We should start of with the good stuff, we ate some seriously good fruit today. Driving through central Mindanao, we stopped at a roadstand to buy Filipino mangoes and a local lychee-esque fruit called lanzones. The Filipino mangoes were literally as soft as butter, we scooped out spoonfuls of mango with ease. The lanzones were spectacular, but don’t eat the seed, it’s sort of bitter.

Lanzones. Great fruit.

Team A met with Land Bank of the Philippines, a key agricultural lender, and a onion-growing cooperative in Nueva Ecija, in central Luzon. Team B met with a microfinance cooperative that provides funds for women-led enterprises, and an NGO that provides education and training for farmers to add value to their crops and to increase their yields.

And as you can see, we’re working hard, forcing our poor interviewees to stay into the evening:

Temporary power outage forced us to pull out the battery-powered lights.

Also, we ran across a sister school in central Mindanao:

A common form of transport, the tricycle, sits in the foreground.