Sedentary Sally

This was the week of sitting, and strangely enough, I feel the most sore I've been since my arrival at the farm. Que interesante.

My week began with a violent bout of vomiting. Yep, my first weird stomach thing since this trip has begun. I think I ate some bad ice cream or something in the city the weekend before, who knows. Or maybe it was the rapid influx of raw milk into my diet. All I know is that I awoke on Monday morning with projectile vomit and dry heaves once my stomach finally emptied itself. Felt like someone was wringing out my intestines. Cramps do not begin to describe. Awesome. Jenn was a dear--she made me some herbal tea and intermittently entered my self-imposed quarantine zone to soak the cloth on my head in more cold water. I spent the better part of the day in an intimate snuggle with a medium-sized plastic bucket. Romantic.

Luckily, I found some antibiotics that I had taken with me, just in case, but since I am such a proud traveler who ''never gets sick,'' I had in effect completely forgotten that I had those little magic pills with me, since I never in a million years thought that I would have a sick stomach. They proved effective, though, and in a couple days I was almost one hundred percent better.

This week marked the arrival of two additional WWOOFers on the farm--a sixty year old Colombian woman named Julieta, and a twenty four year old French woman named Judith. Prounounced Hoo--DEET. I was calling her Hoo-LEET for the first few days, and she finally got comfortable enough to correct me.

Originally, the plan was for Judith to come with Julieta´s daughter, who is her close friend from university, but at the last minute, Julieta's daughter found a job and could not come to the farm. So, she sent her mom in her place, which sounds questionable in terms of the workability of a sixty year old, until you meet Julieta. First of all, she looks closer to forty. Second, she is incredibly fit. She has her own little farm outside Bogotà, mostly flowers, and she is a walking botanical encyclopedia. She arrived to the farm and was shocked to find that most of Cecilia's flowers were in rough shape. Clearly, because Cecilia's priority and expertise is food, not flowers. So Julieta spent the entire week repotting, replanting, and redistributing flowers of varying types and stages. By the end of the week, the farm was a different place. Julieta breathed life into the floral landscape, and I hope she's able to come back in the spring once the flowers bloom.

I loved having Julieta and Judith at the farm. They are true lovers of gastronomy, and we ate (and drank) better than we had in weeks. They enriched our kitchen with wine and chocolate, and Julieta baked this heavy, satisfyingly sweet and savory wheat bread, which was a huge hit. She put on a bread-making workshop for a few of the neighbors so that they could learn how to make a tasty yet healthy bread, and she also made homemade marmelade from the oranges from our own trees. So. good. I made more cheese, but to me it tasted even more like the smell of a cow than the previous ones, so I added a ton of garlic and herbs to it to mask the moo, but it was a futile effort. Tasted kind of like shrimp and cow manure. Julieta loved it though, even licked the knife when it was gone. Must be an acquired taste. Philistine as it may be, I guess I just have to come to terms with the fact that I'm more of a pasteurized milk gal myself. The romantic notions I have of sipping a frothy glass of cream straight from the teet may never be realized, and I suppose that's fine.

The week was sedentary partly because we took more coffee breaks, more sweet breaks, more breaks in general. It reminded me not to be such a damn workhorse. Sedentary also because we harvested about 100 pounds of tumeric, and we needed to soak, scrub, and dry all of it. Many hours bent over buckets of these weird little bulbs that look like the love children of a carrot and a ginger root. Scrubbed 'em with toothbrushes. Dyed our hands bright yellow. I took a lot of pictures. I'll show you sometime.

Julieta really made me laugh. She has a weirdly sarcastic sense of humor that I can relate to, and she never ceased to ingnite the belly laugh within me (even when my stomach was not in an ideal state). For example: when she pulled the loaf of bread out of the oven, there was a sprinkling of white flour on the top. She laid the loaf on the table in front of us, pointed to the flour, and said, deadpan, ''Do you guys know what this is? It's coca.'' We laughed, and she kept a straight face. Another time, she emerged from the bedroom with a plastic sac filled with liquid with a hose attached to it. It was one of those Camelback things, kind of like a source of water that you put in your backpack and when you get thirsty, you can just drink from the hose. Cecilia asked her what it was, and she answered,''it's for my infusions. I have to attach it to my vein here [pointed to her inner arm] and inject myself every night.'' Cecilia wasn't sure what to make of that response, and Julieta just walked away. Fantastic.

We drank some good wine this week as well, which is tough to come by in Colombia. It reminded me of how much I love wine, how much I know about it, and yet how much I have to learn. I am absolutely interested in working on a vineyard for a while during my time here, probably in Argentina, where my love affair with the nectar of the gods began.

The Colombiana and Francesa left this morning, and it was sad to see them go, but it was so incredibly ''rico'' to have them here. Good food, good drinks, good laughs. Important.

Sometimes, you just gotta hit the horse.

