Tourists No More

What a change we've seen since last I wrote.  Having decided to stay in Valparaìso for two extra days Andrew and I didn't find ourselves traveling southward toward Chiloe until last Sunday.  Fifteen hours of bus travel--imagine economy class airplane seats that recline a few inches farther--and we had arrived at our first WWOOFing destination.

And here we are at "La Granja," a fifty-acre farm located on the northern end of the island of Chiloe, owned and operated by Germany-born Jaike and her Chilean husband Manuel.  While we've already spent a week here, it's difficult to accurately capture this place.  We've used the words, "zoo," "circus," and "petting farm" with great frequency, and if one includes Jaike and Manuel's daughters, Sofí and Lena, it can be downright craziness around here.  When we first arrived, their one-story five-room house contained one dog, two puppies, three cats, and two parakeets.  One of the puppies has since been sold, but it can still feel crowded in here when the remaining puppy engages in play with the rambuctious Siamese, Tuki, running from room to room and generally causing a ruckus.  Just outside the window, however, are three enormous German Shephards, a puppy of the same breed, three barn cats, a handful of sheep and their babies, five alpacas, a pair of ducks, a henhouse of chickens and roosters, four rabbits, two foals, three "regular" horses, two Chilotan horses, five wild boars, one enormous "domestic" piggy, and two wild goats.  As it just so happens, Manuel and Jaike happen to be veterinarians, thus albeit a busy zoo, it's certainly a happy and healthy one.

Given that we've been here a week already, there's a great deal to tell.  Andrew and I reside in a little cabaña on the property complete with two beds, a sofa, a tiny nonfunctional kitchen, a bathroom, and nothing more than a woodstove for heating.  After only two or three "stupid Gringo" moments, we've become adept at stoking our heater to produce enthusiastic flames within a matter of minutes as opposed to hours, and the extremely dense Chilotan wood requires that we only get up once during the night to keep it going.  In addition to the comfort of wood heating, there are three working lightbulbs, but foul weather the last few days has rendered them useless on a near-regular basis.

Electricity, however, is something we've found to be a luxury, and it serves no purpose other than pumping water and illuminating storm darkened living rooms for reading and inside farmwork.  Inside farmwork here at "La Granja" is the tedious and infuriating task of rolling large bundles of alpaca and sheep wool into balls of yarn requiring expert communication and patience not only with the material but with each other.  Telling stories in front of a fire while wrestling with wool is both beautifully pastoral and cause for petty argument.  We're not living in our tent yet, but quarters are close and we've only made a dozen balls of yarn.  To give a sense of the level of frustration; the first ball we made was already half completed when we started, and it took us nearly four more hours to finish.  Half a ball in four hours?  Luckily practice does in fact make perfect, and we're cranking out balls in under an hour now.  I enjoy the meditative aspect of the work as well as the conversation it produces, but I'm relieved to know that we only have three more to go.  Until it's time to sheer again.

As for the outside farmwork, today was the first day with fine enough weather to venture out of doors without several layers and a raincoat.  If I had more time and patience, I'd delve into the details of the day, but for now I'll have to summarize.  The day began with pig castration.  Until today, I had never seen a pig testacle, nor had I ever stopped to imagine just exactly what their removal would entail, but the process was both enlightening as to their size as well as to the required strength of stomach to participate in animal husbandry.  A single testacle of a year-old wild boar is roughly the size of Andrew's fist, or one and a half of my own, a size we estimated to be roughly that of the human heart.  Perhaps larger.  The slit for their extraction, made deftly by Manuel and his pen knife, needs to be between two and three inches in length, and the amount of rope required to sequire the beast in order to make that slit is two lengths of fifteen feet each.  After roping the enthusiasticly unwilling piggy and securing him to two fence posts by both snout and feet, it's cut, squeeze, cut, squeeze, suture, cut, apply antibacterial spray, and you're done.  It's bloody and the squeals turned my stomach, but after eating one of the little guy's uncles for dinner I felt much better.

After dinner--that is, the main meal of the day--it was time for sheep manicures.  Another dirty task, but sheep are far more willing to cooperate than wild pigs and we needed no rope to sit a bleating wooly on her rear end.  Sheep need regular hoof-trims to prevent the growth of anaerobic bacteria, and after wintering over the toes of the sheep at "La Granja" were covered in a hard black nail curling under the foot.  Using the same knife that had just undone two gentleman swine, Andrew and I tried our hands at scraping away the filthiest parts of the sheep's nail.  Manuel was gracious enough to give instruction in both Spanish and German, and soon we had the whole flock trimmed and back in the pasture.  Andrew seemed to have a knack for cutting too deeply, and while I had retreated to our cabaña to wash my hands post testacle removal, Andrew was reaching for a hose after nicking too deeply on a few ewes.  Manuel informed us that this was better than not getting the nail open and breathing, but Andrew said he was feeling more queasy after that experience than that of the morning. 

Tomorrow it may be back to the cabaña to finish our yarn rolls, but in the event that I get an opportunity to use Manuel's laptop again (and the power holds), I'll spend the next update illuminating Chilean cuisine.  Until then, we're loving our host-family, enjoying Chiloe's fairytale-like beauty, and eating, washing, and sleeping in volumes most likely approved by any mother.  Besos a todos y hasta pronto.