Our participation in local schools is now at full speed.  More students went into the elementary schools this week and we started our 6-week long project with a local high school that I run where students confront cultural and linguistic differences with 5^th year students (yes, they go to high school for 5 years in Italy!) who are mostly 18 and 19 years old.  I coordinate and run the classes, but it is the students that do most of the talking.  The classes are relaxed and the ulterior motive is to initiate friendships.  Right away, our students exchanged contact information and set up appointments to meet outside of school all on their own.  Hey, when something works… go with it, right?

It is getting noticeably colder here as we approach winter, but the past two days have been gorgeous fall days with warm sun penetrating the clean, crisp air.  We couldn’t have asked for better weather for Friday’s olive harvesting activity in the SIS garden.  We don’t have quite enough olive trees to make oil, but we picked all of the olives that we have using local, traditional techniques and we taught everyone who came how to cure the olives in two different ways (with dry salt, or with a briny salt-water).  If you want to eat olives you have to take this step otherwise they’re pretty disgusting.

That’s all for this week!

Mike

Bottles in the sun awaiting olives

A tree full of students

learning to cure olives with salt