Kibbutz Life: Climbing the Cherry Picker to Success

On my first day of work in the date orchards of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, something gigantic, majestic, and bright yellow caught my eye, captured my heart, and inspired my soul.  It was like the apatosaurus in "Jurassic Park," huge of body, long of neck, and lumbering along through between the trees, its long neck easily overreaching them.  It was the cherry picker, the hulk of a machine that was the most valuable tool in the date orchard team's arsenal.  And I knew immediately that I wanted to use it.  It was the golden yellow of a school bus, with in impressive body that housed the engine, hydraulic systems, and wheels for moving around the tractor.  The platform at the top of the hundred-foot crane was not just a little cubby.  It has easily enough floor space to live in, with a radio that constantly blasted Israel's favorite music station, Galgalatz, and the floor panels could open and close like a claw to allow 360 degree access around the entire perimeter of the tree that was being worked on.


I could tell just by looking that this was no ordinary piece of equipment that would just be lent out for use to mere volunteers like myself.  Operating the cherry picker was something that one had to earn.  The last time a kibbutz volunteer was allowed up there to chop down date branches, her machete cut down a couple of her fingertips along with the branch.  Seeing how this was only my second day of work, I knew it was going to be a long time before I even had a chance of riding the big yellow dinosaur.


After leaving Sweden on October 18, with the usual amount of nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future that comes with my itinerant lifestyle, I made my way to Israel, for the first time since 2006.  This was partly to please my parents, who had decided that if I was going to travel around the world farming and exploring and living in a developmental limbo as far as future plans towards life and career go, I might as well do it in Israel and get some nice kosher food out of it, not to mention see some friends and family, some of whom I hadn't seen in too many years.  And while I was doing that, I might as well check out what it's like to live on a kibbutz. A kibbutz is an Israeli commune, originally socialist by nature, although in recent decades most of them have sold out to private industries and are now just nice places to live and work, without the original romance of living off the land that the kibbutz movement was founded with.


So, I saw friends, family, and the gorgeous expanse of Israel's geography that I've missed since my last time here, a winter vacation during my sophomore year of college with some friends.  At the same time, I was also applying to kibbutzes, which was more disparaging that I thought it would be.  I would look up interesting kibbutzes online, send them an email telling them that I would like to volunteer for a couple months, and then hear back from them the next day that they would be happy to have me, and all I need to do is go through the Kibbutz Programming Center.  Unfortunately, for an organization that was created for the socialist kibbutz movement, the KPC is one of the most greedy, demanding, and un-user-friendly organizations I've come across.  They make you pay around $600 for the program, just to volunteer, half of which is a non-refundable deposit, and then it takes a month to do the paperwork, so that people who just want to show up and work are out of luck, plus there is a rigorous amount of paperwork, medical exams, and recommendations which are required.  If you get through all of that, then you can be sent to a kibbutz to volunteer, but you don't get told which one until basically the day you leave.


Well, lucky for me, I have some contacts on the inside of Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu who got me in past all the paperwork and hullabaloo and I was able to show up just a couple weeks after calling, after space opened up for me, and start working and seeing what the kibbutz life is all about.  Sde Eliyahu happens to be one of the last successful, traditional-style kibbutzes in the country in that it is a socialist commune, where everyone works, is given equal compensation, and live for the kibbutz itself, and not some corporation that has bought them out.  As volunteers, we are given basically the same treatment, only lighter in scale.  We work 6-8 hours a day, are given 3 square meals a day, a dorm to sleep in with sheets, towels and work clothes, free laundry, free medical care, a monthly stipend (not much, but we don't spend much either) and a general sense of being taken care of by the powers that be.  Sounds like a good deal, I figured.


When I first arrived I told them I had agriculture experience and I would like to continue it, and be able to work outside, as opposed to washing pots and pans all day.  Actually, I had been told by previous volunteers, of which I apparently know dozens, that I should absolutely expect to be put in the dishroom at first (when I told this to my cousins in southern Israel, their 10-year-old son asked me, "Why would you want to come all the way to Israel just to wash dishes?"  He made a disquieting good point). Fortunately, they decided to assign me to the date orchard, where the dates were being harvested.  This involved the professionals going up on the cherry picker and chopping down date branches which were wrapped in bags.  We then shook the dates off the branches into the bags, then emptied the bags into crates to be processed elsewhere.  I was working with some fun Australians on a Jewish youth group program, and while the work was hard, it gave me the satisfaction I was hoping for, which I have found I often get from doing useful, manual labor.  I kept expecting to be moved to another job, but apparently the pros on the date team liked me and saw no reason to get rid of me, so I stayed on.  There was also the fact that after two weeks, the Aussies left, so there were half the number of volunteers working.  Since out of all the other volunteers, plus the Hebrew students who were there to learn and work, I was the only one assigned to dates who showed up every day, worked hard, and didn't disappear in the middle of work, I was made to look even better.


Overall, life moves at a pretty slow pace on the kibbutz.  We, the volunteers and students, almost never go off the property, since most of what we need is located on the kibbutz.  Only a few times a month do we go into the nearest town for some cheap beer, fast food, and a bit of a break.  Otherwise, it's a pretty straight routine I have found, waking up at half past 5 to report for work at 6, breaking for breakfast (hardboiled eggs, herring on toast, maybe some shredded veggies) and coffee, working until 1, going to lunch (usually some elaborate meat and chicken dishes, fancy salads - basically the best food I could dream of, served on a daily basis), and then the rest of the day to hang out, go online, read, nap, go for walks, or do whatever else I want with.  It's simple, I'm happy, and there's not much else to it.


And it seems like that is the general consensus for many people here.  After talking to some kibbutzniks (the residents, there are about 800 of them) and some volunteers and students who have made their own impressions, kibbutz life is just slow and simple by nature.  There is not much to do for entertainment, either on the kibbutz or in town, and residents are given plenty of money to live on and save up, but they rarely take vacations, or live with any kind of luxury or elaborate lifestyle.  In terms of work, for those who work on the kibbutz, there seem to be few jobs that have much hierarchy, meaning there are not too many promotions and only so far one can climb up the professional ladder, or cherry picker, so to speak.  But at the same time, the people who live here don't really seem to mind that.  As the volunteers'  "house mother," Henia, told me, it takes a very special, and a little bit crazy, kind of person to live on a kibbutz.  It is like a life-long womb, and as long as you are happy with that - protection, providence, and routine - then a kibbutz can be a wonderful place to live.  During the early days of the Sde Eliyahu, when her husband's parents were building the place, they were working hard, living in tents with malaria and all sorts of hardships, and happy as can be.  People worked for the sake of creating something they loved, and it became that they were living for it too.  So if today, kibbutzniks are still living and working for something they love and need, then they probably don't need to move much higher than where they are now.  They can do their jobs and be happy that they are making their community a better place, without need for ambition or greed.

