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.