As requested by Mr. E. White from Milton Keynes here is a brief update on the reforestation project. Following a brief suspension over the Christmas break due to Mario going AWOL for a few days we recently commenced the project again. This involved working in the fields cleaning up the area that we had dug up pre Christmas. To our surprise and delight we found that cows from some nearby fields had decided to provide us with some natural fertiliser. This should hopefully save us a few Queztales in fertiliser that need to buy. "Operation digging and cleaning" is now near completion and we have started to burn some of the fruits of our labour to enrichen the soil.
Work has been somewhat patchy due to random events such as: 1) being prevented from working one afternoon due to police cutting off our route to the fields (something about investigating some shooting of a bus driver by some gang about 300m from where we work) and 2) bumping into Mario´s aunt and cousin on another occassion and spending the afternoon drinking coffee and eating home made strawberry jam on home baked bread.
However, despite these minor problems I have every confidence that we will succeed in the project despite now being officially behind schedule. The latest mastertroke of an idea that Mario and Marvin have had is to approach "big firms" like McDonalds, Burger King, Pepsi and Coca Cola to sponsor us to plant the trees. Apparently, they will jump at the chance of sponsoring the project as it is "great publicity" and we could play them off against each other saying that their rivals are paying us more to plant trees. I did point out that this would actually involve us proving to them that we are vaguely competent and know what we are doing. I think they have come around to accepting the flaw in their grand strategy...
