Practice Tour

So, I gave my first practice tour with Ivy, another volunteer, today. The education volunteers are getting geared up for the real stuff, which starts next week. The tour I gave is our most basic tour. A video, brief discussion, and tour of the farm. The objectives: to describe the work, mission, and history of Heifer, to explain where food comes from, to describe several sustainable agricultural practices used by Heifer in developing communities, and to identify the benefits of livestock. Most of them are fulfilled during the visit to the different Global Village sites.

All in all, Ivy and I did well. The rest of the education vols pretended to be our audience. Once you really get the ball rolling, things comes easily. As guides, our job is to "facilitate", a very good teaching technique in which you simply ask a lot of questions and get the students to find the answers themselves. For example, say I take a group to the Thailand house.

A kid asks, "Why aren't there any toilets? Where do they poop? Hee hee?"

"Well, little Timmy, where do YOU think this Thai family would use the bathroom?"

"Outside!" says Timmy.

"Probably so. But why don't they have a toilet?"

"I don't know they should get one AHHHH!"

"Do you see any plumbing in this house, Timmy? Or pipes? Or electricity?"

Then, through Timmy's answers, the group will discover that this Thai family cannot afford plumbing, or lives too far out in the country, or lacks access to the government services that we Americans enjoy. And they figured it out all by themselves.

Anyway, the tour was enjoyable, and I think it'll be even more enjoyable when I have a real group. Plus, it was exhausting. 2.5 hours of talking! Whew! Too bad our other programs usually last 5-7 hours, if not 24 hours. Here we go Heifer!

Daddy Goat Horny, Michael

Ah ha! It's breeding time! And I thought people were crazy about sex. We at least mask our rotten intentions with manners and romantic poetry and such. These livestock animals go straight for the "gold", if you will.

For the past week, we have been giving our goats and sheep hormone injections, so that the females get prepped for some conception, and the males go ape-shit with horniness. It's a pretty strange system. We number some girl goats "ones" for example, and they get put in a pen with the buck goat "ones". The reason, if you're curious, because it's not the most natural practice in the world, shooting your animals up with hormones, that we do this is because we are trying to control the time at which our animals breed. We have a birthing program that women participate in, in which they assist a female goat/sheep in the birthing process and help care for the newborn. I imagine there is a deep connection that occurs between the females. Perhaps. I'm not really sure. In any case, we need our animals giving birth at the right time fore the program.

Anyway, right now, we've got a handful of goats (female) and buck goats (male), and sheep and rams locked up behind the barn. The females and males are still separated, but their pins are adjacent to one another, to get them thinking about some sexy time. I imagine that there's a little bit of flirting and passing notes going on right now.

But in seriousness, the buck goats are freaking nuts. All they do is fight one another and try desperately to break into the girl goats' pin. Quentin Tarantino, our biggest buck goat, just stares at them and makes menacing grunts, occasionally knocking his head into the wall. It's kind of horrifying. Funny how sexual desire looks a lot like a murder threat with these guys. Meanwhile, Rumple Stillskin, our smallest buck goat, has decided that he can't wait until mating day. So, he has taken his sexual frustration out on our third buck goat, Henry. Poor, poor Henry. Henry has spent the last week sticking his butt resolutely in a corner, trying to protect his innocence from Rumple's advances. A few nights ago, he actually broke down the wall of the pin trying to escape Rumple. Meanwhile, Quentin broke down the other wall of the pin trying to get the ladies. Come on buck goats!

Also, the buck goats urinate on their own beards. On purpose.

Don't get me started on the poor lady goats and lady sheep. I think they just want mating day to be over. It's certainly no picnic for them.

So, welcome to the Animal Kingdom, I guess. I'm glad evolution gave us humans wine and music and dating. Otherwise, I might just cop out of the whole breeding experience.

Birth Announcement!

I am happy to announce the birth of a new calf! Last night, one of our beef cows by the name of Stephanie gave birth to a little boy calf. You would have thought that we would have heard a cow giving birth right outside out house, but Rufus went unnoticed until after chores this morning. He is huge. Probably about the size of a labrador. And very woolly. I did not know that cows could be woolly. My image of a cowhide has always been something smooth and only slightly hairy. We have some cows that are downright shaggy, and it appears that Rufus is one of these. He has a full body of tan cowl curls, and a big white stripe down his mid-drift. He is amazingly cute. Very awkward, with long gangly legs, a very pink nose, and a butt that sticks up about half a foot over his head. Go figure.

So, tonight, the volunteers will throw a party in honor of Rufus. Stephanie appears to be a happy mother. When we left them, she was giving her baby a hearty tongue bath. Unfortunately, we won't be milking Stephanie, so no extra milk for the starving volunteers. Anyway, be sure to make a toast to Rufus at least once today! Bon anniversaire!

