Saturday: Work Experience Day, or morning (mañana). Every Saturday and Wednesday morning, at 6:30 AM, most EARTH students bike to different farms and fields to work for experience in their desired areas. Fio goes to work with animals (specifically buffalos), but other students work in the food processing center, on the banana plantation, in the genetics lab, etc. At the moment, I do not participate in this program, so I pretty much had the campus to myself this first Saturday

Experience this beautiful harvest through photos linked here! We inch away through the soil, breaking apart clumps with our sturdy picotas (hammer-like tools with sharp, flat heads), or lijuanas in the ingenious Aymara language, to uncover dense bunches of potatoes beneath us. With our hands deep in the soil, we sift around to feel for every little potato nugget, ranging from grape- to fist-sized. Each short row yields hundreds, and we toss handful after handful into massive

I peer up at walls lined with shelves of pre-Columbian pottery resembling ducks and llamas and humans. Many vessels feature the cold faces of gods or intricate patterns. Some take the form of corn husks or lumpy potatoes. And with faces of their own, even the foods stare back. I turn a corner to find myself face-to-face with the most unhappy-looking potatoes I’ve ever seen. On a shelf before me, a pot features three potatoes who show their jagged teeth in a haunting frown. Af