Dispatch 1: Getting There

Woke up this morning to the smell of curry. Roopchand's wife Sheri was making breakfast — curried chickpeas (channa) and flatbread (roti) — which we all ate greedily, along with blood-red papaya and mangoes, which Sheri taught us to peel with our teeth.

We left University Park at 8:00 a.m. Tuesday and arrived in Port-of-Spain after midnight, along with three boxes of drip irrigation equipment that all managed to weigh in under the customs limit. Roopchand was waiting at the airport gate, with a broad smile and a sign that said "Welcome Penn State." Then it was on to the last leg, by 13-seat Maxi-Taxi to Mayaro, where we are staying in a rented house. We traveled east and then south the length of the island, heads bobbing, trying to adjust to being on the left side of the road. Much of the southern route was along the water's edge, with coconut palms silhouetted black against a moonlit sky and bone-pale ocean. Somewhere along the way our headlights caught a flattened snake stretched across most of the two-lane. We arrived at about 2:30, mosquito-netted the beds, and finally fell into them an hour later.

The house is 100 meters from the beach, where at dawn (so I have heard), fishermen gather at the blast of a conch shell to heave their boats beyond the breakers and put out. Later I saw others drawing hand seines through shallow water.

Roopchand and Sheri's farm is half an hour from the house, over serpentine roads through thick forest and scattered settlements. This morning, in daylight, we caught glimpses of what we couldn't see at night: the small farms, with their water cisterns and tethered goats, the hodge podge of roadside fruit stands, small eateries, and gas stations, the uniformed children walking from school. Signs everywhere hark a piquant masala (a mix) of cultures: East Indian, Chinese, Muslim, Rastafarian, and British. "Pudding and souse" are advertised next to "hot roti" and "Chip chip for sale." (There is also a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Mayaro.)

Outside one house was a cocoa drying apparatus. It looked something like a shallow-pitched dog house on tracks, the better to pull back and forth. The beans are spread out on a steel bed to dry in the sun. The retractable roof allows quick coverage during the frequent rains. We've had a handful of cloudbursts already, having arrived here with the rainy season, but they pass quickly.

The showers have, however, made a bit of a muck of the greenhouse site, which was the first place we stopped this morning. The good news is that, anticipating the delays of the season, Roopchand and his crew here have got a good head start, framing out the structure and building a couple of cement-block propagation beds. Helping to lay the groundwork for our arrival, too, were Diana Fillhart of Brooklyn, NY, and Jeanne Peters of Ulysses, PA, two volunteers affiliated with the Coudersport (PA) Alliance Church, Candi's church back home. The first order of construction business, then, is to stretch some plastic across the roof frame, and spread some gravel across the floor, both to facilitate working through the rains. Before that, however, we're going to stop in at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Note: For the next few days, readers can contact David Pacchioli and Mark Guiltinan at mjg9@psu.edu.