As for me, I had just one thing that I wanted to aspire to.  Weeks went by and after a slow period of sewing shut the holes in the date bags for 6 hours a day, I started to ask if I could please go up on the cherry pickers.  I told them that my service here on the kibbutz if they would only give me one day up there, in the golden tower of authority, at the tops of the date palms.  They told me that the only way I would be allowed up there would be to watch a two hour training video, all of which was in Hebrew.  It was a nice way of saying "No."  But one day, actually 3 days ago, I arrived for pre-work coffee and found only 3 of the men on our date team waiting.  The supervisor came by and told them what to do that day, in Hebrew too complex for me to understand.  I only understood them saying that there weren't enough of them, and the supervisor saying to take me along as well.  Was he sure?  Sure, why not, let him try it out.  I assumed this mean pruning olive trees or digging up irrigation hoses or something like what I had been doing for the last week.  But we got in the van, drove out to the furthest date fields, and pulled up right alongside that regal, elegant piece of accomplishment that we call...well, I don't remember the Hebrew word for it, but you know what I'm talking about.  They told me that we were going to be pruning the date tree branches, if I thought I was up to it.  They sent me up on the platform, turned on the ignition, gave me a giant, heavy pair of hydraulic mechanical pruning clippers, put Radio Galgalatz on full volume, and got to work.  And it sucked.  It was terrible.  The clippers were heavy, it was hot, the music was bad, the trees were short so were were never more than 5 or 6 feet in the air anyway, and the date branches are covered in massive thorns and leaves with dagger-sharp tips so that I was in constant danger of having an eye poked out or an ear perforated, and by the end of the day, I was sore, tired, soaked in sweat, and poked so full of holes, I felt like I had been given a full body massage by a porcupine.  And then the next day, we went back for more.  Now I have cuts and pinholes all over me, my hands and arms are sore from holding the heavy clippers, and I'm actually glad I came down with strep throat just in time to call in sick today.

But the point is, I managed to make it to the top.  I rose to the top of my ladder, and I accomplished what I've been waiting over a month to do.  Even if the result was not what I wanted, the taste of success was still as sweet as I had dreamed.  I guess it helps that my hopes and aspirations for the two months I am planning to be here are fairly low, but I guess that is one way I can relate to the kibbutz lifestyle.  If I am well taken care of, given good work to do, and allowed to rise to accomplishment every so often, well, I can be happy enough.  But I've also decided that after a couple months here, there is nothing about Sde Eliyahu, or even Israel as a whole that really pulls me in and makes me want to make a long term commitment.  

So what's next for me?  Tune in for my next posting, where I will tell you how I'm managing to come full circle and end up back in Peace Corps Mali.

Photos Aplenty

For those of you who have been wanting a more visual look at my life WWOOFing abroad, I finally figured out how to give non-Facebook members access to my Facebook album where I have been uploading the photos.  So take a look at the best, strangest, or most self-indulgent pictures of Ireland and Sweden!

Ireland, the begining of the adventure: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.869139739912.2347600.8107797&type=1&l=a9a4c5a34f

Sweden, from Ekero to Stockholm, with a bit of Euro-tripping thrown in for good measure: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.927157002852.2363840.8107797&type=1&l=a7a86652b0

Today is my last day here at Rosenhill, and afterwards, my as-yet-undetermined plans for a couple months in Israel commence.  I have literally no idea of what I will be actually doing there or where I will be or how long I will be doing it, so I'm probably just as excited as you to find out.  I have been trying to contact kibbutzes to come in as a volunteer but most of them require me to go through some umbrella organization which charges hundreds of dollars and takes a month to process the paperwork.  Hopefully before too long, I can find something a little more user-friendly for people like me who are more prone to living life by the seat of their pants.  If anyone out there has any solid leads for something like that, let me know.  Otherwise, you'll get more news when I do.  For now, I have to pack my bags and get ready for the last Rosenhill party of the season, coincidentally taking place the night before I leave, so that I will feel nice and exhausted for my 5 hour train ride to Gothenburg tomorrow morning to see an old Rosenhill buddy, who we all call Clean Steve.

So that's the news for now.  As always, this blog is for all of you friends and family out there, so to whoever is reading this, email me at jmasher85@gmail.com.  I would love to know what you are up to in your lives as well.  I would hate to think that I'm the only one having any fun out here.

Musteri Madness, and Apples Aplenty

Long before my current WWOOFing site, Rosenhill, had volunteers, before they had Saturday night parties every weekend, before they had a cafe even, there was the Musteri.  The Musteri seems to be the be-all and end-all of the Rosenhill entity.  It is the sacred shrine, the Holy of Holies, the bustling commecial center of the empire.  It doesn't neccessarily bring in the most money out of all the Rosenhill enterprises, but it demands the most attention, recieves the most love, and uses the most WWOOFer manpower.

"Must" is the Swedish word for "pressed juice," and the Musteri is a great machine that turns, apples, pears, berries, and more into juice through a grinder and press that looks like a machine The Once-ler would use to make Thneeds in Dr. Suess's "The Lorax."  Originally, when Lars and Emilia, the owners of this place, first bought the farm from Emilia's parents, it was just a farm, an orchard, and a giant, loud, clunky apple press.  People would come from miles around to pick apples, or more often bring their own, since it seems that every house outside of Stockholm has a few apple trees.  They would bring the apples to be pressed, but eventually the lines grew too long, so Lars and Emilia opened a cafe for people to wait, drink, eat, and spend money while waiting for their turn at the Musteri.  Over time, the cafe has become an entity of its own, and as we who work hours and hours in the dishroom and kitchen can attest, there is plenty of draw there as well.  But from the time the Musteri opens in early September to when the last of the apples have turned too rotten at the end of October, there are lines hours long and the crunching and roaring sounds of the apple grinder can be heard steadily for 7 hours a day.

It is also, on a busy day, as chaotic a workplace as you can imagine.  The process of pressing apples in a perfect world would go like this: 1) Customer's apples are dropped into a bathtub to be washed and cleaned of big leaves, snails, rotten apples, and the like; 2) Customer's apples are dropped, one basket at a time, into the apple grinder, where the apples are chewed, scraped, crushed, and bludgeoned into pulp; 3) Said pulp is sprayed through a funnel into a large cheesecloth, where another worker folds, straightens, and piles the stacks of cloth on top of each other; 4) The tray holding the pile under the grinder is spun around to the other side of the machine, where a hydraulic is turned on and the tray is squeezed, pressing out all the juice into a bucket, while a second tray is loaded with the next customer's apples on the other side of the machine; 5) The juice is pumped from the bucket to the bottles, the bottles are sealed, the reciept is written, money is collected, and a happy and hopefully thirsty customer is sent on their way.

Now since this is not a perfect world and the Musteri is mainly operated by minimally trained volunteers, plus Lars and Bo, our Musteri-guru in residence, here are the kinds of issues we usually have to deal with: 1) Sometimes, the customer has about three pounds of apples, enough to make maybe 5 liters of juice, which frankly, is just a big waste of time for us on a busy day.  Other times, the customer has an obscene amount of apples, like the 285 liter load we spent 40 minutes on the other day, while other customers watched and waited, politely feigning patience.  Even with an average amount, say 25-75 liters, there are some customers who come in bragging about how they have the most beautiful apples all from one tree, which they picked last week, and now we open these garbage bags full of apples and have to spend 5 minutes picking out all the ones that have turned black and moldy since their were first bagged a week ago.

2)  Apples come in all different sizes and consistencies, so some of them clog up the grinder, some of them blast soft juicy pulp in every direction, like Steve Buscemi being stuffed into a woodchipper in "Fargo," and sometimes, the spinning blades decide they can't chop up the apples and instead, launch them like cannonballs into the air often nearly shattering windows or nailing bystanders in the noggin.  3) Proper folding is perhaps one of the most important things to get right in the musting process.  If you fold the cloths poorly, they will pop open while the apples are being pressed, and streams of thick apple pulp will erupt out like Old Faithful.  This is also one of my favorite mistakes people make, because lets face it, it's hilarious to see your friends get a juicy, brown spurt of applesauce right into their unsuspecting faces.

