sachawasi

our garden


Top floor of Bruno´s house...pretty nice yoga spot eh?


Dave and I at the farm:)


afternoon chilling


views of the rainforest


another rain forest view


Dave with two of the farms inhabitants:)


an example of how big the bugs are here


pinapples grow here!


community lunch time


homemade salsas and mole, courtesy of Carlos (from Columbia)


coffee beans in the grinder, fresh from the plant, before shelling


fresh picked coffee beans, shelled, and drying in the sun

Hello!
I´m really excited to be writing right now because I thought we would be out of contact for a while, seeing as we are a bit secluded right now. But, lo and behold, the town of Apolo, about a 4 hours walk from the farm where we are working, has fast internet! Pretty exciting. I only have a little time to write before getting moving back to the farm, so, here it goes. After a long 14 hour busride to Apolo from La Paz (including one flat tire and a 3 year old falling asleep on my lap) Dave and I arrived in Apolo, a small village on the boarder of Parque National Madidi, in the northern Bolivian Amazon. We came here to go volunteer on a farm we found through WOOF called Sachawasi. After a 1.5 hour taxi ride we arrived at our destination. Sachawasi is a wonderful place! We really are living in the middle of the rainforest...and I´ve got the mosquito bites to prove it. There are people from all over the world woofinf at the farm: France, Columbia, Argentina, Belgium, Mdagascar, New Zealand, and Korea, to name a few. Some people at the farm speak English, but we try to speak Spanish for most of the day, as this is the only language everyone has in common!
This is what a typical day looks like for us:
-Wake up around 7:15, when Bruno (the farm´s owner) comes into the tent area (we are camping) with his drum to wake us up
-breakfast until 8 or 8:15 (usually porridge with a api, a berry drink made out of fruit from the farm)
-8:30...self run work time, we do lots of projects, ranging from picking and grinding coffee, to working on a adobe oven project, to planting banana trees, to shelling peas or cutting up veggies for lunch
- mid day, snack time, there are tons of banana and orange trees on the property, and you can eat as many as you want!
- lunch time around 2...amazing food from the garden, cooked by victor,a crazy wonderful man from Canada who has worked as the farms cook for over 5 months
- rest of the day...chilling! We lounge in the sun and read, nap, or receive spanish lessons from one more experienced spanish speakers... sometimes we go down to the river and go swimming (the river is also where we wash ourselves...no showers here!) I do a yoga practice in the afternoon on the top floor of Brunos house, overlooking the rainforest:)
-night time: Dinner is around 7:30, and is usually prefaced by music, tea, and sometimes orange wine that Bruno makes himself. We usually head to bed around 10 to get ready for the next day!

So thats about it folks, we are meeting some wonderful people here, eating great food and really enjoying ourselves! One of the drawbacks, definatly is the bugs...but we have been really careful...I´m wearing long sleeves, long pants, and a scarf 24 7 because I don´t want to be tearing apart my skin.

Dave want´s to write a bit so I´m going to turn it over to him...

Hey gang. So two days ago, the owner of the farm, Bruno, came up to me. He asked me if I liked to eat meat. I said sure and then he motioned for me to follow him. Everyone else (I later learned) knew what was in store for me but I had no idea; I just thought the question was for almuerzo that day. So we walked over to where we had been keeping the horses, and only the brown, smaller horse was there. He told Carlos and I to help him bring the horse down onto its knees, which was a pain in the butt and I also got bucked a few times as the horse didn´t want to go down without a fight. Once the horse was down and Bruno pulled out a knife, I knew that this wasn´t going to be a ¨playing with the horse¨ session. He said a few words of prayer under his breathe before slicing the horse´s throat open as Carlos and I held the dying, bucking horse down. The noise coming out of his throat made you gringe, sounding similar to a wheezing, smoker´s cough. I kind of had left my body at that point and didn´t totally realize what was happening, more of feeling like I was going through the motions. Carlos was very much upset and left soon after the horse had died, while I stayed with Bruno to skin the animal and get the meat. Bruno had originally bought the horse in order to mate it with a donkey to get mules for carrying goods to and from town. But the horse was too small and since Bruno wanted meat, that is why the horse was taken down. Bruno would rather harvest his own meat from cows, sheep or other animals than buy it from a carneceria for ¨he doesn´t want another person killing an animal for him¨. Yet, I didn´t feel to overly horrible after the horse was dead and we were harvesting his meat. Without the lifeforce and energy of the living animal anymore, carving him up felt just like any other job. But the main point of this whole thing is if someone asks you if you eat meat, ask them why do they want to know!