happy days!

Hello hello!
Oh boy, much has occurred in the last couple of weeks. In the last post you found me laboring hard on the farm of the Huenchuñir family. Tht was an enriching experience, and helped me think a lot of things through and lose some weight, and really get a genuine experience of a tiny rural area in Chile, but after 3 weeks, I was missing people my age, community, abundant fruit, etc. Fortunately, I found all these things in glorious abundance at my next stop, Parcelita del Espino, a farm in Cauquenes. The climate changed a lot: it´s a much dryer, semi-desert zone with tons of wine production. The farm where I was was the rural estate of the aunt of Manu, the leader of Espino, a huge area with sheep, turkeys, a vineyard with neglected 100-year old grape vines, tons of membrillo trees (pear-apples sort of), and tunas (cactus with a spiny fruit that tastes like honeydew on the inside). The atmosphere of work was much more relaxed. I was there with Ruben, an antisocial anarchist type who specialty is dirty jokes, and Manu´s aunt Cecilia, a crazy, fun 40-something strong woman who ran the farm for years all by herself before Manu and the permaculturists starting helping.
Basically, the week consisted of harvesting endless super sweet grapes, making wine pressed by hand, and playing tons of music over the weekend because they had a get-together and invited tons of friends who play music of all sorts. It was then that I met Javier and Daniela, aka el Quiltro y Charangüilla, a young couple who have dedicated themselves to immersion in the folk traditions of Chile, singing in poetic décimas, improvising, and visiting old musicians before they die and their traditions are lost. We hit it off right away and they invited me to play banjo and Irish tunes at a folk festival they´re holding tomorrow night in their home city of Rancagua, an hour south of Santiago. So here I am now, staying in their house in downtown, playing guitar, banjo, flute, guitarrón, charango, drums, and drnking tons of maté and fine chilean wines. Needless to say, life is good. The festival should be great. I´ll update soon to let you know how it goes. For now, things are great. On to Valparaíso in a few days to meet of with Federico at a occupued anarchist house and make plans for permaculture and activism.
Hasta el próximo episodio!!

Mapu Newen

A week and a half has passed on the farm of the family of Jaime and Angelica Huenchuñir, a Mapuche couple living and farming on a parcel of land in the community of Cañete, to the south of Concepción, Chile who have been recieving me gratiously as a volunteer-family member. Their style of life is a good bit different than Granja Valle Pintado or the hostel in Valdivia to say the least. The work is hard. In the last week we´ve harvested huge fields of potatoes with ox-drawn plow, beans, lupine for feed, and built terraces for the garden. Lots of back ache, long hours, but also work that lets you develop a rhythm and get lost in thought. I´ve done more reflection and brewing of ideas in the last week than the previous couple of months. The food is also different. Hot soup at virtually every meal, super spicy peppers, hot tea, mate, home-baked white bread, endless potatoes. Virtually all the food is from the farm: the potatoes, the beans, the eggs. Now and then Angelica kills a chicken and we feast on that. We harvest baclberries for jam, wild mushrooms for stew. The day a young neighbor showed up with a freshly shot rabit, which he generously offered, and even skinned and butchered it right there for us. In that sense it has been a wonderful experience of very direct survival off the land, unlike many farms or gardens I´ve worked on where you harvest a lot of greens and fruit, but the base of grains and oil and legumes and everything else is bought. It´s also more stark and realistic in terms of the landscape. Cañete is a pretty zone of rolling hills and close enough to the coast that you can hear the roar of the waves at night, but at the same time most of the landscape is scarred with huge pine and eucaplyptus plantations for miles around, with only tiny pockets of native forest around streams. Then for entertainment: for the most part the entertainment is the three children, especially the youngest, 2 year old Alén, who doesdn´t talk yet, but runs, dances to the radio, makes the most hilarious adult faces, plays hide and seek, chases the geese, etc. The television is on more than I wish, usually dishing out the tragically hilarious brand of sensationalist chilean ¨journalism¨ that involves camera capture of muggings, domestic quarrels, and, last night- just to give you a taste- a feature story about a bank robbing ring in Satiago headed by the 70 year old grannie who scopes out potential targets in the street. In that sense the farm is a game of contrasts. For example, the other night Jaime and I went to look for the oxen and cows down in the valley and they had escaped. We spent a couple hours wandering through trails of the pine plantation and thick blackberry thickets in the dark before giving up for another day. We returned from the pitch dark exhuasted and sat down to dinner with the kids watching Batman beat up Jack Nicholson-joker in the bell tower from Batman 1. Last week we had a minga for the potato harvest- that´s were you have a job like harvest or building something and you invite friends to share the work, and pay them in beer and wine and fried fish. I met some interesting buddies of Jaime, one who works in social development, and got my share of chatting about the revolution and what´s messed up. I talk about that a fair amount with Jaime as well, but he´s a much quieter, reserved type who has chosen to focus his energy on raising his children and enriching his soil rather than the confrontation with police and lumber barons that is the fate of Mapuches who want to be involved in activism. It seems every month another Mapuche youth has been shot or jailed or exiled for trying to stop the slow march of agribusiness, mines, dams, and loggers over Mapuche lands. Anyway. I´m well. Healthy. Eating more sparse portions. Working hard. Thinking and growing a lot. In another week, I plan to head a bit further north to another farm that has a more communal, hippy atmoshpere, but for now I´m living this to the full. Love to all!

