While I was in El Salvador with La Ruta Inka the department of tourisum took us to a town that is one of the major exporterters of balsamo in the world. Balsamo is the sap/oil that comes form a tree, that is used for medicine, chap stick, hair products, and has many other functions.
The balsamo farm that we were tooken to was a farm that used very old tecenics to extra the sap and keeps the tree heathy for futrure use. The way they collect the sap is by climbing up the tree, by wrapping a rope around their hands and the tree to pulling them selfs up it. When they are up in the tree they burn the top layer of the bark to make the tree extract a sap that it uses to heal its self. By waving their hat they control what parts of the tree the fire burns. After they have the area brunt and it's extracting the sap the place rags in that area. After a few days of the rags soking in the sap they collect them all up and take them to the next process.
The reason they use this process is because by burning the bark they are able to let the tree heel its self up and then after a year or so they can do the process again unlike the other way of just cutting the trees down for the sap.
The next step is to collect all the rags with the sap and place them into a cloth bag that they put into a pulley/lever system. They pour boiling hot water over the bag and use the pulley/lever system to drain all the water and oil out of the rags. Once it is all collected the separate the balsamo oil from the water and bottle it up for sale.
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