Days in the Village
Hanging out with my Cambodian staff I get to experience some fairly unique sides to life in SE Asia. For instance, it’s not every day you get to eat spicy octopus jerky. Except for a distinct fishy taste it was pretty good. The fishy taste could probably be alleviated by the utilization of fresh octopus dried over a fire. The “sun-dried-for-days” method tends to bring out the worst in seafood.
I slept out in the village this last week as well, as I often do. Usually I spend the night sweating buckets and wake up feeling like I just completed an enduro trek across a desert. Rainy season has set in and I’ve enjoyed swinging in my hammock on the porch of the community center, looking at the stars, listening to the crickets, and trying to ignore the nasal karaoke music squawking from a battery-powered unit somewhere across the rice paddies. This last night however, a storm blew through in the afternoon followed by a clear sky filled with stars and a blustery wind that rocked my hammock all night long. Ill equipped for a cold night, I nearly froze my mutaka off, and ended up huddled in my hammock using my yoga mat as a shield against the wind. The upside was that the mosquitoes were huddling in there hammocks somewhere too which was a good thing because the wind kept popping off the clothes-pins that fastened my net to my hammock. Morning brought a welcome calm, which also welcomed all the mosquitoes to my sleeping body which must have looked like a great breakfast buffet. So I got up and enjoyed a jog through the village and a red sunrise.
The community center has been a buzz this week as 20 odd community members spent mornings hunkered around a large pile of compost, bagging dirt and planting moringa seeds. 2,500 seeds is a lot of bagging. The seeds were then transported in a Cambodian wheelbarrow to the plant nursery. They passed the time laughing and talking and playing some amusing game where they would poke one another in the ribs and laugh at whatever burst of nonsense or incense came out of the poked individual.
Moringa, for those of you not familiar with it, is a nitrogen fixing tree with large pods and leaves with extremely high nutritional value. A couple tablespoons of the leaves, dried and crushed into a powder, contains 4 times as much calcium as milk, 3 times the iron content of spinach, and 3 oranges worth of vitamin C. In addition they have high levels of Vitamin A, protein, magnesium, and potassium, as well as other important nutrients. In Africa, Moringa is being use to treat and prevent malnutrition with great success. The seeds are comprised of 40% oil which is similar in quality to olive oil. The seeds also contain a chemical flocculant that assists in purifying water. It’s drought resistant and grows well in the nutrient poor acidic soils found throughout most of the third world. If you’re interested in some of the other amazing properties of Moringa, or how it has been used in development check out these pages.
