Mary Maier

My last morning in Muisne, the morning clouds opened up and a patch of blue, gold, and silver sky poked through. The night before I was finally able to see a sky full of stars and the sun at sunset. With the changing seasons (rainy to dry), the sky is normally overcast with a little [...]

We made chocolate the other day. I follwed the process through:

Planting the trees
Weeding around the trees
Collecting cacao fruit
Opening the fruit and carrying it back to the station
Drying and roasting the beans
Shelling and mashing them
Milking the cows for the milk
Mixing the cacao balls, milk, and sugar together

It isn’t as good as Hershey’s but it’s still pretty [...]

This weekend Freddy lead a few volunteers to a waterfall past Bunche. We walked without shoes up a river bed for about 20 minutes to get to it. It was deep enough that you could jump from the top, but the water was cold and my feet were numb from the walk, so I stayed [...]

Yesterday all the volunteers went to a school in Muisne to prepare a yard for a playground. We spent two hours with machetes, chopping the grass like lawnmowers and only cleared 1-3 yards per person. About 30 other locals showed up to help: kids were picking up raked grass and whell-barrowing it to a pile, women were [...]

In order to build a fence at a daycare center in Muisne, we spent two days gathering bamboo. First, we went to the bamboo forest, which is located up the mountain near some cacao trees. The volunteer coordinators, Fernando and Vicente, who are more skilled with machetes, cut down the 30+ ft trees. We had [...]