"Earth to the Community Centre"!

So yesterday I was busy in the centre when Betsy and Eli (two of the ladies on the transformation course) approached me and asked me if I was busy. I was so in typical British fashion, I said I wasn’t. It seemed that they wanted help moving some earth to fill a hole in a flowerbed. So we left the centre by foot, curiously carrying a spade, pick and towing one of those heavy-lifting trolleys that office paper arrives on. We walked and talked until we exited Ojo de Agua and came to fields, at which point they became twitchy. Betsy asked me jokingly if I was right with God because we were apparently about to commit a crime and might get shot by farmers. Nothing like a soothing word to calm one’s nerves. But, a farmer wandered into sight and Betsy accosted the poor guy to ask if we could ‘borrow’ some of his soil. Now I’ve heard some fairly loose definitions in my time but what we wanted to do was take it – he was never going to get it back…
So with permission, we started filling rubble bags with nutrient-rich soil. You see, it transpired that the plan was thought through right up to the point where we found the soil, but no more. So when it came to tying the bags, I had to find some wire which I then cut with the pick! Where’s a penknife when you need one? And then once we had loaded it onto the trolley, we realised we couldn’t actually drag it back to the centre!
But, help was at hand, abeit bemused, and we were offered a lift back to the centre. And so I ended up spending most of the afternoon touring parts of Ojo de Agua, sat in the back of a flat-bed truck with 6 bags of soil and some vegetation-stuff. I’m glad I don’t have hayfever! We arrived with much pomp and fanfair, and paid them a bottle of coke and some tacos each for their efforts. A generous fee I think. Moral of the story – think your strategy through before going to steal soil.