Kicking (Coffee) Treetops

I just returned from a week-long field trip to the coffee-growing region of Colombia called 'Zona Cafetera.' The school sent almost all of the 125 7th grade students (some chose not to come), their respective homeroom teachers, and a gaggle of security people. I had never been there before but was told by many people that it was worth seeing. And it was. We stayed on a huge plantation called Combia for 5 days and did various activities.

The first day was getting used to the surroundings, which included a swimming pool and enough rooms to house everyone 3-4 to each room. In the first afternoon, the students learned the intricacies of a coffee plantation and learned how time-consuming and difficult it is to hand-pick ripe coffee beans.
The second day we went to a place called Valle de Cocora, a very picturesque place where the students did a long nature hike where they had to challenge themselves physically and mentally plus learn how to work as a group. The guides, from an outfit called 'Bluefields', lead students along the trail which culminated in a huge lunch of fried fish and patacon, which is plantain mashed into a flat, crispy wafer, then fried.


The third day, the group was split up into two different activities. One group went to a facility which manufactures bamboo arts and crafts and make Rainsticks. The other group went to a place called Canopy de los Caracolies, which loosely translates to a series zip-wires in a forest of trees called Caracolies. One group went camping after the day's activities and the following morning went kayaking (the other group went the following evening to camp and kayak).

The last day the kids went to a nearby school where they integrated and shared activities with the locals. Kids painted murals, played sports, cooked desserts, formed a musical group, and acted out commercials.

All in all the trip was fun. There were a few problems with kids' behavior (one kid was actually sent home early for causing trouble) but generally speaking, the kids, the teachers, and the guides all got along well. Good times.

Last one on the toilet is.....!

For those of you interested, eggs, if kept at room temperature, only last about 2-3 weeks maximum. I'm currently learning that the hard way.

120

I recently went online investigating what the feasibility would be to live in Australia. After reading entry after entry of my friend Dave's online journal and his year-long travels and experiences around New Zealand, I realized that I will not be personally satisfied until I (at least) make every attempt I can to fulfill my dream of living in that part of the world. So I went online and found, purely by chance, this site which rates my likelihood of being awarded a visa for Andrea and I. Collectively, we scored 120 and apparently, if I pay the $299 fee, I can find out within the next six to twelve months if the visa can be awarded to us to live and work there. Now neither she nor I are ready to move there within that time period because I'd really like for her to get her permanent (non-conditional) residency visa for the states which is a two-year process after she first arrived.

Personally, I have yet to find a place where I feel like I'm home; a place to live where I could live in financial comfort with the job I have, a place where it is easily accessible by car or plane without costing a fortune; a place that has friendly and open-minded neighbors, a good mix of different cultures and languages, and offers plenty of activities to meet my interests. Maybe I've found the place, lived there and left because it wasn't the right time for me to be there. The San Francisco Bay area comes to mind. I'd like to live there again, just not as a teacher. In fact, of the places I would like for us to live in the U.S., I don't see how we could live on a teacher's salary.

Something that just occurred to me as I finished watching An Inconvenient Truth for the umpteenth time (Did you know Al Gore was recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?), I can predict that many of the domestic issues that have been largely ignored by the powers-that-be will be depicted and brought back into the forefront of people's lives through movies and documentaries made in Hollywood. Education, poverty, homelessness, corruption, disease... I can almost guarantee that a documentary will be made of one of these domestic problems and something will be done about it. Why wait for it, maybe I'll make my own documentary about the educational system in the US.