4) As often seems to happen to me, the job that is one of the easiest to screw up is also the one that Bo has chosen as the best one for me - filling the bottles.  We use a powerful pump, so when you turn it on, you better have the end of the hose in the bottle you want to fill, or once again, apple-stuff everywhere.  If you turn it off too early, the bottle isn't full enough and the customers feel ripped off.  Too late, and, you guessed it, juice everywhere.  Or, if the bottle is too small, like less than a liter, or if the opening won't allow the hose inside, you need to time and aim your pumping perfectly, or, thaẗ́'s right again folks, apple juice everywhere.

But all these hazards and potential mishaps are part of the fun of working in the Musteri.  We have fun rushing around working the machine, singing and dancing to Balkan opera, James Brown, or whatever other random music has been chosen to blast at full volume so that it can be heard over the roaring machinery.  There's a sense of pride that comes with coming off a 2-hour Musteri work shift with juice dripping down your arms, and chunks of apple pulp all over your face and hair, and wherever your clothes weren't covered in the orange plastic overalls we wear.  And the customers get one hell of a show out of the whole spectacle.   This past Saturday night, a huge party was thrown here, organized by a collective of artists who wanted to showcase their installations.  At around 11 pm, a bunch of us WWOOFers got bored of the party, so we all got some beers, went into the orchards to pick apples, turned on a disco light and trance music in the Musteri, and had ourselves a midnight musting party.  Afterwards, we suggested to Lars, with semi-seriousness, that we close the Musteri during the day, and from now on, only work mildly intoxicated and at night.  Lars told us, with semi-seriousness, that he would consider it.

Blueberry Fields Forever

This blog entry is dedicated in memory of Amy Winehouse, who I recently decided I don't like anymore.  Ever since Amy died, our cook at Rosenhill's Cafe, Johann, realized just how much he loved her music, and with the same voracity with which he smokes cigarettes and cooks hamburgers, he went full-tilt, turning our own kitchen mp3-speaker system into an all-Amy, all-the-time jukebox.  From morning until night, Amy would wail and croon in her nasal alto with the strains of earnest piano and horn sections comforting her betrayed heart, over and over again.  She went "back to black" at least 9 times a day, and jokes were flying left and right about Johann's need for some Rehab of his own get off his Wine-house addiction.  But still she played on, day after day, week after week.  Every Saturday night, we would throw a party with live music for locals to come on down and have a good time, and Johann would whip out his guitar and together we would all stumble through the words to all the Amy songs we knew from all of our hours spent cooking and washing dishes in Johann's kitchen.

But it was one of the bravest things I've ever said to anyone when I told Johann one day, "I'm sorry, but I've hit a wall.  I can no longer stand listening to her.  I hate her voice, her songs are all the same, and frankly, she bores me to tears.  Please make it stop!...no offense..."  While initially a bit taken aback, Johann did come to understand my exasperation, and then Amy became a more of a big joke between the two of us.  But while it's been toned down of late, Amy has continued as an occasional kitchen and party mainstay, and I needed to get revenge on her, or her ghost, for tormenting me so, being one of the sole sources of drudgery for me in the otherwise delirious bliss of Rosenhill.

Vengence came in the form of a pig.  There are three pigs who we raise here, who eat our leftovers during the summer, and are in turn slaughtered and saved for food for the Sillen family in the winter when they close Rosenhill until the air is warm again.  A few weeks ago, the pigs decided that they no longer cared for their pen, and braving the 6000 volts of electric fence and 4-high chicken wire, began a daily routine of escaping their pen and running into the garden, the street, or the woods.  It was decided that the ringleader, the largest of the pigs, the one with the black spot on his eye, would have to be sacrificed for his bad influence, and also to make sausages for the massive annual Harvest Festival that is thrown every year.  The pig was killed, and posthumously named Amy, in honor of the other dead and beloved Amy, whose heavy mascara-job looked a bit like our Amy's black spots.  Since I was the only WWOOFer here with butchering experience, I volunteered to help carve up the carcass.  It certainly was quite a bit more grisly than anything I've ever had in mind for Miss Winehouse, but I'll take my closure where I can get it.  As it turned out later, I was also on the sausage-making comittee, despite my innate Jewish aversion to taking any enjoyment from pork (and Winehouse being Jewish herself), and with my blind blend of spices, herbs, and raw pork meat, I stumbled upon what were universally heralded to be 20 kilograms of fantastic delicious sausages, to the delight of Rosenhill's workers and hundreds of Festival Patrons alike.  So as it turns out, I have something to thank Winehouse for afterall - if, as is often the case with art, hatred begets beauty. . . or something like that.

Other than brief hiccups in music taste, things are basically splendid around here.  The farming season is on its way out, other than some harvesting and tomato plant pruning.  Even the cafe has been getting lazy during the week while students and professionals have finished their summers and go off to do things that are probably more important but a lot less fun than being here.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly what makes Rosenhill so nice.  It's partly the people, who basically don't come out to this countryside cafe unless they are already the kind of nice, friendly people who would enjoy a rural madhouse like this.

There's also the work in the Musteri, Swedish for Juice Press, where everyone in the greater Ekerö and Western Stockholm with an apple tree (and it feels like it is everyone with the lines we get) comes out to have their apples washed, crushed, wrapped into cloths, and squeezed into fresh juice for them to take home.  On weekdays there might be between 5 and 50 people thoughout the day coming by, and on weekends, the line does not end from 10 am to 6 pm.  Sometimes, working in the pressery is a chaotic, stressful, rushed affair with people running around shouting orders, trying not to let juice spill all over the floor and look desperately for more bottles to fill the juice into.  But when we are working well, it becomes an elegant ballroom dance, people switching partners, twirling around the pressing machine, everyone knowing the pattern of what to do and when.  At the end of a long shift, we all come out with chunks of apple pulp in our hair and splattered across our faces, our shirts smelling like cider vinigar, and breathless from hours of non-stop hectic movement.

We are allowed two days off per week, but most of us only bother to take one.  Last week on my day off, I went with my camera for a walk in the woods.  The woods around here are literally carpeted in blueberry bushes, and if you go just a bit off the trails, you will find endless berries that, even this late in the season, nobody has picked yet.  I just walked through the patches of berries, picking off handfulls at a time and eating them, and making barely a dent in their population.  It was one of those moments that hits me every so often when I'm in places like this, or back when I was in Mali, when at the same time I was both delighted that I was blessed enough to be able to be alive in the moment that I was living in, but profoundly depressed that I only had a short amount of time left here before I someday had to go back to what is commonly referred to as "the real world," where instead of frolicking in the woods, staying up late every night talking or watching movies with friends, and exploring the world at my own whim and fancy, I'll have to find somewhere to settle down and actually work towards a career.  I wish, as all little boys like me wish, that I could have those blueberry fields forever where nothing is real and there's nothing to get hung about, but since I'm not actually a little boy, or a Beatle, but a 25 year old man, I'm going to have to face the facts, go home, and find work.  These are difficult prospects to face while I'm still in rural Sweden having as much fun as I could hope for, and so I don't face them.  Instead I just sit here, write my blog, chat with German women, listen to Soundgarden, and think about a good way to end my blog entry before I go back to my caravan and practice playing my Jaw Harp.  In fact, I don't really need a good way to end this entry, so I'm just going to end it now.

