One more month, one more hobby

Next Tuesday I will renew my visa for the 5th time and get ready for the last month of my co-op here in Belize. May has been a hectic month so far, with several WorkAway volunteers and university groups requiring supervision and guidance. It's really great to have the help with the physical labor at Barzakh Falah, but it definitely takes up more time out of my already busy co-op to-do-list.

This week we've had two universities visit, each with about 20 students. The students of Georgia College helped us with a particularly interesting project- building a solar dryer to make dried fruits and vegetables!

Georgia College working on the solar dryer

Go team!

It was really great getting to know all these students from Georgia College- it reminded me a lot of my Northeastern Alternative Spring Break teams that I brought to Belize in 2015 and 2016. The solar dryer they built is going to provide a unique way of providing a balanced diet for the girls living at Barzakh Falah. Because the growing seasons for certain fruits are particularly short in Belize, a solar dryer will allow the girls to preserve them for nutritional snacks all year round.

The completed solar dryer

After Georgia College built the solar dryer, I made it a personal project to test it out, along with one of our WorkAway volunteers, Toubi. So far we've tried pineapple, mango, banana, and cashew fruits.
(Cashew fruits are the fruits that grow at the bottom of the cashew nut- it's a culturally significant plant in Belize. The trees make HUGE amounts of fruits for a short period of time in the dry season, but are unavailable the rest of the year).

The hardest part of drying fruits in a solar dryer is probably resisting the temptation to eat all the fruit raw, so make sure you're not hungry if you try this at home. The design for our solar dryer was found online and only took 2 days to build with a small team of helpers.

So far, it seems to be working great, with a few kinks. For example, we sliced some of the fruit way too thin, and they became sealed to the wire racks with no signs of coming off any time soon. On the other hand, the fruit that was sliced too thick ended up rotting in the intense heat of the solar dryer before they actually became dried fruits. Our bananas all came out pretty good, but are a dark brown color, making them look pretty unappetizing. A quick google search has offered a possible solution- dunking the fruits in citrus juice before beginning the drying process. The acid helps preserve the color of the bananas & other starchy fruits.

There will be lots of experiments in the future! Really excited to have a little mini-hobby as I navigate the last month of co-op. I'm never one to pass up an opportunity for snacks either.

Samples from our first attempt!