Whitney's Travel Blog: Work on the farm

Building the floor at the Pond House

Sandot teaching us about water purification

Tacomepai is pretty relaxed, or so I've been told having never done a farm stay before, the work was always optional. A typical day started at 6, we would meet in the kitchen and then head down to the rice fields to work for about 45 minutes. After that we had breakfast and then would do some type of work on the farm. One day we worked on extending the floor of the Pond House and another day we replaced the wall of the bathroom in the classroom. We used bamboo for all of the construction and it was interesting to see how versatile it is! Whole pieces of bamboo were used as the beams under the floor and for the floor itself, we used criss crossed sections of bamboo that had been partially split by a machete so that it was flat. The wall was made from a woven bamboo mat.

Sandot, or as Irene lovingly calls him, 'Master"

Pierre and Caro work together to plant the soy beans

Sandot went to Chiang Mai on Friday so he arranged for us to help one of his neighbors plant soy beans. The local farmers work together on each others farms occasionally so we were joined by over a dozen other farm workers from neighboring farms. We worked all day and got several large areas planted.