una estadia revuelta

Oh boy. What a wild, absurd, enjoyable, frustrating, and everything else few weeks in Valdivia, Chile! So in the last post Steve and I were settling in at hostal Aires Buenos, me doing odd jobs, him designing a rocket stove, both getting fed and housed comfortably. It continued as such for the next week but I was starting to get restless. I got to do some garden work, but mostly it was the shit jobs: painting the hallway, cleaning the basement, hauling lumber and huge backpacks full of vegetables back from the market. Plus, while the city has its charms, the noisyness, the cars, and the ridiculous tourists above all were maiing me restless for a farm. Some examples of the clientelle of the hostel: Colin from New Zealand who looked exaaaactly like Mr. Bean, a couple of fratty types from Australia that repeateadly awoke us at night, stumbling in drunk and lovelorn and who despite having been in Chile for several months were so inept at Spanish that they had to ask what poco meant. A Danish fellow named Johny who was a fanatic of backgammon and bribed us to play it for hours with peach vodka. As if that weren´t entertaining enough, the last few days things really started to unravel into absurdity. A couple nights ago a loudmouth woman from London got bitten in the night and come to find her room was infested by bedbugs. We inspected it and found more and everyone started to get hysterical and paranoid. We ended up rigging up a pulley to lower the mattress and bedframe out a third story window so as not to transmit them further. Then the fumigators came and sprayed the room and didn´t seal it properly so we were all coughing and decided to get the hell out. The owner, Viella had been out with a friend the night before and had the epiphany that she wasn´t sure she wanted to keep the hostel or build more on her cabaña so she terminated Steve´s rocket stove project. She also finally decided she had to get rid of the semi-feral cat Pierre, an adorable little rascal- all black with a white moustache- because he was spreading fleas and biting guests that tried to pet him so we ended up grabbing him, sticking him in a bag and walking a few blocks to dump him at the fish market near the docks where he´ll hopefully live well alongside the hordes of sea lions that come up to feast on the discards of fish guts. Ahhh, what a glorious parade of absurdity!! But I exaggerate the bad for dramatic effect. Things have been pretty nice. Yesterday for examp`le we fled the fumigation to go up one last time to the cabin. We cut some wood, covered up cosntruction supplies, and then enjoyed the walk down on a glorious sunny day with tons of wild blackberries, rasberries, and murta berries (like red blueberries tha taste extra cedar-ish) and the view of the lowland swamps. Then we celebrated our last night by cooking fresh fish, green beans, and feasting with peanuts, chocolate, beer, wine, and good company. Or last weekend, I managed to sneak away to spend a few hours by the ocean and ended up writing a poem (I often forget that I write poems until I´m somewhere like next to the sea and one just pops out), and doing some good existential reflection. SO life is good, as it always is when you stop to think about it. And now I´m getting out of Valdivia, settling my restless bug. And what´s more, I´m headed five hours to the north to stay on the farm of a Mapuche family that just got back to me yesterday! I´m so excited! They have animals and berries, and are no doubt wonderful. I´ll be meeting them hopefully by this evening. On the road again!!! For the long term plans, things are starting to get clear: I´m going to travel up Chile, cross to Mendoza for a few weeks, head to northern Argentina to wrok on a wonderful farm-forest reverve called Aldea Luna (look it up). I´m going to accept Chapel Hill´s offer for grad school, and either start there in August, or get the Fulbright and defer for a year to live in Colombia. Either way, I should be back in Missouri for a little while as soon as July! So hugs for now. Stay tuned for the next round of adventures!!!