So, I´ve written before that I´m not a lover of animals (see:post entitled ''Cat Attack''). They frustrate me in the same way that certain humans do; they cannot be reasoned with. They do not follow logic. They cannot understand that, for example, escaping from the chicken coop and running freely down the hill is quite dangerous, and that certain hungry animals, such as our friendly pet dogs Lara and Negro, will be waiting at the bottom with open jaws. I was heartbroken a couple weeks ago when my baby chick, whom Cecilia named ''Ali,'' because I saved it, was eaten alive by Lara. I frequently try to reason with my animal friends, and I even speak to them in both English and Spanish, but so far, no good. Jumeth, our old lady horse, is one of the smartest animals I've ever encountered. She often finds ways to escape through the bolted fence--I'm convinced that she has fingers hidden under those hooves. She escapes onto the lawn where horses typically are not permitted, and at first, when this happened, Jennie and I would try to coax her back into her side of the fence with banana peels (one of her favorite snacks) and whisper sweet nothings into her hairy, twitchy horse ears. Nothing. Then, one day, when Jumeth had escaped yet again, we observed Trinidad, the Dr. Dolittle of the farm, approach her from behind as Jumeth stood munching on some raspberry bushes. Trini is tender and loving with all animals, and I think she really speaks to them. She loves the chickens so much that she refuses to kill them when we need to eat them, leaving the dirty work up to Cecilia (more on this later on). However, this day, she walked right up to the hefty old horse and gave her a big WHACK on the buttocks. The horse whinnied and took off running, towards the hole in the gate from which she escaped. Easy. Jenn and I looked at each other in disbelief. ''Sometimes, you just gotta hit the horse,'' was my first utterance directly following the incident. We've been using this expression ever since. It has many implications; I'll leave it to you to decipher them.

I guess one usage of our new saying is that sometimes you have to do things that might be outside your character, but are completely relevant and necessary for the given moment. This week, for me, was the week of killing things. On Monday morning, when we were feeding the chickens, Cecilia came up to me with a twinkle of plotting things in her eyes and stood over the chicken coop, and appeared to be counting something. I asked her what she was doing, and she said, ''You don't want to know.'' About an hour later, I found two chickens sequestered in the coffee processing hut, underneath baskets which were weighed down by heavy shovels. Jenn and I decided that they were probably going to be arreglado (literally means cleaned; organized), or killed. Oh boy!

I felt conflicted. I eat meat. I am doing this trip so that i can learn about where my food comes from, and I don't just mean plants. So, on one hand, I was elated. On the other hand, I felt sentimental. I have conversations with these chickens, even if they don't listen to me. One of them was selected because she was a ''mala gallina'', or bad chicken, because she laid bad eggs. A bad chicken? You say it like it's a personality flaw! She can't help it if she can't make babies! I had a flash of fantastic childhood urgency, in which I briefly considered lifting the shovels, running out with a chicken under each arm, and setting them free deep below into the coffee valleys. ''Run free, little friends!'' And then I snapped back to reality and realized that this was an important part of the food chain, and that it was a lot more humane than the methods used to raise and butcher the majority of the chickens I've eaten in my life. So, I let them be. I went back to my task of pruning the tomato plants, and I checked back about an hour later. Cecilia had already killed them, boiled them, and was in the process of plucking out their feathers.

I asked Cecilia if I could help, and she was pleasantly surprised. Apparently, most of the foreigners who come to work at her farm are grossed out about this process, and prefer to remain in the dark. Not I. Jenn and I got to work, pulling out feather after feather until all that remained were two naked, sleeping (ok, dead) chickies. After, I helped Cecilia clean one of them out. She saved every single part, most of it for us, and the rest for the dogs. Amazing. Jenn got a little woozy at one point; I turned around and her lips were purple and her face white, and she had to take a few minutes out. I was totally enthralled, brought me right back to high school Biology when we cut open those little pigs and explored their insides. The part that was most nauseating for me was when we plucked the feathers; sometimes, I focused too hard on the little follicles where the hair came out and I would get creeped out (kind of like the feeling I get when I look at the heart of a bell pepper, anyone else, other than Emily, understand this sensation? No?).

We ate the chicken for lunch that same day. So satisfying. So fresh. There is something really peaceful about eating something you helped kill.

Later that week, I bought cow's milk from a neighboring farm, since we only have a goat at ours. I wanted to make cheese. The man who sold me the milk told me to boil it first, because apparently foreigners often get the runs from raw milk. I heeded his advice and when I added the guajo (the enzyme from a cow's intestines that makes the cheese separate), nothing happened. Apparently, this was my second experience with death that week--I had aided in the killing of something again, and this time, it was the bacteria in the milk. So I guess you can't boil milk you intend to use for cheese. I felt sheepish. We did end up with some clotted cream, though, which spreads rather nicely over bread. The remaining milk is similar to skim, which works well for hot chocolate.

We bought more milk later that week, and round two of cheese-making was much more successful. Did not boil it. Did not get diarrhea. Double success.

Jenn taught Ovidio the term, ''OK!'' and now he yells it, seemingly from out of nowhere, at any given point during the day. I'll be squatting over a row of beets, and all of a sudden I'll hear it: OK! I will turn around and see him plodding across the field with a sack of something over his shoulder, grinning and chuckling silently. He's a hoot.

Death and Dying on the Farm. Scene.

What Is This, A Farm For Ants?

