LumberJack and LumberJill

Sorry to disapoint with such a long delay. However, don´t miss the post below, as it is from La Paz and I just now posted it.


The day to day

We have just finished our second week in Tarija, 3 hours from the Argentine border. The town is set in a valley that reminds me a bit of California. The climate is moderate, and the area grows grapes. The landscape is desert with mountains in the far distance, and the farm is a slight walk from a river.

Don´t forget that we are in mid-winter. We start work a 7 am, and while the nights have averaged -4 C (24.8 F), 7 am is frosty. We eat a load of toast with homemade orange marmalade every morning at 8, work again from 9 to 12. Then we eat an enormous Bolivian lunch, work lethargically and over fed from 2 to 5, then study spanish and cook dinner. Tired by 8 and in bed by 9. Every day save Sunday.

I didn´t like Farmer John, the owner, much at first. He´s a Brit who has been in Bolivia for 30 years. Thus he has developed a very South American opinion of women as house-slaves. The first two days he had me sewing green house tarp material the ENTIRE day, while Andy did the physical labor. I got so annoyed at this and demanded that I do the same work as Andy. I am not good at sitting and sewing all day just because I´m a lady. Andy is better at sewing than I am anyway.

The physical labor that we were both now assigned was the job of lumberjack/jill. Over the course of two weeks we successfully cleared with machettes and hauled away the brush of a 60 by 30 meter plot of overgrowth. Now John has an entire new plot to farm, and we will probably be doing something similarly monotonous and hard for our last week here. We are pretty buff now.

Back to John, however, once I was doing the same work as Andy, John would address us as ¨Andy¨as if he was doing all the work. Let me give an example:

Lauren and Andy, in a field clearing land with machettes and an ax. About 10 trees have been fallen. Enter John, stage left, speaking in a British accent.

John: Ah Andy, the Ax- man!

Andy: Actually, Lauren chopped all those trees down with the ax yesterday...

John: Uh, nooooo... (chuckles and walks away)

Lauren rolls her eyes as John gives new orders for the day.

You can imagine the dynamic. However, things have improved and I have realized that John simply doesn´t know how to interact with women until they prove they know history or tennis. I think he respects me a bit more because I could explain the history of American independence and how a tie-breaker is played in tennis.


Rita, John´s wife is another story. We see John for about 10 minutes during breakfast, and sometimes for lunch. Other than that he is a work-aholic off the farm for an agricultural business association that specializes in niche market products such as asparagus, red chard, kholrobi, cherry tomatoes and so forth. Right now the farm is nearly out of production, and he only works on site on Saturdays. Still, he is never around and we deal with Rita for the most part. She is Romanian and likewise has been in Bolivia for 30 years. She is a nice but extremely neurotic house wife that does nothing but tell us stories of drama and her bad marriage and so forth. Good Spanish practice, but I´m about to bust a nerve with all of her inappropriate stories and particularities. Nevertheless, she takes car of us as if we were her kids and won´t even let us wash a dish. Therefore, we cook our own dinners to get some space, even though she would be happy to cook all of our meals for us. Another strange dynamic. Oh god, I´m turning into her with this gossip about her! Excuse me, but we have been isolation with her for two weeks.

The Farm

The farm is not organic. This is my main qualm. Unfortunately it is also non productive during th winter season so we hardly set food in the fields. John spot sprays with pesticides or fungicides when there are pest problems, he uses synthetic fertilizers on top of his compost, and he does not intercrop. He is a business farm, and has nothing to do with the organic community that the organization WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms - through which we find these work-trade farm gigs) is supposed to support. I believe he heard about the free labor through a grape growing friend and signed up as a WWOOF farm while ignoring the organic part.

WWOOF in the USA is fairly true to the goal of sustainable farming. WWOOF farms do not have to be certified organic, but in the States they are generally operating beyond official organic standards anyway. Organic certification is quite expensive and many small farmers cannot afford the paperwork. South American agriculture proposes yet another complication: the global export market. As an organic farmer in California, there is little economic incentive in terms of government subsidies, to grow sustainably. Most organic farmers convert for ideological reasons of health, soil preservation and opposition to the excessive use of petrolium and chemicals in industrial agriculture. However, there is a local niche market in which to sell these more expensive organic crops. In South America, there is no such local niche market. All organic certificatied products are for export. Thus for organic certification to be financially feasable for a South American farmer, they must be part of a large organic or fair trade association that will gaurantee sale of their crop in North America or Europe. These crops generally include cacoa (for chocolate) and coffee beans. Further, these farms are organic, but still monoculture and farm far from sustainably if taken into account the ammount of transportation required for export. Yet without these export organizations, it is simply not viable to farm alternatively in the South. One must produce crops for local markets, and this is done with chemicals.

The result for a program like WWOOF in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia is that the farmers are generally gringos that fall into several categories: they either have farms for their own hobby and consumption, thus operate ideologically but lack the financial means to operate on a level of sustainablilty attainable in the US. Otherwise, WWOOF farmers are not so organic production farms that hear about free labor through the gringo-farmer network. The third and most bizzare category to me is that of the ´agro-eco-tourism´organization that somehow finds it´s way onto WWOOF. I find these organizations somewhat exploitative and under the umbrella of rural development through tourism economy (i.e. bring money to the poor countryside via touristic amenities). A few of these organizations offer treks and a really ´natural´experience all inclusive with yoga, spa treatments and ´pay by the thousands to volunteer´ programs. This is not exactly the exchange of information about growing that I´m looking for. The situation is unfornunate for us because we are here to learn different forms of sustainable agriculture. It´s a pity that we can´t work with locals... they don´t have internet access and I doubt they would know what to do with a bunch of gringo transient-hippies traveling around doing work for free and looking for sustainable farming practices to take home. I suppose that´s why the organizations that set such programs up charge by the thousand. They take care of gringo needs while the gringos can pretend to help locals. We, on the other hand, don´t know what we´ve signed up for until we´ve arrived and started work. At least it is always a break in spending our budget, as we are basically living for free right now. And after nearly 5 months of hostals and street food, it is a luxury to have our own room, kitchen and bathroom. We are finally feeling healthy and without parasites (as I know is the most interesting subject of this blog). Further, we´ve got time to try different things out, which is what a lot of travelers don´t have.

Fear not, however, because we will be returning sooner than later. We are travel tired and will be WWOOFing and staying with Andy´s family for the remainer of our trip. We didn´t ¨tour¨much, but we did our fair share with Machu Pichu and we are done with being tourists (as much as we can be). We want to stay long term in our destinations from now on. My Dad and Lori will be visiting Oct 10-19, and we have decided to shorten the trip by a few weeks and leave about a week after them. We should be back before Halloween, but we have not yet booked the flight. See you all for the holidays, and HAPPY 4TH OF JULY! I hope everyone got their fair share of budwiser on the beach. What I wouldn´t give for a stars and stripes jump suit, some fireworks and a beer cozy out in the desert right about now... I miss you USA. More than the USA, I miss family and friends. Hope all is well. Send e mails and comments!

Love,
Lauren