La Visita de Los Uruguayos

Last week, our hippy dippy organic vegetarian apple orchard was visited by two meat-eating roughousing Uruguayan boys. Javier and Gabriel, aged twenty-two and twenty, respectively, had shuffled onto our farm with their packs and a tent strapped to their backs and about two hundred dollars to their names, and were hoping to find a (free) place to camp out for a while.

The boys had hitchhiked their way across the Uruguyan border and were hoping to stretch their savings across six months and most of the South American countries (and possibly Central America, and maybe even Mexico, and, heck, why stop there? U.S.A!). Needless to say, these boys were here for financial reasons and not ideological ones. I don't think they had any idea what they were getting themselves into. I'm pretty sure the truck driver who gave them a lift from their last city just knew that it was possible to camp out at this farm, and so the boys jumped out and knocked on the door and that was that.  They were not crunchy little idealists who wanted to try their hands at organic farming and vegetarianism, oh no siree.

The sheer youth that these two young souls emanated was a giant gulp of fresh air for my rapidly old lady like self--what with the ache in my knees I'm starting to experience after a day of squatting in the fields, or the truck-like blow of fatigue that hits me at 10:30pm every night, it was nice to be surrounded by two young guys who seemed to be filled with so much unharnessed energy and passion and so little direction or sense of reality. Gabriel was especially fun to watch, and I'm not just saying this because he had the thickest, darkest eyelashes I'd ever seen and two full rows of brilliantly white teeth that would give even the most fastidious Western toothbrusher a run for his or her money. It wasn't his tan, soccer playing body either, although all of these things were certainly not ugly to look at (my mantra was, ''twenty years old, Ali. Twenty years old. Baby.''). What I loved was watching his and Javier's interactions in the fields and at the dinner table with the farm family.

They arrived just in time for our Andean potato harvest. The farm family had bought a bunch of special little seeds the previous season from a Bolivian potato farmer as an experiment in different potato varieties and how they would take to the Mendoza soil, and so last week was time to dig 'em up and see how they turned out. Potato harvesting is...well, it's hard work. You're out in the unrelenting mountain sun, hacking away with your hoe at heaps of dirt under rows and rows of weeds mixed with potato leaves, which often closely resemble the weeds. You must be careful not to chop too deep or too close to the potato stalk, because if you do, you risk chopping a potato in half as well, which you cannot see since it is hidden deep below the soil. After you've freed up a patch of dirt, you must get down to the level and the soil and painstakingly feel through the mountains of cool musty earth for round little balls of potato. There are also many round little balls of dirt, probably put there just to fool you, so once you find one, you must sqeeze it to ensure that is indeed a potato and not a poser. You must dig deep with your fingernails until you are sure that you've found every last one from that stalk, and then you must stand back up and start the careful hacking (if those words were ever meant to be together, it's now) process all over again. It's a lot of sit down, stand up business, lots of dirt under your fingernails, lots of lightheaded near-blackout ''oops I stood up too fast and it's HOT under this sun, I might pass out'' moments, but it's so satisfying to find these gorgeous little red and purple papas.

Anyway, the Uruguayans were the saddest addition to our work team that I could have ever imagined. In fact, I think we all got less done with them around. Every time I looked over at either one of them, they'd be perched under the shade of an apple tree taking a break, munching on an apple, or standing around with the hoe laid horizontally across their shoulders, stretching their backs a bit after an arduous two minutes of work. Every five minutes came the questions of ''when do we finish? when is lunch? when is dinner?'' When these questions weren't asked, the conversation was punctuated by some of the most interesting comments about politics (Gabriel: ''I have absolutely no problem with anything about Uruguayan politics. I'm completely content with our government and the general state of things.''), religion (again, Gabriel: ''I saw this really cool documentary in which it proved that every religion has some sort of Jesus character.'' Me: ''Uh, what about Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam?''), and science (both Javier and Gabriel: ''We don't believe in evolution.'' Me: ''Oh, well that's cool, do you believe in divine creation, then?'' J&G: ''No, we don't believe in God, either. But evolution definitely didn't happen. We were never monkeys.''). I have never met anyone who was an evolution denier who didn't use religious grounds to base his or her point. So fascinating.

At dinner, their poor bodies were clearly suffering from the lack of meat. These boys were daily meat eaters, and they appeared listless after their first day of ''work.'' Amparo, in her lovely mom role, in an attempt to get some animal protein into the bodies of these poor little guys, prepared a giant casserole with a whole lot of eggs, which the boys shoveled down immediately. It was so hilarious for me to experience this clash of culture because it once again reminded me that I'm living among the minorities of the minority here in Argentina, and it's a healthy dose of reality to see that it's not exactly typical, especially down here, to go a meal or two without any meat. I think nothing of heaping piles of potatoes and squash and lentils onto my plate and going to bed with a full, satisfied belly, but these guys were hurting.

They packed up their tents after day two; enough was enough. It was sad to see them go, simply because they were so entertaining to watch and listen to, but it was also sort of a relief because we would actually be able to get some work done. And we did. And the potatoes are so lovely (and delicious).