We Love Canadians

We have been enjoying apartment living on our own since our Canadian house mates, Peter and Kristine, left for Canada for a month. For those of you who don't know, we didn't end up roughing it in the Nicaragua house for our entire stay. We lasted about a month. When Matt invited us to come volunteer at the farm, he said the only housing available was the Nic house. When Chris told me that we would be living in a place without electricity, running water or toilet - I started crying. My goal was for my life to be LESS crazy. After the initial shock, I made a deal with Chris: I would move to the farm with him if he agreed to come with me to the composting toilet in the middle of the night - whenever I needed to go. (This tends to be a nightly occurrence, unfortunately....and sometimes I have to go twice in one night.) Chris has kept his end of the deal and he even chases away the cockroaches before I go into the toilet. I am very thankful for that.

It was an interesting experience living in the Nic house, but around mid-July we noticed an extra room in Peter and Kristine's apartment and we brazenly asked them if we could move in. That was a moment that I appreciated Chris' lack of subtlety:

"We noticed an empty room in your apartment. Can we move in?"

They said yes and since then we have been living in relative climate-controlled luxury. Although it was fun waking up in the middle of the night to stumble along outside in a sleep-induced haze from the Nic house to the composting toilet, those days are past.

Speaking of the composting toilet, since Peter from Canada is the designated "peak knocker" in this building, and he's been gone for a month, the peak is starting to get a little too close for comfort. For those of you not familiar with composting toilet lingo, I'll explain. When people defecate into the composting toilet, the waste goes into a chamber directly below. As more and more waste piles up, the mound starts to form a peak, like a pyramid shape. When the peak of poop starts to get too high someone has to take a stick and knock it down so that the waste forms a more even surface at the bottom, so that there is room for more crap. Once the peak has been knocked quite a few times and the chamber is completely full, someone has to open up the pit and remove all the feces. Fortunately, this is only done a few times a year - and it hasn't been done while we've been here (although it would have made for some humorous blog material). I think the Farm waits to assign that task to some unsuspecting, enthusiastic group of spring-break college volunteers looking to change the world.

So other than the growing peak, things have been quiet around here without the Canadians. We have redecorated (i.e. swept the floor) and enjoyed having a little more space to ourselves. But we do miss them and our quality time together: long discussions about God, judgement, hell, cats, scripture, politics, bear attacks and taking shots of Chris' homemade kombucha. In Peter's absence, we keep all of his phrases alive. These are expressions of excitement said in a sort of monotone manner, kind of like the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

1. This is pretty much the best ever.

2. This is for real.

3. You talked me into it.

4. This is really happening.

5. This is unbelievable.

Before leaving, Peter's big project was selling frozen, chocolate-covered bananas at a movie night in downtown Waco. The bananas were fair-trade bananas, and selling them was a way of trying to educate people about fair-trade and the abuse going on in this industry. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check the farm website or I can send you one of Peter's pamphlets.

The Turkeys are Here!

This is day 5 and the turkeys are still officially cute. People here on the farm were saying that the turkeys would turn ugly after the third day, but I have been checking daily, and they are still not ugly.

About 100 tiny turkey poults were donated to the Farm by a large turkey factory. They arrived when they were one day old - cute, fuzzy little peepers. They are kept in a special coop with temperature controlled lighting to keep them warm as they are extremely fragile. These turkeys have been commercially bred to be exactly the same, and as a result they are so genetically similar that they are very susceptible to all kinds of illnesses. I am also told that they are unbelievably dumb - bred not even to be able to reproduce on their own! So, although they are not a heritage heirloom variety of naturally bred turkey, they will be raised humanely: without antibiotics or hormones and allowed to roam freely.

Back when I was a single gal living in the city, one of my roommates came home with another bizarre tale of daily life in New York City. She had seen a group of people protesting inhumane treatment of poultry outside of a KFC in Greenwich Village. She was baffled at the sight and wondered how people could have such misplaced passion. Who cares about chickens when there is terrible suffering of human beings all over the world!

Recently during our morning devotional time we were asked to step outside and find something to look at and practice some meditation. I had arrived to the devotion time late and was more focused on eating toast than I was at trying to meditate. Thankfully, Samson from Ghana was in a contemplative frame of mind and said something that really resonated with me. He was looking out over the farm and the creation story from the Bible came to his mind. He noted that the Earth and all of creation was made before man and that nature had an established working order to it apart from man. In the end, man was created to fit into that natural order. He went on to observe that because of the corrupt human heart, man has tried to make creation work according to his own order.

So, maybe cruelty towards poultry is not that big of a deal compared to all the insanity that is going on in the world, but at the heart of the industrial food model is the abuse of the natural order for profit. Birds are living creatures and were never meant to be pumped full of hormones and drugs, bred to have unnaturally gargantuan breasts, and left packed in cages, unable to walk around. As man continues to use nature for the accumulation of wealth instead of respecting the limitations of the natural order, we, and future generations reap the effects of the depletion of our natural resources, global warming, disease and destruction. I'm reminded of the scene in "An Inconvenient Truth" where Al Gore shows a picture of a scale with the Earth on one side and bars of gold on the other.... Hmm.... Which one should we choose?

Here is a Wendell Berry quote from a book I am reading:

"I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at the store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and reuse its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people."

A Celebration of Growth

Last Saturday the Farm hosted "A Celebration of Growth", a fundraiser dinner cooked by the one and only Chris Becker. The fundraiser drew many new supporters to the farm and the proceeds benefited the urban gardening programs that the farm is spearheading in Waco.

It was a four course dinner and the menu included:

Local tomato, cucumber and basil salad
with Moroccan extra virgin olive oil, '07 vintage

Handmade zucchini panzotti
with golden butter, meyer lemon preserve and pecorino secco

Grass-finished World Hunger Relief beef
with red potatoes and liana beans

Spiced poached pear
with homemade vanilla ice cream

Chris was in his element and we watched in amazement as he cooked every dish and timed every course to perfection. We now know why he spent all those weeks toiling in the barn to refurbish the commercial stove known as "Lazarus". Rusty, gross and non-functional, Lazarus was saved from the scrap heap by the Farm and sat in the barn until Chris arrived as a new volunteer. Given up on by so many others, only Chris was able to restore the stove to working order and wield it to create an unbelievable evening of food.

And with the interns and volunteers receiving 20 minutes of waiter training, we had some pretty decent service to go along with the food. Only one steak was dropped. And luckily it was dropped on the floor and not on a donor. The only other crisis was that the ice was melting too quickly in the iced tea. So all in all - a very successful night.

The best part about it was the leftovers. Yes, we enjoy the all vegetarian meals that are served on the farm, but I think we all savored the luxury of the steak and sparkling water at the after-party meal...and the after-after-party meal.

There was a lot of care, skill and love that went into the meal. Chris' cooking ability and organization is obvious, but probably most of the people eating the meal did not know the persistence and patience it took to clean and repair Lazarus. Not to mention the labor and sweat poured into growing the produce in the garden or raising a grass-finished cow. The next time you scoff at the price of a piece of local, organic food, take my advice to get to know an organic farmer and experience what they do. I guarantee, you'll never scoff again and you'll gladly plunk down the money for something you KNOW is good.