Now that I know this is for my blog, I feel I should be more descriptive. What is the farm like? Well, it is smaller in scale than I anticipated. Barely a half-acre of cultivated land, including a large garden growing row upon row of the same veggies, scattered fruit trees and an assortment of housing structures. Fortunately, some of the fruit trees are bearing, namely an overladen peach tree and a few mulberry trees. The fresh fruit helped to offset my hunger pains between organized meals. The buildings are clearly works of a novice hand, most of them constructed by unskilled volunteers such as myself over the last several years. The roofs are plastic siding, artfully concealed beneath the drapery of saffron-colored saris. All except the kitchen that is, where the clear plastic reveals all manner of insects scurrying along above your head (and food).
We are living in an “ecohouse,” a rather unique construction of mud and wood hoisted four meters off the ground on palm wood stilts. The first night here, a week ago now, a fantastic storm washed out part of the mud walls, bathing our backpacks in mud and water. In the wind, the whole little house sways like mad, flexible by design on its palm stilts. Last night brought another rain shower and all day today the wind has howled through the cracks, but the sway has become second nature to me now and today I found it lulled me to sleep.
The whole park is home to an undetermined number of Hare Krishna followers, the girls and women in white cotton saris and the men in saffron kurtas and dhotis. All of the Hare Krishnas have Indian names, the food is all vegetarian and cooked in Indian style (albeit without any of the spice), and the meeting halls and public places are all decorated with stenciled images of the holy Indian cow. For the first few days, I sometimes awoke confused, thinking I was in India again as someone’s lyrical Sanskrit chant floated out to me on the breeze. But no, this is certainly not India; although that distant country is so highly revered here that I am loathe to attempt to explain my own, more mundane experience there. To the Hare Krishnas here in this remote Argentine town, India is a land of perfect spirituality, full of only temples and swamis and lifelong yogis, where everyone is on a constant search for samathi (transcendence) and no one feels their hunger or poverty or the injustice of corruption or the ineffectual nature of the crippled government system. How to communicate the rivers of human feces flowing freely in the slums? The mile upon heart-rending mile of sunken-eyed children so impoverished they have ceased to dream of school? The fourteen-year backlog of the judicial system that lets rapists, murders, and thieves walk free and unmolested through the same village as their victims for over a decade?
But they are persistent and determinedly naive in their dedication to this faith, this way of life. Nearly once a day, I am engaged in a lengthy conversation about “the philosophy.” I have noticed that those volunteers who are less adept at Spanish are generally ignored, since most of the initiates do not speak any English. They are all eager to learn, although I feel conflicted about teaching them if their only goal is conversion. Regardless, I am not teaching here. Upon arrival, the Hare Krishnas seemed eager to have a teacher, but they are set in their ways and seem resentful of any personal contributions by the volunteers. I feel like nothing more than a body, quite similar to my feelings at Trader Joe’s. I feel the volunteers here are seen only as disposable, eager manual labor that should not step out of place and who should remain distinctly separate; it is hard to believe that we are actually paying a hefty fee for the privilege of being here. I so badly wanted to be a part of a community, to contribute my unique set of skills and knowledge to the betterment of the whole, but always the answer here is NO: no cooking, no English classes, no art, nothing out of the ordinary. I feel so frustrated and unappreciated.
What’s more, I have been sick for three days now. Another mild case of dysentery, I believe. Again, I think the culprit is the unclean state of the kitchen here. Helping prepare food this week, I observed countless flies, left to swarm over the cooked food sometimes for hours before it was served. There are also cockroaches, fleas from the various animals on the property, and a general lack of soap for proper sanitation. This too, brings back images of India, but I don’t think it’s any excuse. Five volunteers have been felled by this sickness in the short week we’ve been here. Those aren’t great odds. I am aching to leave. I don’t like it here and that conviction only gets stronger every day. But now I am too weak to travel, and I have to eat more of the food until I can get my strength back. I have been working on a small bowl of rice for over an hour now.
But Patrick seems reluctant to leave. Despite the inconveniences, he is in love with this stark, empty countryside, with the novelty of performing manual labor everyday, with the quaint charm of the thousands of fireflies that swarm the garden at night. It is beautiful at night, with the moon hanging huge and milky white and those thousand blinking lights among the vegetables. But it is not enough for me. I hate feeling so underutilized when I can see easy ways to improve many things here. I hate the banality of the daily labor, always the same and always hot, hard work. I hate the attitude of the Hare Krishnas towards outsiders, even if they seem peaceful and loving to one another. I hate the isolation, the lack of sanitation, and the idea that I am paying for it all. With the little amount of time I have left in Argentina, I want to find a better place. I need to.
No comments:
Post a Comment