WWOOFing Part II: Sweden

Nearly due west of Stockholm is a lake. It's quite a large lake, and it meanders and winds its way through the Swedish countryside like an amoeba, dispersing its mass over the flat lands with only the highest points of land rising up above the water level. One of the largest of these islands is the township of Ekero, which seems to be a pleasant, rustic and simple community. It's an easy trip to the city, the locals are friendly, and the general store has very limited weekend hours - basically a nice place. But tucked away on this island, not far off the main road and up a shaded woodsy driveway is the Rosenhill Tradgard, Cafe, och Musteri - a farm, cafe and apple juice pressing business all rolled into one delirious, and many say magical little alcove.

Rosenhill, the place that I've called my new home for the last two and a half weeks, looks a bit like Pee Wee's Playhouse might look if it were redesigned by aging hippie farmers who inherited an ancient farm and turned it into a wholesome organic retreat center - which is basically what it is. Cafe decorations include archaic farming equipment hanging from the walls and ceiling, a model human skull who always has a pair of fresh crab-apples resting in its eye sockets, ashtrays which look like the title character in The Old Man and the Sea, and a wide variety of coffee mugs from every background, from Swedish driving schools, to Marlboro, to one of my favorites which ambiguously just has a "dinners" logo on it. Most of the furniture is and looks handmade, much of the produce sold and cooked with in the cafe comes straight from the gardens, and except for the professional kitchen staff and the family who runs the place, just about everyone working here is a WWOOFer, like myself.

It didn't take long after arriving for Amanda, Matt, and myself to fall in love with the place. Actually, it really didn't even take more than a minute from walking up the front driveway. There is a cozy, home-made summer camp feel to the place, which despite never really having enjoyed summer camp, I quite liked. We took a flight from Ireland to Stockholm after having a fantastic final few Irish days in Dublin, and after a full day of travelling, we arrived at Rosenhill just in time to hear the dinner bell ringing across the fields. This turned out to be fortuitous timing, since we got to meet everyone altogether, and eat a fantastic meal of cafe leftovers all at once. Every inch of the place seemed to be drenched in simple happiness. The WWOOFers and everyone else were all smiling and joking, eager to tell us newbies just what a wonderful place we've picked for ourselves to live and work for the next...how long?...three months??...wow, you guys are lucky! Most volunteers only tend to stay a couple weeks but wish they could stay longer, or only intend to stay a couple weeks and end up putting off their departure for a day, or two, or a week, or two...

This ain't no easygoing laissez-faire hippie commune though. It could be, and we'd all be pretty happy, but we came here to work, to do something useful, and that makes us even happier, to get stuff done. Morning tasks generally have to do with cleaning the cafe and bathroom areas before we open for business. I've lucked out lately by getting animal-feeding duty - taking the leftover scraps from yesterday's food and feeding some to the chickens and ducks in their pen, and the three pigs in theirs. Nothing puts a smile on my face at 9:30 am like watching a medium-sized hen snatching up and entire foot-long hot dog and greedily running around the coop with it, trying to keep the ridiculously-sized prize for herself, or tossing a bucket of slop food into the pigpen and listening to the grunts, snorts and wheezes of three pigs going nose-deep into their meals, chowing down on every possible morsel. After morning routines, the daily jobs tend to involve weeding, planting or otherwise tending the gardens, bussing tables and dishwashing in the cafe, running the apple-press now that the apples are in season and it seems like half the households in the region have an orchard they want to drink, and other assorted maintenance tasks. Lars and Emilia seem to encourage us to find a project we like and stick to that as long as there aren't more pressing jobs at hand. Amanda's been painting the family's house, my new friend Steve's been building a solar panel, which while very powerful, is still an appreciated effort and a good model, and I've been mastering my tractor skills. Okay, mastering is probably the wrong word, since as good as I might be becoming at driving the thing, I'm pretty sure the lawn-cutter attachment I've been using it with is either haunted or just hates me. All three times I've taken it out for a spin, something has broken, so that just doing a two hour job of cutting the overgrown grassy areas has been taking me about 4 days, with most of the time spent trying to fix the beast.

But when I get too frustrated or tired from labor, and after dinner, after our nightly movies or hanging out is over, I can retire to the second most interesting house I've ever lived in - my converted Volvo city bus-turned-trailer (the most interesting being my Malian mud hut). The bus still has a ticket insertion slot and other commuter-bus standard gear, but has also been outfitted with beds, a non-working sink, a non-working fridge, non-working lights, and a set of keys which are still in the ignition but, expectedly, don't work. It does however offer a lovely easterly view of our far-northern 4:30 am sunrise, which wakes me up every morning like clockwork, and gives me the chance to look outside at the view, look at my watch, and be happy that I still get another 3 and a half hours to sleep before wakeup call. What a great invention!

Of all the things there are to love about Rosenhill, perhaps the best, the true source of magic here, is the people. There are the WWOOFers, who more or less stumbled upon this place much the way my little group did, just looking for a cool experience, and it takes a certain kind of generally interesting, adventurous, and open-minded person to want to do something like this in the first place. There are also the employees who, as some of them have told me, came here once, decided it was their favorite place in the world, and decided to get a job so they could come back every day. There are the owners, Lars and Emilia, who do a good job of making sure that we know that we are expected to work, but do everything they can to make sure that we enjoy it as much as we can. And there are the locals who come out to the cafe and to the concert/parties every Saturday night. After the relative seclusion and limited interaction with others that we had in Ireland, where Amanda, Matt, our host Flo, and I mostly just had ourselves for company outside of work, it was a godsend to arrive here to not just other WWOOFers - five to ten others at a time - but also an endless stream of local visitors and some regulars who, as would be expected at a place like this, are as friendly as can be. If you haven't gotten the point of this update yet, it's that Rosenhill might well be one of the happiest places on Earth, and I am one lucky S.O.B.

Postcards From Ireland

It took me two years of living in Mali before I even came close to running out of things to blog about, and even when I left, I would read other fellow Peace Corps Volunteers' blogs and kick myself for not having written that entry, or coming up with that joke, or publishing that aspect of Malian culture for my readers to learn about. Well, here I am with a week and a half left in Ireland, and I simply don't have the time or creative energy to keep coming up with things to write about everything interesting I've seen and done in this country. So instead, I'll send you all a series of "postcards;" little snippets of some of my favorite things about Ireland.

Irish Hospitality: Of course our host Flo was going to put us up and take care of us - that's part of the agreement when you ask for WWOOF volunteers. But in my book, when a man is raising two kids, chronically in a state of financial uncertainty, and is still happy to have us live in his house, eat his food (and we eat a lot of it), drink the plentiful bottles of wine which he brings home from events he caters (and we make quick work of those as well), give us rides, beds, and takes care of us without a harsh word, well, that's quite a man. And when we needed a place to stay in downtown Galway one weekend, we were introduced to his friend Daniel (the Jewish New Yorker and pet crow-owner of my previous entries) who has many times since put us up for a night or two and still gives us free fresh donuts at his stall in the market the next day. And just this past Sunday, Kenneth, the other farmer we work for, took us for a day trip out into the Burren, one of the most scenic areas in southwest Ireland, just for a good time. Overall, while they can be a bit reserved and shy at times (Kenneth blames this on all the Catholic guilt they're bred with), just about everyone we've met so far here is friendly, chatty, and eager to help with whatever we need. To illustrate the point, I would have to say that in our two months here, I have paid for less than half, and perhaps only a third of the alcohol I've drunk. Which brings me to my next point:

Beer: All stereotypes, no matter how false they might be, come from somewhere. The one about the Irish and their love of beer comes from inside places like the random pub co-WWOOFer Amanda and I walked into one Sunday morning while looking around town for a restroom. We saw half a dozen men chatting lazily around a cluster of empty and half-empty pints of Guinness, and immediately upon entering, the bartender began reaching for another glass, asking us, "Will ye's be having a pint then?" Yes, the Irish love their beer, and they really love their Guinness. From my own observation, I would guess that between 45 and 65 percent of the beer drunk here is Guinness, and those in the know will even be able to tell you which pubs have the best Guinness. Apparently, Guinness is a very volatile beer, and things like temperature, air pressure, and even passing over a body of water are liable to change the taste and texture of the drink. Luckily, the pub nearest where we're staying has - according to some award it one once - one of the best pints in all of Ireland. But even if it didn't, we'd have plenty of others to choose from, since as the saying goes, "You can't throw a stone in Ireland without hitting a pub."

