farm life

we decided to stay at la stala till the 11th of november which would make it a month of working and living with the erquiagas. life here has finally become less intimidating on an everyday basis and more routine. i understand basic things like ´did you sleep ok?´, ´would you like more food?´ and ´what did you do!?´. the last one is more of an ongoing joke.

this weekend, i had karate chopped lunch. the family raises rabbits for consumption and the easiest way to slaughter them is apparently to karate chop them in the back of their heads and quickly clean up with a very sharp knife. it wasn´t disturbing but i won´t be raising rabbits in my home. they´re not worth the work. and also, the idea of rabbit feet for luck has become a little bit morbid for me.

we got baby pigs! on the 27th and 28th. we had been waiting for them for a week or so and then they finally arrived. it was like a real life discovery channel documentary. apparently pigs just poop out their little ones which makes human births seem so much more complicated than they need to be. so far 3 pigs have given birth to a total of 28 piglets (i think they have designated sex days here). there were a total of 32 piglets but some of them got aplastado which is castellano for ´plastered´ which also means they got sat on by their mothers and died. they´re way cute. not the dead ones. pictures to follow.

we cleaned out the bunny and chicken houses today which isn´t the most glamorous of tasks. i wear boots of the rubber variety and rake out poop and other unwanted materials. katherine awaits with a shovel to transfer waste material into a cart headed for the compost heap. we´ve done this once before and that time would have been worse if i didn´t get pelted in the face with rabbit pee today. i´m not sure how it happened but i thought i was going to die. emotionally. good thing it was only a single drop otherwise i really would have died.

learning more spanish in the meantime and thinking of heading off the farm in november to tour the country.

tunuyan

life here has been pretty rough, i have to admit. i´m in some internet cafe in clothes that i´ve been wearing for the past 3-4 days (i know, not my style). i not only look dirty, i am dirty. to prove that i´m not actually whining, my pants have spots of pig food on them.

tasks at the farm include feeding the pigs (you probably already got that one), feeding the chickens, weeding a lot (since it´s an organic garden, weeds (and the next door neighbors who apparently steal water) are our nemesis), working in the small vineyard, planting seeds and other tasks of the season. currently, it´s important to trim down the oregano bushes to make way for more oregano. they cut their oregano bushes up to 3 times in the summer then dry it for sale or for their own consumption.

i´m trying to learn spanish but currently that´s going pretty slowly and is leaving me feeling a little silly and disconnected. communication with everyone except katherine has been reduced to a series of grunts and shrugs which i have to say, is a little demoralizing and frustrating at best. i miss life where i had time to myself, space to myself, tasks that i assigned to myself and where i understood most things.

not all is bad...i´m learning a lot about self sufficiency and i can tell that luis and laura have intelligently chosen to live life off the grid for most part and to take a chance living life as simply as possible. luis was in construction before and built the house where his family lives. they have an indoor and outdoor oven and they´re both firewood powered. the indoor oven is set up to heat up the house as well. the outdoor oven is used in the warmer months. we shower 2-3 times a week when they fire up the furnace that makes hot water possible. they recently constructed an outdoor composting toilet. they compost with scraps from the kitchen but also with pig and cow manure and i´m sure many other things. weeds go to the cows, chickens or rabbits. everything is set up with a lot of thought and everything is reused whenever possible. they´re so far ahead of the curve here in argentina, that i´m constantly amazed whenever i understand.

we eat with the family everyday and laura is a wonderful cook. we´ve had plenty of salads from the garden, cheese made from the milk that the cows produce, eggs from the chickens, bread made from scratch, a variety of meat products from the pigs that they raise, sauces and preserves made with last year´s fruit and vegetables etc. two weeks ago, i had the most delicious raw asparagus of my life (sweet, delicious and tender) - they grow around the property.

all 4 kids are terrific and sweet - mauricio, antontella, nicolas and sofia. thirteen, 14, 16 and 18 respectively. they help in various ways when they´re around. antonella can identify most vegetables growing in the garden and has taken us under her wing, explaining everything in painful detail whenever she can.

last weekend, we travelled an hour north to visit laura´s mother in mendoza. we also visited a friend of luis´, armando. armando has been making wines for the past 15 years and his malbec was delicious and sweet. magical.

i´m looking forward to (hopefully) a time when i can communicate better. otherwise, life in rural argentina is very simple, low key and full of learning. oh, and one more detail...we can see the andes from their backyard.