Lets All Hug Some Trees

It has come to my attention that not only my parents are going to be reading by blog. I have gained and lost some readers over the last eight months and I knew this would happen. It was only a matter of time before people I was only acquaintances with or even good friends of mine would drop off into their own lives and slowly forget about Adam. This is actually OK with me. Especially since my posts lately have probably been less than exciting. I'm no longer in great mental pain over my situation and I haven't seen many dying or dead animals in or people in awhile. My blogs have changed from me judging random people in an airport by their appearance and talking about the dramatic rescue of someones life to talking about the fact that we are selling more chocolate now. People were bound to loose interest and that is OK with me.

Next month should be the big test in terms of our tour. My piece comes out in the local newspaper about my work and the chocolate tour that we are doing and I expect that people will be calling the Oreba Chocolate phone on a regular basis. It will be the big test to see how much volume we are ready for. As of today we have gone three straight days of doing a tour and have two separate tours scheduled for tomorrow. Its going good and with every tour we are fixing the little things that tourists mention. I'm hoping to slowly pull myself out the equation too which is obviously the desired result and from the looks of things should not be any type of problem. I sat back and barely guided Solomon today while he created a logo for our future T shirts and then put it on his USB stick to take to the printers. This is a good sign. We have also talked about hiring someone from Almirante that can translate tours for us in the future if we get busy which would be great and reassuring to me that the main problem of being able to speak English can be handled. Enough about all that though.

Here is some more opinionated stuff that might go along the same lines as some earlier posts of mine and if you are easily offended or just don't want to hear it by all means skip to the end where I just complain about my health; I have decided that whenever someone comes into my site and starts salivating over the great planks of wood that they are chopping out of the trees here, I'm going to tell them that the wood is poisonous. I can't tell you how many people have come into my site under the guise of “helping” or wanting to support the local poor, and then start asking about how strong the wood is, how much it sells for, and how they cut it. I understand that it is fascinating to know that we have some of the hardest wood around and that the local economy here is getting something out of it, but these people that are coming in and encouraging the cutting down of trees are starting to wear on me. I've decided that it is not their fault though. Some people are really interested in getting hard wood for a good price. Especially those who live in this country. And not too many gringos are going to build all cement houses or even use non wood materials when local woods are so readily available.

My problem with it all is that the people here are not ready for it and the people exploiting them on the price aren't following the laws here about cutting down the trees (Not that it matters in a country where money means everything). Most people in my community have a huge number of trees in their farms and some of it can be considered forest. This is because the cacao needs a certain temperature and shade to grow. Thank god for this, because if it were not for the cacao this place would be cut down and shipped just like other places I've seen where the poor live. Even in my own community I have seen not just single tree felling for a quick buck, but whole areas cleared for pastor land. Part of the reason I stopped eating red meat because I see first hand how it is single handily destroying complete ecosystems along with the jungle.

The sad thing is that it will never stop. Someone here and in other places around here are going to want a quick payday and have this “money tree” sitting on their land looking pretty good to bring home dinner. The demand will always be there and will actually only get larger. The people here get money for cutting the wood, the person who owns the tree gets money for the wood, and the people coming to pick it up and sell it get money for the wood. It does bring money in though its sustainability is not too great considering it takes 100 years for some of these trees to grow this size. I can only hope that I can one day live in a house built from low impact and maybe even recycled materials, but the fact is that right now and probably in the near future I will be living in and using a lot of things made from wood.

Now you can cast me as a tree hugger because I'm pretty sure that most of what I'm saying makes me one but hear me out on just this one point. Everything on this earth is here for a reason. The birds, soil, plants, and trees. They all have their niche and have evolved that way throughout millions of years. Only in the last blink of an eye of time compared to the existence of living things on this earth have we started to change the make up of our environment. Everything in this world has worked in conjunction. One thing helping or complementing the next. I'm going to give you a microcosm of an example; There is a moth that only lives in the fur of the sloth. The moth lays it's eggs on the ground when the sloth goes down once every couple weeks to defecate. It is a well accepted fact that without one, the other would parish. There are thousands of cases like this and probably millions if you consider the multiple cases where the death of one species affects hundreds of others in different ways.

So who cares. We have lost tens of thousands of species already while we have been here and we are still living right? Well, ya. Kinda. We are finding new and important species of plants and animals all the time. Many with healing properties that we never knew about and could unlock cures for a variety of different diseases or conditions. There are so many of these species that we have never seen due to deforestation and pollution that we may have sealed our own graves already.

There is also the fact that biodiversity works well for this planet. Leave it humans to think they could improve on nature. We make chemicals that kill weeds and end up poisoning ourselves and other plants around it. One example of thousands. I could dig up countless journal article about how the killing off of species will come back to bite us in the ass, but I will leave that up to you. I'm just planting the seed so you can see for yourself. I'd like to get back to the tearing down the of the forest. I don't blame these people for selling their trees. I would do it if I were in their shoes and didn't know any better. I blame the people that need an entire extra story to their house so that when aunt Margret comes to visit she has enough space to feel like she is in a different house. If it wasn't for the outside world, the forest would be intact, the animals would be replenished faster than they could be killed, people would live an average of 17 years longer from not being introduced to the nutrient poor food that is being brought in, un-biodegradable trash wouldn't be scattered everywhere, and being at peace with the jungle and its surroundings would have been good enough instead of having a new god to bow down to.

But again, this was all inevitable and is part of the reason I'm here. To help these people adjust to the new world. A world that is changing faster than we ourselves can keep up with. It's a cycle that can be stopped with education, hard work, old traditions, and new technology. Its finding that right mix that is the tricky part. Let's just hope there are some trees left by the time we do just that.

Health Report:

I've been doing good. I swear. Well, that was until I got Giardia. I have have unusual low energy for the past three weeks and I knew that something was up. I couldn't sleep at night and just getting up out of bed took more effort than I was willing to give. Everything else was OK and there weren't any other signs so I thought maybe I was just overworked. Well, turns out I had Giardia. So that is that. I'm supposed to be at a Peace Corps training session where all the volunteers in my group are and here I am at my site making sure I don't crap my pants. Shit happens I guess. Literally. Other than that I'm doing good. My foot still hurts every once in awhile but I've learned to block it out just like the pain in my right for arm and on the right side of my face. (If you want to know why those hurt, you will have to comment below about them).

Until next time...