Sunday, January 04, 2004

there is a pile of dirt outside. the pile of dirt is in large clumps and people hunch over it. i have no idea what they’re doing.

the leader of the group came up to my room the other day and asked if i could help them. i was doing nothing except grading tests and i said i could. the pile of dirt needed to be chopped up into smaller pieces.

the dirt ends up coming form the river. they said that they bought the dirt from a company that specializes in bringing river dirt to land. they said that the river dirt was special. they were using it for an experiment involving a certain kind of flower. if the flower grew well in the river dirt, they would tell farmers and the farmers would have a greater yield.

six students and one teacher from the agriculture department sat around the dirt with machete’s. they chopped the dirt into smaller pieces. i grabbed an extra machete and began to hack away at the large pieces of dirt. the dirt was like rock. it was grey and brown. if you hacked at it with a machete for long enough it would become like dust. it took a long time to make one grey-brown clump dust.

here were six students and one member of the agriculture department hacking away at the ground. i asked them how long it would take to make all of the dirt into dust and they said about five days. these seven people would spend the next five days chopping and smashing dirt. i couldn’t believe they didn’t have anything else to make the dirt into smaller pieces. if you drove over the dirt with a car, you’d have smaller pieces in, oh, probably a day. there had to be a different way to finish the job.

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