If you get our letters, you saw a different version of this picture, but we thought this one was pretty funny since all of us (including the animals) are looking the wrong way.

Having dinner with friends.

Andrew teaching agriculture students about beans. He had met the teacher on the road and gave him some seeds from Canada to try with his classes at the local technical school. A few weeks later Andrew took a friend of ours to the school to show him around and found the class just getting ready to plant the seeds Andrew had given them. The teacher was super excited and asked Andrew to teach the class. There are lots of opportunities at this training school, and Andrew has an "in" with them now, so there's a good chance part of our work in the future will include some time at KTS.

Andrew and our goat. We have lots of property to graze the goat on, but it needs pretty close supervision--it frequently runs away. We met it on the road one night while returning from a walk, we've chased it out of our neighbour's kitchen, etc.

Our farm from the hill behind our orchard. You can't see the apples very well in the small version of this picture, but we've got lots! Andrew and our landlord estimate between 1.5 and 2 tons! We hope to be able to pick, sell, and juice them before we leave for North America. Andrew has started some grafting with different varieties and root stocks to broaden the options available. The only trees available grow huge, take a long time to bear fruit, and are susuptible to lots of diseases. Andrew is doing some experimenting with building trees that won't have these same problems and that will hopefully help apple farmers in the coming years.

Us and our friend David on the bridge in front of our house.

Picking apples with Kamal and some kids from the orphanage across the street.

Me, our new kitten, and the inside of our house. Hopefully by now we have a woodstove in this room as well to help with heating and cooking.

Grinding grain for our goat. So far our goat has been all expenditures and not much for returns, but we should have baby goats and milk soon, so we'll see if it is worth all the work! This is called a jata and is used to grind grain and beans.

Andrew in our attic growing mushrooms. This was his first attempt and was very successful. He's doing some experimenting on growing techniques and ways to reuse the non-natural resources like the plastic so cost and waste are low. There's a good market for mushrooms, and none available, so we hope this will be a good small business for a family one day.

Part of our plum harvest. After coming to Jumla at a season when you could only get rice, dried beans, potatoes, and a type of cooking greens, we were SO thankful to have all the fruit we could eat. Since the plums we've had peaches and an early crop of apples. Now the main crop of apples should be ready.

A top bar bee hive in Jumla. This isn't the traditional hive in this area, but lots of people use them, and for business-level production, this is the way to go--at least right now. A lot of Andrew's time is spent talking with beekeepers about the pros and cons of this hive and learning the way people manage bees in Jumla. He has already designed a honey extractor (which allows the bees to reuse their comb instead of needing to rebuild it all after the honey harvest), attempted variations of local methods for catching swarms of absconding bees, and combined 2 weak hives to get a stronger one that has a chance to survive and produce honey. There are a few men who call themselves beekeeping "addicts" who spend lots of time with Andrew talking about bees and watching his experiments. Selling honey is very profitable, and requires low overhead and very little land--all pluses for helping families support themselves. Andrew's really working hard to test his ideas and inventions on our own bees before trying to pass the ideas along