With three weeks of farming under my belt, I feel that I can say with confidence that Cecilia´s finca is built for those with slightly more delicate builds than my Norwegian-esque frame.

I think I have finally made my way out of the honeymoon period, and now find myself more settled, and seeing my daily tasks as work (which I enjoy) rather than a beautiful natural gift from Pacha Mama. To be sure, I am still in love with the work I´m doing, but I guess I´m starting to see things from a different (slightly taller) angle. I´ve slammed my head into the doorway of chicken coop countless times, partly due to the fact that I wear a baseball cap and it obstructs my view, and partly because I am by no means a miniature human. Cecilia, on the other hand, is, and as she was the one who built the entire farm from the ground up, I think it´s fair that the size of the animal pens and the holes in the fence that we´re meant to climb through from garden plot to garden plot are more Cecilia-sized than Ali-sized. I frequently get my shirts caught on the barbed wire as I try to wiggle my way under tiny crawl spaces, and my feet hang over the edge of my bed while I sleep. Also, in addition to my title as resident gringa, which I share with Jenn, I have also become the human subsitute for a ladder. Cecilia is thrilled to have a friendly giant at her disposal; I am finding that she more and more often calls me to reach high-up tools in the shed and clear fallen leaves off of rooftops (don´t worry, Dad, the rooftops here are lower than over there) and it´s just funny, I guess, to see oneself as a tool.

I have finally become acquainted with the varying classes of hormigas (ants) that make this region their home. The most common ones are little brown ones, which attack your foot and proceed to crawl up your leg with astonishing speed the moment you step upon the little mound of dirt they call home. These guys crawl into your socks and bite you, but the bite doesn´t really hurt, it´s more annoying than anything else, because you have to roll down your sock and pick them off of you, one by one. And then, there are the big red ones, the ones that latch on for dear life. Their bites burn, real bad. They burrow their antennae´d heads in your sneakers, shoelaces, pants, socks, SKIN, and you have to grab them with concentrated dexterity in order to pull them free from your skin. Plus, they hurt, so it´s almost counterintuitive to be grabbing at something with your bare hands that will probably turn around and bite your finger. This week, they seeemed to be everywhere, and it felt like either Jenn or I were doing the ceremonial ant dance (frustrated grunts and groants, stomping feet, skipping around, hands reaching down to feet and picking, picking). I never thought I´d say this, but I miss our friendly black ants that visit us in Boston in the summertime. They just walk around the house in search of a crumb or two, and you just pick them up with your own hands and show them the door, and nothing happens. They don´t form massive mounds of dirt, dirt which is essentially the same color as the dirt on which their mounds rest, so that they´re essentially begging for some poor unsuspecting traveler to set her feet. Apparently, though, the red ant poop is really good fertilizer.

Poop. I find myself talking about it a lot, lately, both within this blog and in common conversation at the farm. Maybe it´s the ant bites, maybe it´s the relative lack of human contact, maybe it´s the fact that there are few people my own age out on the farm, but I think I´m regressing. Jenny and I make countless jokes around fecal matter, and now that we´re becoming more comfortable with our farmer coworkers, we share them with these guys. Ovidio is a sixty-something machete-toting gentleman whose jobs most of the time entail chopping things down and lugging them from one end of the farm to the other. He is short, stout, and strong, with a slight case of scoliosis (my own diagnosis) so that his right hip is slightly higher than the other, which becomes more pronounced when he walks. His skin has been tanned and tightened from working outside all day, especially on his forearms and face, and he has freckles over the laughter crinkles on the corners of his eyes. His bottom row of teeth jut out from under his top row, and his eyes sparkle with humor and at times mischief. He always wears a sombrero typical of the men of the coffee region, and he´s got a fantastic sense of humor, which is why we have started to joke with him. I don´t know, I feel this sense of childhoodhood freedom when I converse with him, and so the other day Jenny and I were helping him clean out the manmade duck pond and we started chanting ´´Playa de Popo! Playa de Popo! (Poopie Beach, Poopie Beach)´´ and laughed hysterically until we were doubled over with muscular contractions. Ridiculous.

Ok, back to serious stuff. This week, I got to harvest coffee beans, which I´ve always wanted to do, since I´m a coffee fanatic. I took my Ipod down into the coffee trees and searched for yellow, red, and black little granitos, which I tossed with a satisfying PLUNK into the plastic container I wore fastened with twine to my body. It was a fantastic morning, I just rocked out in my little world of playlists and parted branches searching amid the majority of green, young beans for their brightly colored ripe brothers and sisters, bending the trunks back as far as they´d permit without snapping in order to reach the highest ones, which were usually the ripest since they had the twofold advantage of both prime sunlight and were also out of reach of the shorter coffee pickers like Jenn and Ovidio. Later, we ran these beans through a processing maching that de-shelled them, and they are currently laying out to dry. Once completely dry (4-7 days time), we will roast them and grind them and package them! I will save a few for us to roast on our own, over a small fire, so that when I sit down to eventually drink this coffee I will be able to say that I made it. And this will have a much different sentiment than the countless times I´ve said I´ve ´´made´´ coffee before.