It´s evening and I´m sitting in a locutorio writing this post and periodically leaning back in my chair to check out the sunset through the window. It´s an intense blend or orange and pink against the chalky blue lumps of mountain. I´m feeling pretty mangy because I had to get up at 6:45 to catch a ride with Azucena back to the city from the farm. That means not much sleep because I was up late tending the fire in outside the cabin while the others baked the round of bread for the week. My rewards for this violence to my body (lack of sleep): watching the sun rise over the desert, not paying bus fair, and being at the market to buy organic apples and carrots (rare specimens down here). The carrots are stubby, thumb sized, and reddish orange and have a fantastic sweet woody taste.
The last couple of weeks have treated me well. Besides farm life on weekends, I´ve caught some great reggae shows (said genre is BIG down here; I´ve seen more dreads here in the last months than I´ve seen in my whole life in the Midwest), discovered a pretty good micro-brew, read piles of extremely interesting, if exhausting works about Incan society and agriculture, about Mexican and Peruvian socialist leaders, and other good stuff. And I´m halfway through the Humanure Handbook- which is fantAstic! An American ex-pat who lives on a neighboring farm in Tunuyan loaned me the book, and she has a whole compost system set up based on it. Wow, I can´t believe I´ve been pooping in drinking water and filling landfills my whole life while I could have been creating rich soil. Well, always room for self improvement.
I´ve really gone overboard dipping my toes in different books at once. Here´s a list of books I´m in various stages of starting and completing:
1. Humanure Handbook
2. writings of Subcomandante Marcos
3. The Cosmic Race- by Jose Vasconcelos
4. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
5. Harvest of Empire- by Juan Gonzalez
Am I forgetting something? Pretty absurd, but better to have fingers in too many pies than to have already eaten all of them, right?
Well, many other things worth telling, but for now I think I´ll leave you with a typical day on the farm in Tunuyan, a Friday, let´s say . . .
I wake up gradually to the sound of the other volunteers creaking on the wood floor and clinking dishes in the kitchen. I lift the pile of cats off my sleeping bag, and eat a breakfast of bread, dulce de batata (sweet potato jam), tea, and a some oats if we´re lucky. We head out and starting the mornings projects like repairing fences for the hens or horses, collecting firewood, mud building, or hoeing and prepating beds in the garden. The air is dry and brisk, but things heat up quickly once the sun is high. The mountains across the way are the same chalky blue as the sky, with white caps. We work and hum and talk until midday. Then we gather tools and head back to the cabin, where Jorge conducts the daily yoga session on the grass outside. We stretch and do breathing excercises following his slow, treebeard-voiced instructions. Then we´re called to lunch by the smell of lunch boiling in a pot across the way- usually some blend of lentils or chick peas with squash and various greens from the garden. We eat and slowly descend into the after-lunch coma and spend the next hour inside away from the hot midday sun talking or reading. Nacho appears at various points, asking for help with a new project like his ¨house¨or repairing his ¨car.¨Eventually, we head back out to work, if we´re lucky, there´s work to do in the shade of the woods where they´re constructing new cabins for a planned retreat for artists, with the financial support of Marcos, an LA native and former NASA employee with an anger problem who was so fed up with US politics the last 10 years that he abandoned the country. He sleeps in one of the cabins and takes care of feeding the herd of the resident abandoned dogs that are always in train when he comes by. We work the rest of the afternoon. On really hot days (read, always from now on) we strip down and dive into the icey water of the irrigation ditch. It comes straight down from the mountains, and you can only stay in, gasping and shreiking, for about 20 seconds at a time, but man you aren´t hot for the rest of the day afterwards. As the day get on, we start to watch the spectacle that is the sunset over the mountains. Especially if there are some whisps of clouds, it is pretty amazing. Basically, it looks like a volcanic explosion over the line of peaks until it finally fades, and we gather tools and head back to the cabin. There, we put on the radio and a kettle and help make dinner, which is usually similar to lunch, but often Azucena makes pizza or noodles. We stuff ourselves again, wash dishes, play music (the banjo is now resident at the farm), maybe make a bonfire, maybe read and write in our journals, play with cats, make a fire for hot water to shower (only one Fridays), and eventually climb back into sleeping bags and sleep like logs.

So there you have it. Country life is good, city life aint bad either. And the weeks sure fly by. Tomorrow we´re going to a huge open air market that the bolivian immigrants put on- the only place to find piles of used stuff, anything from old instruments to clothes and tools. Then there´s a monthly folklore dance fest in a plaza east of my neighborhood and Evan and I are going to get some experience and brush up on our steps.
I´ve got two weeks of class until my second midterm, and then school is more or less over, and we wait for finals in late November. I´m off to Chile in two weeks to spend time with the ocean once more before I leave. Stay tuned for further adventures, and if you can, start pooping in a bucket. Sawdust is the key.