Castles: "You can't throw a stone in Ireland without hitting a castle either."

Dogs: Okay, dogs aren't one of the major things people think of when they talk hear about Ireland (except for the Irish Gypsies in the film "Snatch" - Ya like dags?), but they've been the source of some of the most fun we have here. Everybody seems to have a dog, at least out here in the country. There's Flo's dog, Bella, who we love just as much as we think she's a complete nut job. She chases every single car except Flo's as it drives off the property, barking directly at the front right wheel while it rolls, except for sometimes when she barks at the front left wheel. Most people are cautious and drive slowly, pleading with the dog to leave their car alone, but then there are those like our neighbor who just chuckles at Bella and then barrels full speed ahead, letting Darwinism have a chance to take its course. Bella also used to steal the duck eggs from Flo's duck pond and leave the empty shells next to her bed outside. Co-WWOOFer Matt started yelling at her every time she did it and shaking the eggshell in front of her face. He did this until she started hiding every time he came home and I figured he had just convinced her that he hated her. But then one day, when we came home from town, she greeted us happily, walked in a bee-line over to her bed, picked up a duck egg which she had captured, and deposited it entirely intact at our feet, still wagging her tail. There are also Kenneth's dogs, Molly and Cara. Molly sits on peoples' feet when they pet her and gazes longingly into the living room window hoping to catch a glimpse of the cats inside, whom she apparently terrorized during their last encounter. Cara, our favorite dog in Ireland, loves to play fetch and has endless patience. The means that she'll find a stick, toy, or rock (all of her teeth are broken in half from too many rocks), lie down in a prone position wherever we happen to be working - between a row of carrots we're weeding, for example - and wait for us to throw her fetch toy. And wait. And wait. She'll wait for us, and if in the course of our weeding we move too far away from her, she'll just crawl up the row a bit closer, resume her prone position and wait some more. Finally, there are the dogs who just meet us on the street near their house as we're walking - to the park, or the lake, or anywhere else - and just start walking with us. Sometimes they want to play fetch, and we oblige, but sometimes, they just want some company on a stroll, and when we return or they get tired, they just go back home.

Peat: Man, do I wish it was cold again. When we first got here, it was in the 40s in the morning and on a nice day, it would go up the low 70s, before coming back down again in the evening. And that meant houses had to be heated, and since firewood is somewhat scarce here and the electric bill is expensive, people threw peat bricks into the stove to heat their homes. Peat, or turf, is like clay. It comes from peat bogs, where chunks of it are dug up and cut and dried into bricks, where they turn into the the nicest smelling fire fuel you can imagine. (It's what they use to roast the grains for scotch, which is where that lovely smokey flavor comes from.) The scent is like a combination of Christmas, New England, barbecues, autumn, happiness, and love. And when a whole town is cold and everyone starts burning the peat to warm up, no matter how cold it is, the peat smoke aroma wafting through the wind will put a warm smile on your face.

Gaelic: Yes, they still speak it sometimes here. In fact, there's a burgeoning movement to have it taught more in schools, and there are areas where it is how the locals converse with each other, speaking it as a first language. Sadly, I haven't really had a chance to learn a lick of it, except for a few words that get tossed around here and there, most of which I won't be able to spell, translate or explain as well as the internet would be able to. . . which I suppose is kind of a tease, but you're on the internet now anyway, and I mainly just wanted to point out the fact that the language is still very much alive, despite common belief that it's gone the way of Latin.

Well, that's enough for now. Perhaps I'll squeeze out a few more snippets of life for you folks before I leave. Thanks for reading, and if you want to send me any love or hate, or just neutral feedback to tell me you're still reading this, go ahead!

Playtime!

If you read my last blog post, you know a good deal about what I've been doing here in the rural farmlands of Western Ireland. It's often hard work, long hours, and fairly early bedtimes. But lest you think that all work and no play makes Jake a dull boy, my travel-mates and I have still been managing to have ourselves a grand old time here, trying to squeeze as much juice from the pulp of Irish culture as we can. After all, we didn't just come here to work, we came here to have the most awesomely fun time of our life!

Unfortunately, the local Sheep-Shearing Festival was too far away, and Bog Week was happening during our work schedule. We did hear on the radio that last year's sheep-shearing champion was planning to attempt to shear 800 sheep that weekend, and we wish him the best of luck on that endeavor (those famous Irish woolen sweaters don't grow on trees, you know).

Despite our despondency over missing these two epic events, we spent the first two weekends hanging out in downtown Galway to try to explore the best of what the city had to offer. The first stop, of course, is the outdoor market where our host Flo works in his falafel stall. It must be said that as humble as it may sound, Flo has operated his stall in countless festivals and catered events and has easily the most professional-looking cart in the market.

After getting our complimentary falafel sandwiches with our WWOOFer's discount, we head further into the market, which is populated by all sorts of interesting folks and friends. There's Mick, who runs a creperie and has in his past starred as the "evil white guy villain" in several low-budget Japanese action flicks. There's also Daniel, who is originally a New York Jew, but after 10 years of living at sea among Irish fisherman and another 10 years of living in Galway selling freshly made donuts in the market, and recently adopting an injured wild crow as a pet, there seems to be very little of the N'Yawker left in him. We love Daniel, first of all because he's endlessly friendly and entertaining, regaling us with his life stories I probably shouldn't submit into the public forum. He's also let us sleep over at his house a few times after late nights in town when our ears are blown out from too much live music and our coordination is off from too much Guinness.

One such night was during Galway's Latin Street Party. Apparently, to the surprise of us WWOOFers and even several locals, Galway has a Latin Quarter, and it's big enough to warrant its own cultural festival. This was no cheap pinatas and mariachi band festival either. This was three days and nights of music, salsa dancing, street performers, some of the most terrifying clowns I've ever seen, and Cuban Rum specials at every pub in the area.

As far as I was concerned, however, the highlight of this festival was a pub hosting Australian Pearl Jam, a tribute band that is, as the singer said, "Not Australian and not Pearl Jam." This wasn't just some kitschy throwback party celebrating a 20-year-old band either. Co-WWOOFer Amanda and I entered the pub to the sight of a hundred plaid-clad Irishfolk belting along to the songs and partying like it was 1991, and we happily joined the fray (easy enough for me, I knew all the words and I am almost always wearing a plaid shirt and jeans anyway). As the concert let out, and we worried that the night had hit its peak, Amanda and I went bar-hopping for a little while, trying to see what other fun we could conjure up before retiring. Our travels landed us in The Western Hotel bar, which, at shortly after midnight, is populated entirely by drunken Irish out-of-towners of the AARP-age variety. One particularly indecipherable old man came up to Amanda and I at the bar and asked us, or rather, asked Amanda, "Scooze meh, ung layd, woz ur nemme? Yoo frm roond her? Her ya liiike de pless?" The conversation went on in that manner for a few minutes, and when the tired musician in the corner - warbling out of tune to country songs lazily strummed on his guitar - picked up the tempo, Amanda was escorted to dance by her new gentleman friend. I sat back smugly and watched this happen for a song, but as the next song began, and Amanda was twirled in my direction, she snarled at me "Finishyourdrinkandlet'sgo!" before being pulled back onto the dance floor by her old and drunken lothario. The night was officially over.

