Helping with the maize Harvest- April 9th 2010

by Leander Hollings (Mysmallhelp)

At the moment the community of Paucarbamba are busy harvesting their maize. Much of the community’s crops were destroyed in the January floods, however at the moment time is being spent seeing what can be salvaged from the maize fields.

The maize that is completely black or waterlogged is useless, that which has speckled leaves and is ok inside can be used as animal feed and those with clear white leaves can be sold on the local market for tamale making (a traditional maize dough wrapped in maize leaves) and the corn dried, and sold on the local market.

We invited a team of volunteers from Loki Hostel in Cusco to come and help Marie Elena with her Harvest. Marie Elena is a single mother with 2 children. We had already helped her fix the door to her temporary house, and wanted to offer her more support. With a fantastic Group of volunteers, kindly organised by Pauline from Loki, we all enjoyed helping Marie Elena out, getting to grips with farming Peruvian style and of course, trying the obligatory chi-cha (locally made beer from maize)

Thank you so much to all of our volunteers and we hope to continue to offer assistance with the harvest whenever we are in the community.