My address is Sam Hedges, Overlook Farm, 216 Wachusett St., Rutland, MA, 01543.

Send me anything!

Also, went to Boston yesterday and toured the Harpoon Brewery, a micro-brewery based in Boston. Good tour, lots of delicious beer tasting. Let me do some quick advertising on behalf of Harpoon. Try their Saison Royale. It's part of their Leviathan series, and it won't be around forever. It's more than good. Maybe the best beer I've ever had. Seriously. So delicious and flavorful. Saison Royale, Leviathan, Harpoon.

Write Me!

My Schedule Today

Today was an exceptionally good day, so I thought I'd share it with you. Maybe it'll give you insight into life on the farm.

7:00 a.m- Woke up and made breakfast. A tasty mix of flax and Harvest Wheat with some blueberries that my roommate Ben picked. And coffee, of course. If I'd been lucky, I would have had some milk from our dairy cow, Mabel.

8:00 a.m.- Chores and check-in. The staff met in the barn to check on weather and what the schedule was today. Last day of full orientation for all the volunteers. Good, sunny weather, in the high 70's.

8:15 a.m.- CHORES! One of the best parts of the day. Before we did any chores, however, we had to "run the goats". This fun little activity involves leading the goats out to pasture in the morning, and back to the barn in the afternoon. It's part of the rotational grazing process. One person leads them with a bucket of "textra", the goat form of crack, and everyone else kind of runs with them to the pen. I had the crack, and I ran them out to pasture, where, instead of going into the fencing, they ran into the nearby woods and started going to town on the undergrowth. It took ten people and fifteen minutes to wrestle all of them back into the pen.

Then, we had to do the same for the sheep. And I helped feed the guinea hog, the buck goats, and the pigs. It involved carrying to buckets full of water a ways. Ouch. End of Chores.

9:30 a.m.- A little free time! I went to our two acre garden, where we're doing a lot of harvesting, and helped pick green beans and snow peas.

10 a.m.- A little orientation in the farm's kitchen, where all the food for guests is prepared. Liz the kitchen lady taught us how to pickle/can vegetables, a useful skill indeed.

11 a.m.- Back to the garden! This time, Maggie and I picked tomatoes. There were about three different varieties. To pass the time, we talked about Islam, the Middle East, and the U.N. She's a very interesting person to talk to. And finally, we picked raspberries! So delicious. But picking raspberries, a pain in the butt. The plants are huge, close together, and prickly, so you really have to work to find the bastards. In the end, we had a good sized wheelbarrow full of produce. In a year, the garden produces about 10,000 lbs. of produce.

12 a.m.- Lunch. Sandwich featuring goat cheese from out goats, and tomato and basil from our garden.

1 p.m.- Meeting with Donna, our livestock manager. Fascinating woman. We mostly just shot the breeze about the different livestock on the farm.

2:30 p.m.- Orientation close. Next week, we begin orientation in our different volunteer groups. Education volunteer orientation for me!

3:30 p.m.- CHORES! I had to run the goats back in, and then milk a few of them. Then, more harvesting from the garden. This time, we harvested produce just for the volunteers. WOW! It was exciting. We gathered carrots, potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, mustard greens, kale, arugula, lettuce, and green peppers.

5:30 p.m.- Dinner time! About eight of us cooked one hell of a meal. Most of it was made from our garden, with the exception of some flour and such. There was mushroom and gouda quiche, potato casserole, green bean salad, goat cheese and beat salad, carrot muffins, gingersnap cookies, rhubarb crisp, and homemade ice cream made from our cow Mabel. It took 2.5 hours to cook, but a lot of that cooking was very social. Twas a grand dinner.

11 p.m.- Went out for a walk before sleep, only to find that Abu our camel had gotten loose. It's not easy moving a stubborn camel. While I pulled and pulled on his harness, Susan tempted him with a bunch of hay. Ten minutes later, we moved him about twenty yards back into his pen. Damn camel.

Then, sleep. We have the day off today, so a bunch of us are going to Boston. Peace out, dawgs.

The Violin

So, you knew it was coming. You had to have known. Here it comes. Time to play the violin (is that the phrase?) BILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE POOR AND HUNGRY, DON'T YOU FEEL GUILTY YOU RICH AMERICAN FOR YOUR EASY AND COMFORTABLE LIFESTYLE!

