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.