Thursday visit to the Episcopal Agricultural School

This morning Raul took us on another field trip, this time to the other El Hogar vocational school, the Episcopal Agricultural School. This is a working farm that serves as an open-air classroom for boys who wish to learn modern farming techniques. After three years of schooling, they graduate and take what they have learned back to their own villages, to help improve agriculture throughout Honduras.

The first stop on our tour was an experimental area being prepared as an orchard for fruit trees. Two young men at the school had planted several dozen small saplings and then had been watering these small trees for months by carrying buckets of water by hand. The trees will eventually grow to be about six feet tall and produce a very marketable kind of fruit (although we're not quite sure what the English translation of that particular word is, so that will have to remain a mystery!)

We then had our own "Field of Dreams" moment as we entered into this mysterious-looking grove...

...to find banana trees growing inside!

Then it was on to the hen houses where we saw some young chickens...

... and where I bonded with a special friend ...

... and finally found out where all those tasty fresh eggs we've been having for breakfast come from!

We also stopped by to see some livestock - first a litter of frisky piglets...

.. and then we finally found out where baby cows come from! Answer: this bottle of liquid nitrogen and a long hollow tube!

We met a cow just days away from giving birth ...

and a couple of young twin calves:

After our tour, lunch was very similar to yesterday´s; tasty but a little disconcerting with bananas in our hot soup!

We ate lunch along with all the boys in the school. We met several of them and they are a very hardworking bunch!



This school is located about an hour and fifteen minutes' drive away from the El Hogar elementary school where we are staying, and on the way back we got another eyeful of the unique living conditions in much of this country.

We spent our afternoon back on work detail. More about that in my next post.

- Mark