So the sindico (kinda like a county commissioner) Felix, my project partner Nivin, and I were talking one day early last week and we decided it would be a great idea to have a meeting with all the community leaders of El Batey. They were in charge of organizing it since I don't know that many people yet. We set the date for Thursday at 4:00 pm, which is not too bad a time considering most people are farmers and out of their fields by then. Well, by 4:00 we had Felix, Nivin, and Santo Suero, a farmer from the area who went back and forth between Santo Domingo and El Batey. So we chatted and waited. After all, we all knew things here worked on Dominican time. Felix and Nivin both told me they had invited a bunch of people, which may or may not be true. Dominicans, like the rest of us to some extent, like to save face so even if they hadn't remembered to invite anyone they would say they had. Needless to say, no one else showed up so I did my presentation of the projects to these 3 gentlemen. Turns out Santo Suero has a group of organized farmers that wants to work with deforestation and growing alternative but locally feasible fruit crops that they could market as well. So after hearing about his organization we all loaded into the inginiero's car to head out to Santo's farm. More about the inginiero another time. We got there and walk out onto the property that is behind his house into this field with these little trees with these GIANT purplish mangos. It was a thing of beauty let me tell you. Check out the pictures below. And the cool thing was that he had started with the local variety of mangos which are tasty but super stringy, i.e. not very marketable and had found starts from this other kind and grafted them onto the original rootstock. And he was using sawdust and cow manure as mulch around the young trees. These are pretty saavy practices for the DR. Not that people aren't intelligent, the vast majority just haven't been presented with different ways of doing things since the advent of chemical agriculture. I was excited to say the least! Even better than that, is that we made plans so that I could attend the meeting of his group this coming Sunday, and we're going to invite some other community leaders. And even better than that, we're going to make plans with his group to go for a horseback ride up into the lomas (hills) so that I can check out the conucos they have up there and also the deforestation that happened years ago and that this group would like to work to fix. And yes, there's still one more thing that's better. Santo's brother, Fredy, brought me some mangos last Friday. Unfortunately I had left for the capital for the weekend. So needless to say a few of the six mangos got eaten before I got home on Sunday, not that I blame anyone because who can resist. Anyway, I was kinda sick Monday and Tuesday so I didn't eat a mango until today (Wednesday) and I wish I had eaten one every day since I got back. It was the best mango I think I've ever had in my whole life!! It was like a meal in itself and I was eating it for dessert!! But I somehow managed to demolish the whole thing in no time flat by the light of my headlamp no less because se fue la luz (the light left, a very commonly heard phrase here) right as I was eating dinner. So I was being dive-bombed by moths as I was munching on this spectacular mango!! I can't wait to eat the one remaining one tomorrow! And hopefully I can snag some more this weekend when I see Santo again. Keep your fingers crossed for me, mine are definitely crossed.