There are plenty of good discoveries I've made just wandering around Galway, like kayak-water-polo matches on the river, or the plethora of random buskers. But after a couple weeks, we were feeling stir-crazy and decided to head to Cork for the weekend and see the Street Performers World Championship we had read about in the paper. Every year, in several Irish cities, the SPWC is organized and famed performers of every kind from all over the world are invited to come in and perform for thousands of people, who will in turn hopefully throw a few euro into their hat at the end of the show. We saw quite a few acts, among them beat-boxers, illusionists, acrobats, pogo-stickers, flaming teacup-balancers, weight-lifting midgets, and at least half a dozen people juggling flaming torches on unicycles insisting that what they were about to do is "one of the most astonishing and dangerous tricks you've ever witnessed." (I'm not about to discount how hard it is to balance on a single wheel and juggle fire, but with the number of people there doing it, it goes from impressive to downright tedious and predictable - "Come on, try juggling chainsaws, ya pansy!")

Among the events was also planned an attempt to break the world record for the most people gathered in one place dressed as Waldo of Where's Waldo fame (Wally, as he's known here in the UK), because apparently the World must be starting to run out of useful world records to break. Nevertheless, for 12 quid, with the proceeds going to the Africa Aware charity, thousands of people bought their official Wally costumes and shortly thereafter became very confused, since the newspaper said the event was at noon, the organizers said it was at 6, and radio said it was being canceled for rain. The result was the city of Cork being overrun that Sunday by hordes of damp, frustrated, and very easily spotted Wallys. Eventually, the misinformation was sorted out, the rain ceased, and two-and-a-half thousand of us descended on the public park for our picture to be taken. We did end up breaking the world record, and keeping our title for a full week until the SPWC and the record-breaker organizers held the same event the following weekend in the bigger and less rainy city of Dublin, where our record was shattered by nearly 1000 souls. But now, if nothing else, I have my next Halloween, Purim, and any uneventful Sunday's costumes sorted out.

After spending a month with hardly any good long solo time, I decided to take a vacation and spent last weekend on the Aran Islands, which Flo told me was the one place I must see before I left Western Ireland. I took a ferry out to the largest island, Inis Mor and got myself an overnight hostel room and a bike. The island landscape is basically an amalgamation of most of the Irish postcards you've ever seen. It's nine miles long by two across, with two main roads going up and down the length of the island. Those roads tend to be crowded by speeding tour buses, and offer a fairly restricted view of the landscape. Once on the smaller, unpaved roads, I found myself biking through endless grids of stone walls dividing the pasture lands between different farmers' fields. Cows and sheep grazed everywhere in the electric green pastures, and dotted among the new modern homes were the remains of old stone cottages and churches where the thatched roofs had long ago rotted to nothing, offering a view inside of the old fireplaces now filled with grass and thistles. On top of one of the hills is what claims to be the World's smallest church (more dubious world records) built centuries ago in memory of one of St. Patrick's disciples. Elsewhere is the island's main attraction, an ancient stone fort built right up to the edge of the cliffs which look like God had taken a chisel and split a mountain cleanly in half so that there was a straight drop from the top where we were and the bottom where the waves were smashing against the side. Since this isn't America, the Land of Liability Litigation, there was no fence or protection from the cliff edge, save a couple guards stationed way off to the side, so just about every visitor who came was able to force themselves to work up the courage to crawl up to the cliff edge and look into the abyss, over 300 feet straight down.

This weekend is taking us back the joys of simple country life. Thursday night was a bonfire for St. John's Day, where Flo and I lamented together the burning of tons of perfectly good free firewood - a bit of a scarcity in Ireland. Sunday will be what is the local Irish equivalent to the 4H Club festivals or county fairs held in the States. There will be livestock and horse competitions, vegetable judging, and probably more country fun than you can shake a stick at. It's all part of the fun, here in cloudy, wet, and lovely Ireland.

What's The Craic?

Here in Western Ireland, there are quite a few people who still speak traditional Irish, or Gaelic Even among those who don't, there's still a healthy sprinkling of terms thrown into everyday speech, not unlike fourth generation Jewish Americans like myself who still toss in a bissel Yiddishe for emphasis. One of my favorite expressions that is heard all the time here is "What/how/where's the craic?" The craic, pronounced crack, is the news/state of affairs/good times, and the uses are plentiful. So now, for this blog entry, I will regale you with the news, state of affairs, and maybe a couple of the good times being had by me and my WWOOFing buddies here on "Uncle Flo's" farm.

In general, we work five days a week, but usually only three days at Flo's garden. The reason Flo brought us in as volunteers in the first place is because he's got a head full of ideas that he wants to actualize since moving into his house in January. Some of it is pretty basic, like turning his ragtag gang of vegetable and herb beds into a proper garden, which will provide produce for his house and his falafel stand. He's got a polytunnel as well, which we've been filling to its maximum capacity so that Flo can add an enormous lettuce battalion to his "Gourmet Offensive." Ideally, we'll be creating a permaculture, where the placement and variety of what is grown works to benefit the greater good of the garden, like stacking plants on top of each other for efficient use of water runoff, or growing nitrogen fixing plants next to nitrogen users.

I've also been recruited for the odd household task such as cleaning out the old rainwater catchment tank that came with the house and had a thick murky layer of sludge on the floor that needed scooping-out with a dustpan. One of my proudest accomplishments was when Flo told me he needed to prepare tapas for a wedding that he was catering, while also filling a bakery order for 15 bags of 50 falafel balls each. In one Friday, over around 6 or 7 hours, I rolled, fried and bagged nearly 800 falafel balls, while enjoying the company of constantly skipping CDs and an anxious, angry, and foul-mouthed Dutch-Irish chef. It was a good day, until Flo admitted that if I wanted to work in his falafel stand someday, I'd have to make that same number of balls in about a third the amount of time with a broken deep-fryer, and my dreams were shattered, just like that.

We've also been working at a larger-scale organic farm, Green Earth Organics, run by Flo's friend Kenneth. Over there, we've been doing fieldwork more typical of a big commercial operation than what Flo has. Lots of weeding, sowing, more weeding, other sowing, sandbag-filling, more weeding and sowing, and soon, when the sun has come out long enough to let the plants grow to fruit (which takes a while under the fluffy, gray skies of Ireland), harvesting. Kenneth has acres and acres of fields and a half dozen polytunnels where he grows all manner of vegetables and herbs. Fruit and more specialty items are imported, and then he sells it all to try to make a living, using the same land that has been farmed by his family for three generations.

Since most of my farming experience comes from weeding my Mom's tiny garden bed in the backyard 10-15 years ago, and then going to Mali and working with my neighbors in their fields before starting my own plot of corn, I am accustomed to pretty low-tech agricultural methods. Organic farming, despite being closer to a natural way of agriculture, can't be sustainably done without tractors, fertilizer sprayers, and the tools of industry. The thing is, while I knew in my head that there are tools and machines for everything, I didn't know that this was literally true until now. To illustrate, when I was in Mali, people would often talk to me about Malian farmers versus American farmers.

