to those that Heather has set the bar with. Planet Drum visited El Bosque Encantado not once, but twice this week. We carried out a lot of trail cutting and planting in several heavily eroded gullies. About fifty trees went in this area. Plenty of opportunity for more. […]
Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador The rainy season finally began at the end of January this year, late but potent. Only six weeks later the hills have been completely transformed from dust blurred brown-orange to wet vibrant green. Vine tendrils hang like searching snakes from trees and slink across paths. The ground is in a constant saturated state ranging from clutching mud that weighs down shoes […]
February 27 to March 5, 2006 The week started off with a bang with carnival in full swing; luckily the rain held out until just the day after, when we got a heavy downpour, and another one a few days later. There was a mangrove planting for the Eco-Semana on International Day of the Mangrove (Feb 28), for which I helped to collect seeds. Patrick […]
February 21-27, 2006 This week we transported another load of trees to the sites and planted in three places – La Cruz, Bosque Encantado y El Toro (on the other side of the creek although we don’t know who the land belongs to). We got rained on and it was very slippery! We had help from both Jorge and Blas this week, who came to […]
February 13 – 19, 2006 We’ve been getting rain about every other day, but it’s not consistently heavy. Maybe one or two nights of heavy rain a week. It’s been getting cloudy in the daytime more often now, so it seems like the weather will stay wet for a while. The new plants are doing well. We haven’t had a chance to go back to the old […]