Meat Tooth

"Time for the meatstick,
Bury the meatstick,
Take out the meastick time
Whoa, shocks my brain
Whoa shocks my brain."

Phish's 'Meatstick' has been the soundtrack of my life on the farm for the past two weeks.

The most eventful of mornings found a team of 6 of us trying to move the chicken tractor that houses three guinea hens that are slowly, but surely cultivating the land for us. We left maybe two inches of space between the ground and a rock and sure enough- a guinea fowl escaped. Did you know that they can fly well above your head? Well, they can. And catching them was a mad dash of tricks and finesse, or lack thereof, and the most epic of fails was when Jim jumped to grab the guinea fowl and face planted into the brush of the jungle. Turns out that guinea fowl actually like going 'home' back to their chicken tractors, so the guinea fowl was lured back to be with his two friends. Thank God, because if I was partly responsible for losing a guinea fowl, I would have been in big trouble.

A new tradition has been creating marking every Saturday as 'Carne Extravaganza Sabado.' Every Saturday at 1:00 AM the town of Balgues slaughters a cow; the process takes until about 5:00 AM. All of the farm volunteers' meat tooths spoke up and strongly voiced that we wanted some of this meat. So, that's what we did. We purchased the freshest meat I have ever purchased in my life and made hamburgers with it. We made our own buns from scratch and my role in all of this was taking the juiciest parts of the cow through a hand-operated meat grinder; splattering my clothes (that were of course not hand washed after this kind massacre) and the greater part of our kitchen in Sangre (Blood). It was the most connected I've been with my food and one of the most momentous moments in my life. And I've never had a hamburger taste so good (of course, it was 10 PM by the time they were cooked and ready to be eaten).

The tradition, as with all successful traditions, was carried on the following week to celebrate Mitch's birthday. Mitch is the Volunteer Coordinator on the farm and his life mantra he tells all new volunteers is that 'if you only do one thing on this farm, feed the Pelibuey (the goats). Seriously, all I want is pelibuey meat, that's the only thing I want in this life. Feed the damn Pelibuey, more than they want, more than you think they should eat. Just do it.'

So I kept the only secret I have ever kept in my 21 years of life and did not tell Mitch that we were getting him a Pelibuey to roast for his Cumpleanos dinner. Our pelibuey are not fat enough to eat just yet, so two girls on the farm volunteered to spend a day riding a bus with a pelibuey that traveled two hours across the island to get. It was well worth it. Pelibuey meat is delectable.

Mitch had left the Isla de Omatepe to get his visa and passport in order, so he was truly surprised to come back to the farm and have a big Pelibuey Birthday Celebration awaiting his return. One of the owners of a nearby 'Eco-hostel-farm' also made Mitch a leather case for his Kindle, which is his most beloved item. So a successful birthday it was indeed.

One of the funnier fails earlier last week was on my night to make dinner. I was making a salad dressing and tossed in some oil and what I thought to be vinegar, as it was a liquid in a vinegar jar. I kept tasting the salad and it tasted more and more oily, so I kept adding more vinegar. We found out too late that the bottle labeled 'Vinegar' sure enough was, you guessed it, OIL. Many jokes on how the botched salad tasted like Chinese take out and how we were all sweating oil of course ensued, and the following day we had a group meeting about being aware of the mislabeled jars and making sure we labeled the mis-marked oils, seasonings and other unidentifiable things. I definitely learn by making mistakes, unfortunately this one was at the expense of the other 15 volunteers that had to suffer through this oily mess of salad dinner- Sorry, again for the hundredth time to all who obliged and tried bites of this salad.

The Two Weeks of Meat could not be complete with baking birthday cakes- which we did, a lot.
We had Margele, the most skilled cake baker and sweet treat instigator in Balgues teach a lesson on cake and pasteles making. We had another birthday on the farm, too, and I think we ended up baking and eating:
carrot cake, pineapple cake, coconut cake, a three layer cake of all three, coffee/ginger/chocolate cake, and more tiny, sweet biscuits with filling and without than we could count. The best reward to a hard day's work on the farm is cake.

Daily farm work has been lots of manual labor planting with a tool known as the 'mechana' that more or less is like digging with a spoon. But the masons on the farm seem to be able to dig all the way to China with it, so there's that. More experiences of an American, White girl looking like an idiot; I welcome it. I got to learn how to use a level to measure distances between tree seedlings making sure that the ground is as level as it can be on contour lines. Unfortunately, keeping the plants level translated into planting near, by, and on muchas muchas rocas; it would be a very cruel joke to send me a Pet Rock after this week of planting. I helped termite-proof Ilona's solar water heater project and will be painting the entire thing black today (looking more and more like a coffin).