WWOOF WWOOF!

Scarab Hill Farms aka the Green Co. aka Janet's farm kitchen was infinitely more engaging and satisfying than olive branches and Stephen Covey. The farm owner, recently widowed and raising two teenaged boys has carved out a little eco paradise with organic veggie patches, houses renovated from tool sheds, collected rain water used for everything from drinking to washing to watering, and a restaurant built out of sand bags and featuring produce from the yard and meat from around the corner. I spent a lot of time cutting and sewing sand bags from burlap for the new wall to the restaurant. The property is perched on sand dunes making building materials cheap and plentiful, plus sand is a great insulator and damp can only travel down the sand bag walls, but not up them. I also baked bread, made yogurt and jam (and jam-making deserves its own post, really), packaged lettuce for sale, pickled onions and served and messed around in the restuarant kitchen.

The owner was as crazy as you would have to be to live in a tool shed, wash in brown water, and have the most alternative lifestyle dreamable. When my favorite staff member told me he was Malawian, I greeted him in Chichewa, the national langauge and he giggled uncontrallably. When I learned that he was from the area I spent quite a bit of time in a few years ago, I greeted him in the minority langauge and he laughed even harder. The only female staff member was rather hostile toward me, to an extent I am sure I could not have provoked if I tried. One afternoon, she threw a poisonous snake at me. She thought it was dead but her genius boyfriend had tried to kill it my smashing the body, rather than the head, with a stick and when it landed on my sewing, writhed around in slow motion, opening and closing it's jaw. I flung it back toward her, inadvertantly leaving a blood stain on a cushion of a restuarant chair, and the Malawian beat in its skull until death was certain. I found the gesture of snake-throwing rather suspicious and a Mosotho friend confirmed that "she tried to curse you and it may work."

I slept in the cheese making room of the restuarant. The walls don't close all the way around, and while my sleeping bag kept me warm from the howling winds, the sound they made rattling the canvas and burlap sections of wall would startle me awake and keep me up for a long while. The cat took to sleeping on my stomach, and then inched her way each night closer and closer to my throat until I realized I was stuck with her. I didn't mind until she brought me a dead rat in the night and I spent the early hours of the morning scrubbing innards off the floor with my head lamp on. There were some lunatic dogs about, and a frog who lived in the shower (a frog whom I would be perfectly enchanted to see on a hike in the woods, but made me quite squeamish jumping at me naked), and otherwise not too many souls about, quite an odd feeling compared to my usual toddler-covered state.