Return of the Nonnative: Jake Back in Mali

With apologies to those of you who have somehow been left out of the comings and goings of my life as of late, I assume most of you know that I've found my way back to Mali, my old country of residence from 2008 to 2010.  And for those of you who didn't know this, and are right now going through tremendous surprise and shock, well…whoops…I probably should have told you to sit down for this.  Not the kind of blast-in-the-brain you wanted to get while reading your iPad on a crowded subway on the way to work, is it?

But now that you've had a chance to recover, and for the rest of you who already knew about this, I should probably take this time to explain myself a bit.  As you may have gathered from knowing me personally, or reading my previous tactlessly-honest blog posts, I've been in a bit of a directionless state for a while.  I finished the Peace Corps in Mali in 2010, was home by October of that year, looking for jobs a few months later, with not the kind of success I had hoped for.  It was then that I was invited by an old and dear friend to come along on a WWOOFing adventure with another of his old and dear friends, who would soon become a new and dear friend of mine. (When I was much younger, people would talk about "dear friends" and I would somehow decide they meant Bambi, the only friendly deer I knew of – and now you know even more about me!)

Over the course of my hard-working, exciting, and emotionally profitable adventure, I began to realize that I needed to sit my brain down and have a talk with it.  You know, really figure out what it wanted from me, where it wanted me to go, in a way that would be productive for the safety, well-being, and longevity of the rest of me.  My Id, Ego, and Superego thought they needed a heart-to-heart with my gut feelings.  WWOOFing-buddy Matt noted at a later point that he had noticed that I was often talking about trying to figure out what's next in my life, with no satisfied answer, but that I often spoke with mirth and fondness of my time in Mali, and he had sort of assumed that at some point in the near future, I would make my way back there.  And I had planned to…at some point, though not necessarily knowing when.  But the more I began to look at the prospect of coming home from my trip and having to start from scratch with the job searches and whatnot, I realized that more than any other specific thing, I just wanted to get back into the world of international development and intrigue, and what better place than the place where it all started for me, the land I grew to love, Mali.

Of course, due credit goes to Karmen, my old site-mate, "travel-wife" (so shady characters would leave her alone on our frequent cross-country bus trips), and good friend.  She gave me the extra push of confidence I needed, not to mention advice, for how to go about applying to Peace Corps Response, a program for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to go back into service to fill immediate and specific needs by host organizations.  I sent emails to our PC/Mali Country Director, applied online (PC headquarters never actually got my application, though, but with the strength of the CD's recommendation, they figured it didn't really matter anyway), and was accepted to work for what I lovingly call the Malian House of Pancakes (MHOP - they're actually called Mali Health Organizing Project).  Washington HQ was actually somewhat vague as to the nature of the work I would be doing there – mainly, I suspect, because of a previous negative experience with a PCV which didn't work out – and with rising Tuareg Rebel tensions in the Northern desert areas of the country, and a last-minute tonsillectomy, I actually began to worry that this plan might not materialize after all.  But my departure date came, and after 10 hours of waiting in airports, 15 hours sitting in airplanes, two sunsets, five in-flight movies (I recommend "50/50" and "The Ides of March," but was disappointed by "Horrible Bosses"), I arrived back into the fresh, balmy, night air of Bamako International Airport, just like I did three and a half years ago, and I felt mighty nice!

I guess the next question is "So Jake, what are you doing in Mali this time?"  The answer is: I don't really know enough to have anything worth telling you quite yet.  I only just met with the organization on Thursday, and I don't begin work until Monday.  If you want to know what MHOP does, you should go to malihealth.org and they will tell you all about what they do, and what I will be a part of.

As for where I'm doing it, well it's a far cry from the rural village I found myself in last time – though not quite as far as I pictured it might be.  I'm in Bamako, the capital city, but not quite in the city proper.  It's more like on the outskirts, or peri-urban neighborhood, as it's been described.  It's got the business, noise, and congestion of the city but without the amenities like nice houses, or electricity or running water in every home.  I'm actually fairly happy with where I'm set up, despite being way on the other side of town from the PC bureau, transit house, and most direct and easily accessible PC contact.  In fact, the taxi ride across town to PC territory costs about half as much as a bus from Kita, one of the nearby transit houses back when I was a normal volunteer, several hours outside the city.

But this time, my walls and roofs are cement, not mud and thatched bamboo, there's electricity, I have an indoor toilet/bathroom so I can use the commode in comfort, in any weather – but no indoor running water, so I'll still have to wait for the water delivery boy to come by every day (just like the Milk Man in the olden days!).  And let's not forget the lovely sunrise view outside my window.

I'm right near a large local market, and not too far from the Westerner-friendly supermarkets and restaurants, if I feel like splurging my meager PC stipend (or I could save up for a fridge…).  And while this neighborhood, Sikoroni (or Sikoron as the locals call it, the "ni" suffix being considered diminutive), is not the quaint, slow-paced, and relaxing village Niantanso was for me for two years, I've been told that the old village mentality this area had before it was developed into a Bamako suburb is still somewhat intact.  They still have unpaved roads, the neighbors are characteristically delightful and adorable, there's a few good climbing hills nearby for great vistas of the city, and best of all, they speak Bambara!  Not Niantanso's bee-stung-tounge dialect of Bambara, locally called Maningakhan, where every name sounds like something somebody belched (M'badjala, Djadjei) and even Malians from other parts of the country can't understand a word the old ladies say, but real, straightforward, simple Bambara, a language as easy to say and learn as its own names (Fanta, Mamadou).  And while most of the people I knew when I was still in Mali are gone, with a few fantastic exceptions, that just means there are that many more new people to meet.

So the lesson for the day is that while things are not quite as I thought they would be, that's part of the fun of living and working in Mali, and knowing that every day will be rife with strange and novel experiences, waiting to be enjoyed.  And for now, I feel like I'm on something resembling the right track.  Of course, work doesn't start until Monday...

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.