Planting Trees

I got to help the youth of the church with their tree-planting project yesterday! There were about 35 students that went along, so the church rented a bus to take us all to the site, which was a Christian camp about an hour away. Their goal is to plant at least 250 trees over a bit of time, and by the end of just one day we had planted 128. Woohoo!

When I got to the church at 8:00 am (ugh), I didn't recognize anyone, so I was pretty excited to see a guy named Alvaro join the group. I had met Alvaro just two days ago at the college group and he had seemed like a fun character, so I was looking forward to having a day to get to know him, and I was just glad to see someone I knew. We talked on the bus the whole way to the camp - he really surprised me with his English. He is pretty much self-taught but he knows an amazing amount of vocabulary (much of which he's picked up from tv, haha), but the next time I see him I'm going to make him speak to me in spanish because it just wouldn't be right if I left Argentina without picking it up because everyone spoke to me in English!

Once at the camp, everyone was put into partners to plant trees... kind of. They weren't exactly trees; apparently the specific type of tree we were planting has the ability to sprout roots just from a branch, so we were planting spear-tipped branches in the ground. I hope they know what they are talking about! So Alvaro was my partner for the first half of the day - we had a fun time talking about pretty much everything. After lunch everyone switched partners but I didn't have one for a while so just planted trees on my own for a bit. Eventually another guy named Nacho asked if he could help me, so we worked together for the second half. Nacho and I found a grub in the hole we were digging (yuck), but he kept calling it a crag.

A shovel is called a "pala" which really translates to "spade." Alvaro was telling me about a "picada," from which I gathered is like a spread of snacks - I think specifically meats and cheeses; the kind of things you eat with toothpicks, but the actual snack itself is not called a pica. Apparently you can't use it that way.

I slept very well last night :)

About to plant me some trees!

Some little kid trying Mate for the first time (a really stong, hot tea)

The group of "jovenes"

Our garden!

One of the "trees" I planted!