Tuesday, April 12, 2011
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!
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