Our First Week in the Village…

Our first week in the village has been dedicated to setting up house. This has consisted of cleaning, building, making our compost, setting up our kitchen garden, and overall making it feel like a “home”.

            On our first day we focused on setting up our common space/kitchen. This required a lot of man power because we needed to build shelves, un pack, and organize. Our first challenge was cleaning. When living in a mud house, the dirt never seems to end. Once we got the dust under control we began brainstorming where everything was going to go. It was amazing to see how creative and resourceful my roommates are. If you have ever seen the game show “whose line is it anyway” then you can have a better idea of what this process was like. There is an imporov game that is played on the show where each contestant is given one object and they have to come up with infinite possibilities for the use of the
object. We would look at rocks and see shelves; we would look at a plastic water bottle and see a flower pot. It would have been easy to look around and say “we have nothing, we can’t work with this.” But instead everyone rose to the occasion and created a space that I believe is really special.

The rest of the week has been dedicated to creating our kitchen garden and setting up our own rooms. I really have enjoyed the kitchen garden because it’s an extremely useful skill that I have never been introduced to before. Because we are planting things out of season we first needed to create a nursery. This is a small space to grow the seedlings in a controlled environment

which we will then replant in our garden. In order to prepare the space we needed to first dig up all the soil and turn it over. We then created a mixture of compost, dirt, and sad that we would use for the nursery. Once we had developed the space we drew small horizontal lines across the 
space to place the seeds. We planted cabbage, 
cucumber, tomato, basil, and onion. Once everything was planted we placed straw over it and then created a plastic dome around it to create a green house effect.