Por La Taina

I´ve spent the day today taking apart a stone wall which has fallen. It´s a job where I basically am removing all of the humungous stones, and moving them to a pile on the side, and then cleaning out all of the fallen stones, sticks, and leaves, to make room for the farmers to rebuild the wall, using the same stones and cement. It´s pretty heavy work, but I don´t mind it because I´m outside, in the sun, and because of how physical the work is, I stay pretty warm. By nightfall it´s pretty cold, especially in the house where the warmest place is near the fireplace.

I´m not really sure how cold it is in the house. All I can say about that is -- it´s so cold, the olive oil is solid. I´m pretty much living in all of my clothes at once. I feel a little bit like a mouse, I pretty much keep all my clothes in the bed around me, so that in the morning I don´t have to get out of bed to put anything on. I just dress under the covers.

I have to say, I´m interested in how the farmers, Maxi and Samuel, are doing things. Everything in the farm is from recycled parts that they´ve found or salvaged from the town dump. For example, the pig broke her gates the other day. One door was fixed using baling string leftover from feeding the burros straw. The other side was repaired with nails and broken wood from a wooden pallet. Yesterday I built a doghouse. We used two pallets for the A-frame, plus a few pieces of a third pallet for bracing wood. Then I wrapped the thing with a broken summer lake floatie, and a large strip of rubber which I have NO IDEA where they found it.

So i´m in the town of Santamera, which I´ve mentioned before only had two residents before I arrived. I made three, and for the past two weeks we´ve also had a woman named Krystal, from Switzerland, on the farm. Life is actually pretty easy. In the morning, after a cup of coffee and a few crackers, we head off to the taina, a few hundred feet away, where usually Maxi (the boss) and Krystal feed all of the animals while I take the goats up the mountain. It´s a job I specifically requested because I want to get a little physically fit while i´m here, and there´s nothing like climbing a mountain twice a day to really get the blood pumping.

After everyone gets fed, we accomplish small tasks like digging six pails of rocks out of the vegetable garden, or repairing the chicken enclosure fence with baling wire. Oh what I wouldn´t give for a staple gun at moments like this. Instead of five minutes with a staple gun, clack clack clack and it´s done, I get to spend two to three hours wrapping baling wire around the bottom of a two by four and attaching it to some hardware cloth to make a secure fence.

All in all, it´s great to use things at hand, but after the pig breaks her gate three times in a week, it sure makes sense to me that a visit to home depot would do these men a world of good.