Costa Rica: Bucashi

Gazuntite.

Alright. If I knew I'd be shoveling chicken shit... man.
Well it's all a part of organic farming. What we are doing is making grade A organic fertilizer called Bucashi. Before making a new batch, we had to bag and store the fertilizer made from the last group already dried. Jon quite literally picked the smallest girl to do the hardest job: carrying the heavy sacks up this hill and into the storage. My face was dripping sweat. Anyways. It is literally made of chicken poo and some other ingredients. We pretty much made a layered poo cake.

From what I remember the steps to making Bucashi are:
1. 10 bags of chicken poo (for maybe 250 colones a bag. Super cheap!)
2. 10 buckets of black soil (part of their land)
3. 4 buckets of water and molasses
4. 30 buckets of coffee cherry skins (recycled from coffee production)
5. 2 bags of charcoal (made from ecostoves)
6. 1 bucket of the powder waste from rice production
7. 3 buckets of a mix of water, molasses, and m&ms?? (Okay this I'm iffy about. Not quite sure what the heck else is in this liquid but it activates the bucashi so the fluid is essential to the process)
8. Then we repeated 1.5 more times
9. Add water till very moist until you can almost turn it into a ball
10. mix everything well
11. Each day mix and turn the bucashi to cool until the fertilizer is completely dry.
12. Pray it comes out well.

So this stuff is supposed to be the shit. Quite literally and figuratively. It is the best and most natural fertilizer you can have. For farmers, too, it provides all the nutrients to naturally make your plants strong without putting your plants on steroids, and its so much cheaper than what nonorganic farmers have to use that run around $30 a bag. It is just more work. The natural fermentation causes the mix to go up to 200F. So quite hot...

Surprisingly, it didn't stink as what I was expecting. That is because the chicken poo was already mixed with some soil at the farm to reduce to smell. I wore a friend's large farm overalls he lent me and got compliments from everyone all day!

Community Building...

Later we had a community BBQ later that night. Jon had a few surprises for us. We also had a surprise for the community. They made dinner but we made dessert! Kristal had the idea of making dirty snowballs:
Crushed oreo cookies mixed with cream cheese and covered in chocolates

We danced a little, played a game of hot potato, and this newspaper dancing game, and we didn't have to come into work until 8am instead of 7:30am the next morning! Thank. You. Jonathan. Tonight was a blast. The newspaper game was one where you have a partner and have to dance in the newspaper. Every song you fold the newspaper in half and repeat till your feet fall out and you lose. But I... WON!!! Myself and Gustavo. Granted we were the smallest in the group... All strategy, yo. The little boys broke out their break dancing skills (under 10 years old!!) I played with the kids, but accidentally made one cry when I put him on top of my shoulders...