Before going to the station to catch our the bus to Mendoza , I dropped by the dormitories where my co-WWOOF-er to be, Stephanie, lived.
As one of Stephanie’s friends chatted with us about our trip, it soon became clear that we running optimisitcally and blindly to an unknown province. We did not know what sort of work we would be doing, what sort of farm it would be on (“there’s a lot to do” was the only description I knew), what the town was like or who the owners of the farm were.
“The person I e-mailed with is a woman,” I offered.
“At least that’s what she says.”
At this point the friend offered to loan us her knife. (We turned it down).
A bit of background:
WWOOFing is a program where anyone can volunteer to go work on an organic farm, for any amount of time from weeks to months. It cost $40 to join the WWOOF website, which then provided me with a collection of e-mails of farms who I could ask to let me work for them. This program runs throughout the world (a friend WWOOF-ed in Hawaii for a summer) and differs by farm.
Sheep are Odd
When we arrived on the farm (after our taxi first accidentally brought us to another small organic farm), the first animal I saw was a sheep, leashed to a pole.
“Is it female?” I asked, and they laughed at me.
Between it’s legs hung something pink and huge. I thought it was an udder, turns out it was balls. (In my defense, the balls are the size of two bannas hung together, curves pointing out, not very different in size from actual sheep udders). The male sheep, one owner of the farm told us, was kept separate from the females, and only allowed to have sex with them once a year.
Part of why I’d gone to a farm was because I wanted to fill in the gap between the packaged meat and the living animal it came from, and then decide how I felt about it morally. Trying to find some framework for judging how farm animals were treated, I kept asking about how sheep lived in the wild. There are no wild sheep, Luis, the other farm owner, insisted, they were a completely domesticated species, and had adapted to be so. For instance, sheep grow coats so thick they suffer from heat if no one shears them each summer.
Still, something can be inferred about the animals that evolved into modern day sheep. For instance, according to the evolutionary psych books I was reading at the time (“The Moral Animal”), large balls imply a species in which femalse have sex with many males. Because they don’t monopolize any notable section of a female’s fertility time, the males instead try to overload her with semen, hoping theirs will beat out the sperm of the other males.
A side note for those of you who think sheep make cute little “baa-ing” sounds. Most adult sheep sound as if they’re about to throw up. We had one cantakerous sheep who would stick out her tounge and bellow blehhhhh. (I would imitate the sheep all the time. This one and I got into shouting matches). Lambs, admittedly, are cute, if very very sad to watch. Every day two or three lambs would escape the sheep pen through gaps in the walls, and go frolic in the greater farm land. Then they would realize that they forgot how to get back in, and would cry. (Baby sheep make a high, mewling “mehhh”). Even when one lamb would find a way in (and there were many), his/her friends wouldn’t follow but instead would stand on the other side, bewildered. It is as if there is something fundamentally wrong with sheep language.
Routine
The farm was owned by a husband and wife couple, Luis and Laura, who had previously worked as a kindergarten teacher, and I think, an electrician, before deciding they preferred farming. They had four children, ages 16-22, the eldest of which lived in the city while going to university. Our farm was a 40 minute walk from the town of Tunuyán, and bordered by other family farms (hence our taxi getting lost).
Stephanie and I slept in a tent we’d borrowed from her cousin (most of her family lives in Argentina) with a mat and blankets the family lent us. We soon settled into a comfortable, if not exactly thrilling, routine. Luis and Laura would wake us at 8am, and give us a breakfast of tea with bread and jam. We spent the mornings weeding, and feeding animals until 1pm or 1:30pm. Lunch was with the parents and their kids, then we’d take a siesta, because Mendoza province gets hot enough that you need to. Usually I’d read or nap until we returned to work at 5pm, and we’d keep working until it got dark, usually around 8:40pm.
A nice part was I really did feel accepted by the family. They’d joke and tease us constantly (me for my American-accented Spanish, and for getting smudged with dirt while working in the dirt) and on Thursdays after dinner we’d watch movie on TV with the family.
Our part of the farm
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