Arroz con Pollo

Lisita (above) and Mateito are spending most of their time outdoors, wandering around in search of bugs and worms. They also eat feed (alimentos) to get fat. They eat all day, but Lisita the hen is a lot smaller than the gallo Mateito.

Here's their plastic washing machine house. The roof is made of a hood from a Toyota pickup truck. This area is in a roofless addition next to our house. When it's raining like crazy the machine gets moved to our kitchen because everyone says these birds will get sick and die if they get too wet. The pollitos are too dumb to take shelter on their own, but we're trying to train them to go in their washing machine.

Lisa led work on our 100-square-foot vegetable garden, which includes the raised beds you see in the backround. After just a few days, the squash (zapallo) is really taking off. The garden also has yucca, corn, peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Note that Lisa now has rubber boots, a must-have in the rainy season.

Matt and Bolivar helped make the raised beds, which ensure the crops don't drown in all the rain. The beds also give plants more air and allow you to use only the best topsoil and compost. We made compost of dirt, plantain leaves, kitchen scraps, sawdust, egg shells, coffee, tea, and whatever else we had on hand. It made a nice black mezcla. The palm tree fencing behind Matt and Boli is there because we didn't have enough chicken wire to enclose the whole space. This garden's a good project because kids are helping out. Hopefully, they'll get their families to start their own gardens. Everyone here needs more veggies in their diet because the focus out on the fincas is on starches or sugarcane that gets sold to the sugar company.

This is a typical evangelical church in the countryside. This one's in Cacao, Los Santos, where we went on a field trip with our co-op to see a rice operation. The message in red letters on the rear wall of the church says, "Jesucristo es el mismo ayer, hoy, y por los siglos."

Here's Lisa out in the rice. This valley north of Tonosi is very beautiful, with miles of green rice fields surrounded by knobby mountains. Rice in this area is cut by big tractors. The grains get broken off the stalks and taken to a plant where they're husked. In smaller operations, people cut each stalk by hand. After the harvest in our town last month, individual growers put big tarps on their lawns to dry the rice. When it's dry, they remove the husks by beating the rice with mallets in wooden basins. Sometimes 2 people will work the rice at once, like 2 drummers taking turns beating the same drum.


This is Edgardo, president of our co-op's education committee. He's a cool guy who cracks a lot of jokes. We went on the field trip to see this irrigation system, which is on wheels and extends for a few hundred yards. It allows this farm to grow a lot of rice in usually dry fields. Our co-op needs something like this if it wants to dramatically increase rice production. But these irrigators are really expensive, and there's only 3 in Panama. The co-op, which makes its money with sugar, wants to grow more rice because the country is experiencing a big rice shortage right now.