"In America, they have machines to do everything!" they would say. "Do they have machines that plant the seeds too? And machines that tie up the sacks of rice for you? And that roll up the bales of straw?" I would tell them yes, assuming that it was true, but never having actually seen any of these things for myself. Then I came to Kenneth's farm, and I realized that there is, literally, a machine for everything. There's a machine you put on the back of a tractor, and you just sit on a stool, feed the machinery seeds or saplings, and it will plant them in perfect rows with even spacing. There's a tool that will grab wire ties and with a couple yanks, twist the wire up to close up the burlap sacks of potatoes, or sand or whatever. And there's a machine that also goes on the back of a tractor that cuts grass, rolls it up into massive bales, tightly wraps it in plastic to keep out mold, and deposits it upright on the ground, while you just keep your foot on the accelerator. I saw these things in action, and all I could think was "Damn, my Malian buddies would be jealous!" Of course, I have to admit that I miss my daba, a small, cubit-length scooping hoe used by Malian villagers for weeding, which frankly seems to work much better, faster, and more easily than much of what we've been doing here.

But all things considered, I'm still getting a very classic Irish farming experience here. I've weeded acres of potato and cabbage fields. I've plucked boulders from between rows of crops (the very same unpicked boulders that have built perhaps millions of Irish houses and countless miles of stone walls over the centuries). I've been taken out to the pub after work and had whichever farm-owner was my boss that day buying us all of WWOOFers rounds of Guinness (which really is better here - common wisdom dictates that Guinness changes every time it passes over water) and if we're lucky, a live "trad session" of traditional Irish reels and ballads.

It's not all fun and games though. There are days when I spend so many hours weeding stinging nettles that my hands feel like pins and needles, and when I close my eyes to sleep at night, all I see are endless tangles of leaves, vines and stems until I jolt upright in a cold sweat, half expecting to find soil on my hands and my bed sprouting scotch grass. And there's the intimidation factor, when Kenneth says that today's job is to sow a bed of onions, five sprouts across, and what seems like billions of rows long. At least in Mali, where there were no tractors or expensive fertilizers, the fields were big but at least managable and the days were hot enough that most people didn't work past lunch. Well, nobody said that this would be a total holiday, and anyway, I am enjoying both the good hard labor getting me in shape for once, and the fact that this is the closest thing to a normal full-time job I've had since Summer 2007. Speaking of which, it's past 10pm and work starts early tomorrow. This weekend I'm off to the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway. I'll fill you all in with my next blog post about all the fun we've been having, including the Street Performers World Championships, the Where's Waldo world record attempt, and Galway's Latin Street Festival. Until next time, see you next time!

Who Is Floris Wagemakers?

"Well, based on his email to us and his website, it looks like he's some guy named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland from Holland a while ago and started up his own organic, self-sustaining falafel stand to make a living," I told my Mom when my travel partners and I first got our invitation to WWOOF in Ireland.

"So you're going to be making falafel with a Dutch man named Wagemakers? This doesn't sound like it'll be a very 'Irish' experience..." my Mom responded, skeptically.

"Ach, nah! Flo? He's about as Irish as they come! A real nationalist, he is!" countered a friend of Floris a few weeks later, after I had related the skepticism which my Mom, not to mention quite a few others, had expressed when I told them what I was planning to do in Ireland. To be honest, I myself was not really sure what to expect initially. I'd seen his WWOOF profile and his website (thegourmetoffensive.com) and had communicated with him by email once, when he invited us to come down and stay with him as helpers. All I really knew about him was, well, just what I told my Mom in the first paragraph of this article. And of course, as is usually the case, once we got here, things became a lot clearer and a bit more interesting as well. So who is this guy anyway, other than Galway's premier falafel baron who decided to take in three American kids he didn't know to work in his garden for two months?

For starters, Floris Wagemakers's name isn't pronounced the way you think. Supposedly, the Dutch people, of whom Floris is natively a member, never had last names until that idealistic tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte, came through and decided that surnames were the way of the future, and so Flo's ancestors decided that since they were wagon makers by trade, than wagon makers they would be henceforth called. Hence, Wagemakers - pronounced not like makers of wages, but more similarly to the old Philadelphia department store Wanamakers.

Flo (who's out of town right now so he'll have to forgive me for any factual inaccuracies) moved to Ireland around 1998 hoping to start a new life for himself. He'd had some professional kitchen experience and knew how to make falafel and after a few years of one thing or another, he decided to fill in the falafel niche that was sorely empty in this part of Western Ireland with his very own organic falafel cart. That's how The Gourmet Offensive began operating on weekends in the Galway market.

There were a few stipulations that were very important to Flo upon opening his business. The first was that he would do this on the weekends so that he would be able to grow produce in his garden during the rest of the week. This served a few functions. One of them, as is advertised on the front of his cart, was that he could grow as much of his own produce as possible, creating a more personal connection from himself to his food to his customers. While this is mostly limited to greens that go into the salads that fill his pita sandwiches, his garden is full of other goodies, which I've been helping to farm since arriving here and which often find themselves on Flo's dinner table as well. More importantly to the garden, though, was the fact that Flo has been growing most of his whole life (growing produce, that is; not growing physically, although he is quite tall).

This ties into the other stipulation of his business. Everything is organic, produced not by the machines of modern warfare in the fight of agri-business versus nature; or the genetic manipulations of the likes of Monsanto, who strive to make tomatoes that will last in the fridge for ages at the expense of flavor and diversity. No no, Flo insists that mankind must narrow the divide between themselves and the food they grow. It's one thing for people not to grow their own food; there has always been a divide between the agrarian sectors of society and the rest of those who benefit. But in the Western world, there is a disturbing lack of interest in quality produce, and an abundance of ignorance of what it is we are actually eating. What the hell is in a commercial hot dog anyway? And how can anyone expect to be able to manipulate a plant to grow all year round or be shipped across oceans without suffering in taste and nutrition? Flo firmly believes that people maintaining a closer connection to their food, and the natural world at large, is the key to improving lives, enriching souls, and getting our society that much closer back to where he says, and I agree, it should be.

Of course, these aren't easy ideas to put into practical action. Most people appear perfectly content to eat the same half-dozen or so varieties of apple, narrow-mindedly selected for mass distribution from among literally thousands of varieties that once covered our planet, despite the fact that this means that in a world of supply and demand, all our other choices will most likely soon become extinct. The pitfall of this is not only the lack of aesthetic options, but also the creation of a monoculture, the worst possible outcome for the natural world. The Irish potato famine, for example, occurred because there was primarily one variety of potato farmed throughout the country, and when the blight came along, there were no resistant strains of the plant. The result was that all the potatoes died and the people starved, and there is no reason to think this can't happen again, despite, or because of, all the efforts to create produce that can resist disease. (There is also a lot of science that assures us that the more disease-resistant strains of produce we create, the stronger the diseases will become until - worst case scenario - we can no longer overpower Mother Nature's adaptive abilities and have a planet full of super-blights flying around destroying all our food.)

Even closer to home, reaching a mutually-respectful relationship with agriculture is a complicated issue. During dinner one night, Flo was serving a lamb stew. His 7-year-old son, Idris, asked at one point, "Flo, is this from a real lamb?" Flo offhandedly answered, "Sure it is. Like it?"

Idris's face instantly sank and tears began to well up in his eyes, as he underwent one of those epiphanies that many poor children find at some point in their youth, like when they realize the Tooth Fairy is really just a sneaky parent with some pocket change. "But I don't want to eat a lamb!" he cried.

