Mud Soup

Went to the feria this morning and got some lettuce, chayote and plantains, not to mention a huge slice of Catia’s AMAZING CHEESE. Apparently someone in her family (her father?) learned how to make cheese in Switzerland. I’ll ask her next week. She’s started making mozzarella as well, and it is delicious.

After practicing driving the truck back up the (frankly vertical) road back to Cloudbridge, and managing to stall an automatic on a tight corner, I spent the day today getting prepped by Tom for my two months as manager here at Cloudbridge (Incidentally, you can read up on Cloudbridge at its website and its blog). There is going to be a lot of work! Very little of it is hard work, per se… but it will be challenging in the level of people management I will need to do. For a start, I will need to meet with the workers (all locals, Spanish-speaking) on a daily basis to check in on their work, and assign them new work if they have finished. Work might include trail-clearing, building maintenance, weed suppression in the tree planting areas (ie putting down boatloads of cardboard on the plots), repairs… in short, quite a lot of things that one really needs to keep on top of in order to know where to focus and how much needs doing.

Then there are the volunteers and researchers. The researchers are self-sufficient, and I’ll only need to check in with them every few days or every week to make sure all is going well, or if they need any support. But the volunteers will depend on me to make sure there are projects for them to work on that are within their (varied or perhaps limited) skillsets, but not meaningless or dull. There will be some volunteer turnover while I am here, though fortunately less than Tom had in March (16 volunteers at one point!). I should have six or seven over the course of two months. Which is enough to accomplish a lot of work… but also enough to mean that I will need to be coming up with a lot of projects.

Despite the scariness of being in charge of four workers, two researchers and six (+) volunteers, I am excited for this challenge!