Sigh. There it is. Nobody really likes hearing it, and the guilt trip gets old and/or doesn't actually change your life in any major way. Except maybe you give some money away. But, white Americans, as my sister will agree, are good at taking a snapshot of hunger and poverty, feeling bad about it, and moving on with their lives. In all honesty, what more can you do?

Why am I talking about this? Well, during orientation at Heifer's Overlook Farm, the discussion on hunger, poverty, and injustice has to come up. Why? Because the purpose of Overlook Farm is to share the experience of hunger and poverty with its visitors, to broaden their perspectives on the conditions in which people around the world live. The main way we do this is with the Global Village, a program through which I went yesterday. I must admit, all cynicism aside, it's a wonderful program.

And this is how it works.

On Overlook Farm, there are six "Global Villages". Each global village is essentially a working model of a house site in a particular developing country. We have Guatemala, Peru, Tibet, Thailand, the Mexican/United States border... and I forget. So, for example, in the Thailand village, there is a typical Thai household, raised on stilts and made out of bamboo. There is a Thai garden full of staple Thai crops, a pond for tilapia, and a pin featuring two water buffalo. Everything in the village is modeled after an actual household in Thailand that Heifer has done work with.

In the Global Village program, a group of people, usually students, live in one of the Global Villages for a night. And, boy oh boy, they do it about as authentically as they can. The program begins with a lottery, in which you pick a random number and get placed in a village with a few other people. My family was placed in Tibet/China. Immediately, things got sticky. One member of my family was disabled (me), another was pregnant, only one could read (and let me just say, if you're disabled, then you actually disable yourself for the night. I had to do it; not easy). We received a limited amount of money, the equivalent of a day's wages in our village, and had that money to go to the "Global Market" and purchase food for the night. I, personally, expected to share a decent meal with my family of four. I was wrong. After haggling a lot, we managed to get a baby bottle for the baby, a small bowl of beans, 1/8 of a cup of rice, 1/4 a small onion, and a handful of kale. Split four ways. Then, we had to build a fire, prepare the food, cook, and eat it. What we ended up cooking is best described as "warm bean water". It was hot, tasted vaguely of beans, was very watery, and bland. So bland.

But, it was all we had. I admit, it was not representative of a Tibetan meal, but that was mostly our fault. If we had been realistic, we would have bought barley and yak milk.

At some point in the night, our "mother" gave birth to a water balloon baby, whom somebody to take care of at all times. So, while we cooked breakfast, for example, someone had to hold the baby. If it died (aka: popped), we had to have an hour of silent mourning.

Then, the big event for the night. Our family had an arranged "crisis". Read from a sheet of paper, the crisis we received was based on true events and forced us to make a decision as a family in regard to our future. Briefly put, our crisis was this: In the year of 2005, the Chinese army invades our territory and threatens our nomadic way of life. We must move. Do we: (1) Stay in the mountains and farm on steep land that will only be good for a year because we must use pesticides and chemicals to grow crops there?, (2) move into a refugee camp for Tibetan nomads, in which we would probably starve, not to mention sacrifice our nomadic way of life and civil liberties beneath the hands of the Chinese, or (3) move into a large city in order to find work, though none of us have any marketable skills because we've been nomads all our lives, and we'll probably end up homeless and starving.

So, we had to make a decision as a family of what to do. OK, you may be thinking that this is awfully dramatic. It is. But, in 2005, a lot of Tibetan families had to make this kind of decision. The kind of decision with no good options, where death and starvation seem to be a end result of every option.

For the most part, that's the Global Village program. We went to sleep around the fire. It was freezing and wet and quite miserable. We made some oatmeal for breakfast, packed up, and moved out of Tibet.

What's the point? To feel guilty every time I think of Tibet? No. To experience what it's like to feel truly hungry? Yes. To know what it's like to make impossible choices? Yes. To experience the difficulties of a life guided by hunger and poverty? Yes. For me, it was like trying on a new pair of old shoes (my phrase). In other words, receiving a new perspective, in someone else's shoes, when that someone else is hungry and poor and, guess what, is YOU! It's one thing to sit in a classroom and learn about poverty. It's another thing to live in a poor household for a night, with a poor family, eating a poor person's meal.

Here's a quick example. So, we have an expecting mother, whose baby will need milk. The mother can't breastfeed because she is too malnourished, and the baby will probably die. We need to buy good milk at the market, but the milk costs 1/3 of our daily wages. This is a decision we actually had to make. Should we buy the milk for our baby, or spend that money on food for the family, essentially sacrificing the baby's life in the process?

Again, it's dramatic. But it makes you experience something. And experience is really what it's all about right?

Ok, time for more Orientation. I haven't totally answered the question of "Why?" Why experience this at all? What does it change? I'm not sure. But I'll get back to you.