"Aww, Jaysus! You're not eating it now?? But you always ask me for meat!" Flo and I have had a couple conversations about meat, and the idea that peoples' perceptions towards it would change if they themselves were a more active part of the "foodification" of animals. In Mali, I regularly found myself becoming personally acquainted with livestock who I would later watch go through the whole process from bloody death, cleaning, and finally to being turned into supper which the whole family would voraciously consume, knowing how much effort they put into raising this animal and keeping it happy until it was time for it to serve its purpose. As I said before, it's been ages in Western culture since agrarianism was universal, and there have always been people who did the "dirty work" of food for the other branches of society, but in today's world, where there is such a wide disconnect between us and something as basic as our food, the idea of having the casual carnivorous American businessman kill his own cow to supply his 16 ounce steak sounds...well, it might be interesting to see how that turns out.

I guess what it all comes down to is prioritizing. Flo has been doing a lot of that. He spends a good amount of time thinking and talking about the problems the world is facing: political unrest, human rights and freedoms, and the rest of the issues that plague humanity on a daily basis. But he also realizes that very few people can effectively take on more than a few of these problems, and even those who do have made little headway in the grand scheme of things. The best approach to making effective change is to choose your battles. Flo's is food. He's not a vegetarian, or an all-organic, all-the-time crusader like some folks I know, but he has his agenda, and he's taken it to the front lines. You can see him there every weekend, making falafel sandwiches with pride and determination, and selling them to all walks of life who pass through the Galway marketplace. Whether they share his agenda or just want to fill their tummies, be they young or old, tourist or local, from every denomination of humanity that comes through, Flo will sell them healthy, humanity-centered food that everyone agrees tastes damn good. The way I see it, every falafel ball sold is more ammunition spent, and every patron is another soldier enlisted in The Gourmet Offensive.

Jake Asher: Back in Action

How does one pack for five months of living in a foreign continent where temperatures will range from the low-70s to the low-30s? How does one dress accordingly for 7 hours of outdoor work, when regularly can one see half a year's worth of weather patterns over the course of half an hour? And why does one go from living the simple, free-room-and-board, yet unpaid easy life in the parents' house, to the toilsome, unfamiliar free-room-and-board, while doing unpaid labor, life in some Irish stranger's house?

Well, to quote some guy I've never heard of named Bolitho, "Adventure must start with running away from home."

Hello, family, friends, and fans, and welcome to the revival of Jake Asher's traveling blog! I've been completely flattered and delighted by the number of you who told me you enjoyed reading my blog when I kept it in Mali, and when some of you expressed hope that I would continue to write through my latest travels, I figured I would give it a try. Knowing that there is regular internet access here, at least for the first couple months, will make it easier for me not to disappoint.

I'll assume that most of you reading this now are the same folks who started reading my blog at some other point during the last three years, but for the consideration of those of you just tuning in, I'll briefly backtrack. I entered service with the Peace Corps in July 2008, being assigned to Mali, West Africa. As Peace Corps Volunteers, we are given three goals to fulfill while living in our host country: to engage in technical exchange of ideas and knowledge, to inform our hosts about our life back home and outside of our service, and to take what we've learned and bring it back home. This blog was my way of fulfilling the Third Goal, not to mention my way of keeping in touch with everyone at home en masse, and a blueprint for the memoir that I have vague pipe dreams of someday, possibly, thinking about trying to perhaps get around to writing...maybe. For more about my experiences in the Peace Corps, just read any of my earlier entries.

So why have I again picked up the quill to play cultural liaison? Well, it all began like this...

I was bored. I was, aside from a small tutoring gig, unemployed. I was developing an unhealthy habit of Facebook, streaming online movies, and going out drinking with those of my few friends who were still in Philly until 1 or 2 am. I needed to change things up. I had tried job hunting, but between the market being bad, my own standards being admittedly too high, and my own lack of personal oomph, plus the fact that I was living at my parents' house for free and relatively comfortably at that, things were going slowly. Between having no woman, no job, no dog, and only a bottle and a guitar for company, my life was beginning to resemble a country song, and while it might well have been a very good country song, it lacked the romantic quality that those Hank Williams classics portray. Some of you - well, my parents more than anyone, who I know are less than thrilled about this latest frivolous excursion of mine - might be a bit put-off by my candor. I understand that I'm not painting myself in the best light right now, but the truth is, I'm more interested in being honest and frank about my situation, because otherwise I would have to lie for my story make sense, and I'm not about to do that.

Anyway, I was looking for some direction to go in when a friend of mine suggested that I go with him to Sweden to work on an organic farm. It would be through the WWOOF program - World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms - and we would get housed and fed in exchange for labor, and hopefully a fun working experience. Those of you familiar with my previous exploits probably won't be all that surprised that I spent fairly little time thinking about this idea before giving an enthusiastic "Yes!" To be fair, I did carefully weigh all my options and talk with my parents before agreeing. I knew I would be setting myself back in the job search, depleting a good chunk of my savings account, and making myself appear to the casual observer like an aimless itinerant, travel and adventure being my narcotic high of choice. But on the other hand, I wasn't doing a whole lot better for myself back home, and a plethora of nostalgic cliches kept entering my mind: "Youth is wasted on the young"; "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"; "It is regret for the things we didn't do that is inconsolable"; and "Europe is nice this time of year!"

So we made our plans - my friend Matt, his friend Amanda whom I had not yet met save through mutual internet-investigating, and myself. We expanded our plans to include Ireland as well as Sweden, planning to spend two months in the former and three months in the latter. We scoured the WWOOF website, looking for the few organic farms who would host three volunteers for a relatively long period of time. There were a few interesting options: a Viking historical recreation site where workers dress in period garb and live on boats or in huts (I, for one, had taken my fill of living under a grass roof for a while), and an Irish goat farm which provides tourists with the experience of strolling along the nearby scenic cliffs accompanied by goats (nothing else was said about why one would want to be accompanied by goats, so we figured we would keep that option left up to the imagination).

Finally, we found our winners, or rather, they found us. For Sweden, our application was picked up by Rosenhils Tradgard, a combination operation of farm, garden, bed & breakfast, cafe, music venue, and flea market, with apparently quite a bit of experience hosting WWOOFers as well. Our Irish hosts were a bit less...conventional. According to his profile and the email he sent asking us to come out, he is a native Dutchman named Floris Wagemakers who moved to Ireland years ago and started up an organic, mostly self-sustaining falafel stand in the Galway market. He'd never hosted WWOOFers, but he had just moved into a new house and wanted some volunteers to come out and help him realize all of the many ambitions to improve the place that he had in his head.

So we had our plan, we had our assignments, and after going through the usual steps taken when one goes on a five month farming excursion in Ireland (as I asked before, how does one pack light for two seasons of volatile weather?), I made some last minute visits to friends in New York. They were were duly credulous as to what I was doing (Floris what?? Do they even eat falafel in Ireland?? What the hell is a Woof??), and predictably jealous once I explained it.

So we met at the JFK airport, myself and Amanda formally meeting for the first time, and a hop, skip, and a non-stop flight later (since people always ask: I watched "The King's Speech" in-flight...I was not too impressed), we landed in cloudy, misty, 50 degree weather we would soon learn to be typical of the region this time of year.

And here, dear readers, I will leave you. Tune in next time where I fill you in on what life is like as an organic farmer in Ireland, living "Real World"-style in a house with an old friend, a new friend, an even newer Dutch/Irish friend, a pair of youngsters who do not ever seem to run out of energy, and a duck-egg-stealing mutt. And, I answer the one question that's on everybody's mind:
Who Is Floris Wagemakers?

Until then, "Pogue mahone!"