Rosa Del Taro

This is Rosa Del Taro near Puerto Rosario in Fuerteventura. The little house there is one of the guest houses Silverio and Cati rent out during the summer. As you can see it is incredibly arid. The water here mostly has to be delivered in a van, but they´ve got a system of recycling what they´ve used. I´ll explain a bit more about this later on because there is also a project about to start in which they collect the vapour of the clouds (somehow!) and use it to regenerate the earth. At the moment barely anything but the cacti grow. There are about two trees, the  rest is scrub and grasses. There is some success with fig plants that have made nice fruit - I nabbed one from a neighbouring tree yesterday and it hadn´t dried out! Anyway, the earth is completely orange and you come back from taking the dog out entirely stained, and also a bit grazed, because the rocks are rough and volcanic. Pumice I think. Haven´t yet seen if it floats maybe will do this tomorrow! Wikipedia informs me it´s basalt too. Hmm, I´ve never really been fascinated by geology but it´s interesting to see a landscape made of something entirely different! Silverio makes clay pots in a traditional canario way, that´s stayed from indeginous times before Spanish colonisation. This is extremely orange as well.

This is Nora (5) and Omar (11) playing near the frog pond which I think has lilies in it as a way of filtering dirty water. They´re good fun if not quite tiring as every hour of the day is usually spent doing something if your a child! I´ve been here nearly a week and need to think of a few more English games to play with them. I discussed this with their parents and we decided games and other bits and pieces would be the best way to move forward with English especially because they are both on summer holidays. Nora was given a game where you have to pile up animals, so this was great for numbers and colours as well and for Omar we also did verbs. Lately we´ve been running around labelling nouns with post-its things in the house and will move onto names of rooms and also prepositions like ´in´ and ´on´. But there is a limit to how much conversation can happen when we haven´t covered many verbs or conjugations, which is quite hard in small sessions of games and writing down vocabulary. Might have to do a couple of traditional classes, who knows! Omar told me a bit about school so that´s a start!

Chicken coop! They get all the table-scraps. It seems pretty difficult to compost here when there´s not much moisture.

This is the big hill that faces the house, I can see it from my bedroom window! Red soil again. This is where we take the dog for a run. She´s called Lluvia, yellow labrador type. People seem to name things after weather here, maybe it´s the lack of it, because I´m fairly sure Omar also has a friend called Nieva.

We walked down to the only bit of water near to the house. It´s a small lake (or rather pond) and looks a lot like a desert oasis! This oil palm was on the way.

The dragonflies below are longer than my finger and there are blue ones too that like to hunt flies near to the house!

Nora and Cati sitting outside the house in the porch.

This is mostly a jumble of things I have seen. We tend to do a lot in the day, so much that I almost forget what we did in the morning. And so I doubt this blog will have any particular organisation to it other than vaguely chronological.