Age of Aquarius

To describe the farming shinanigans Liz and I have been creating the past two weeks I think it would be fun to write out a couple passages directly from my travel journal so everyone can fully comprehend my mind frame in the begining, middle, and end of the experience, so here goes...

Madre Tiera farm, Oct 13, 2008: Day 1 - Holy Shit! Im in a farm in BFE Argentina. What am I doing here? There are no indoor toilets, only a mud hut with a toilet seat suspiciously attached. Im already envisioning an Italy-toilet-seat-mid-pee-detachment-debacle repeat. Oh, and did I mention the sawdust toilet paper? Definitely not feng shuied for maximum pooping potential!

There are two obnoxious social abominations playing leap frog on TOP of the kitchen table named Paloma and Nacho, seriously, the kid is named Nacho! LOL! It´s frickin cold here too, we splurged at AR walmart equvalent on some little kid´s sleeping bags that come barely up to our nipples, which btw could cut through glass right now. We are supposed to wake up tomorrow at 8 and milk some goats or something in the mud fields, it´s probably going to still be dark outside just to spite me. We are sleeping in the loft with two twin sized mattressses on the floor of a room which is about 4 feet tall and could fit a king sized matress and NOTHING else. The ceiling is constructed out of cardboard and newspapers and held together with what looks like spiderwebs and staples. Everyone speaks spanish except for me, I have the feeling I am going to get really good at charades by the end of this ordeal. I would kill for a toilet shower right now.

Madre Tiera farm, Oct 15, 2008: Day 3 - Shit show! Literally! We were both elbow and knee deep in horse shit today, called barrow, for four hours this afternoon. If you add straw and dirt to horse shit and water it down you have an amazingly disgusting adheisive to patch houses... or throw at little children (hehehe). I stomped around in the kiddie pool sized horse shit mixture for four hours this afternoon, mixing it for maximum patching power and filling huge buckets for Liz so she could throw heaping handfulls at the shit house we are constructing. GROSS!


It seems that the jobs we are doing get daily worse and worse. We hoed this morning for four hours, which isn´t soooo bad because I can concentrate on my abs and arms and rock out to my ipod and just think of it as a work out, but that horse shit house is horrid.

I would KILL someone for some sugar. At night I have been shoveling Argentinian cheerios called Aritos into my mouth and sucking off the sugar and honey just so I can taste something sweet.

We have been on a steady diet of polenta and salad. Its pretty bad!

Madre Tiera farm, Oct 23, 2008: Day ? - Lost track of days, but I have figured out the trick to this farming thing.
Trick number 1- when bored strike up conversations about hot topics like exboyfriends/ fashion/ celebrities/ hot gossip with those around you
Trick number 2- If trick number 1 isn´t possible due to lack of human interaction keep your ipod on you at all times and rock out like its New Years 1999.
Trick number 3- Stock BABY WIPES and chocolate at all times.
Trick number 4- Sink showers, and lots of them!
Trick number 5- Bond with fellow volunteers over midnight games of Texas Holdum and forbidden cerveza (snuck in from the tienda down the road).
Trick number 6- Read bedtime stories outloud for the group from slutty romance novels (preferably with seductive and smutty art on the cover) with prpoer accents for each character until every person in the room is laughing histerically at the ridiculousness of the writing and sex scene situation.

I have actually come to like this farming thing just a little bit. We get siestas during mid day which I am way into, and the other girls volunteering and I have bonded over our lack of plumbing and exboyfriend tales. We make iced tea at night with orange slices for our tea breaks during the day and get to make homemade pita bread and bake it over a camp fire which is pretty cool too. There are about 4 cute little kitties wandering around, my favorite is named Desayuno.

The shit house is coming along just fine and the house made out of thatched willows is almost done except for the roof. Its actually pretty cool to be able to say I made something like that. The little social abomination Paloma snuck into our room while we were all out working the fields yeterday and stole all the chocolate the volunteers had stocked from our weekend travel trip to Mendoza. The problem with this is she is lactose intolerant. She was missing from dinner tonight and when we asked Nacho where his sister was he told us she was sick from eating all our chocolate... I like to call that karma :)



SIDE NOTE: The family comments are HILARIOUS! I am sitting in an internet cafe laughing my ass off about the farming debates taking place among the sibs. I love you guys, priceless!

For some more stories click here to check out Liz´s blog!