¡Mama Rojaaaaaaaaaa!

Mama Roja.


Paradise.


Eden.

Heaven on earth.



Whatever you call it, here life is so simple and so beautiful, i am in love. In love with Mama Roja. All my fears were for naught, I never could have anticipated how much I would enjoy this lifestyle. Three of the interns canceled so it is a small group of lovely, intelligent north american women, four of us in all plus an Argentinian guy who is becoming a park ranger and will be working with us to build a long drop dry composting toilet next week. Plus Marcelo and Kimberly, Mama Roja´s keepers. They are vibrant, passionate, and hilarious. We also share the farm with a mama kitty and one of her kittens, Amacita and Conan, and two dogs, Lulu and Rambo (who has no teeth and thus leaves his tongue hanging out all day). There are 23 chickens and a few roosters, thousands of butterflies the size and beauty of which i have NEVER seen before, dragonflies in green, blue and red, birds, ducks, armadillos (yet to be seen by my eyes), and some of the most insane insects I have ever been near. But very few mosquitos!!!



Lessons:

1. Poop is amazing. The bathroom is this beautiful adobe structure with recycled glass bottle inserts and open air on top and side. The floor has beautiful tile mosaics. The toilet is a 5 gallon bucket (ala Christian camping trips), that you put a bit of sawdust in. The bag of sawdust lives next to the toilet. You do your pooping and peeing, cover with sawdust. There is ZERO smell in the bathroom and no flies. It´s incredible. When the bucket is full, you take it out, cover it and walk it over to the HUMANURE compost pile. There are two bins. One is active, where you dig a hole in the middle with a shovel (steam pours out), open the bucket and dump in the hole. Then you cover with dry matter like leaves. Once again, no smell. The second bin looked to be about 1-3 full of gorgeous, rich compost. They let the active bin sit for a minimum of 6 months after it is full of poo and dry matter in order to go through the three stages of composting. Kimberly says they actually let theirs cure for 1 year. Then they use it to fertilize their amazing gardens. I LOVE HUMANURE. All the possible pathogens are broken down in the super hot thermophilic second stage of composting. They also put all the food scraps in this compost pile, or sometimes in the non-humanure piles near the garden. I read a book yesterday called ¨let it rot¨which is all about composting and a great read.



Bugs. There are bugs here called Botflies. Ever heard of them?? I hadn´t. Emily Baier, this is for you: These flies generally live on dogs that lie around all day like Rambo. However, they also like stinky clothes. The kind of stinky clothes we each generate daily sweating like little piglet girls while we work in the sun. If you hang your stinky clothes on the clotheslines the botflies like to land on them and lay their eggs. If you then wear your stinky egg-filled clothes, they BURROW INTO YOUR SKIN AND HATCH INTO LARVA THAT YOU HAVE TO SQUEEZE OUT. Apparently a previous intern got them in her labia. In her LABIA (or shamelips, in Holland). Needless to say, I am washing the bejesus out of my clothes before hanging them up and then closely inspecting my panties before putting them on. Ew. There are other bugs that burrow into your toes near your nails but there is no hatching larva so they worry me less.



Plus the amazing jungle humidity heals everything quickly! At home my bites last days and here they are gone in a day. My hair is super curly and my skin very glowy and moist.



Five days with no coffee, meat, booze and I feel pretty good. I had a headache the first few days (coffee), but feel like i have detoxed from buenos aires. Now that we have made this trek to town to email and call our loved ones I think I will stock up on chocolate to share. We eat all our meals together, beautiful food from the garden and from other local farmers. Yesterday we made yogurt from fresh warm milk that our neighbor cow gave. We have eggs from the chickens and may even slaughter one this week and have chicken soup!!

Oh, yes. The chickens. Yesterday I learned how to tell if a chicken is laying eggs yet, or stopped laying eggs (we are going to slaughter one that has stopped). You turn them over and look at their ëgg hole¨. If it´s moist and pink and open, they are laying. If it´s yellow and dry, they have stopped laying. If it´s really little and dry, they haven´t started yet. It felt awfully invasive but also really interesting .



Also (sister!!), thanks to Cj´s leatherman, i whittled my own set of new double pointed needles. AND THEY WORK. I think they are beautiful. So it doesn´t matter that LANChile took my knitting needles. Because i can make my own. Which feels amazing, amazing, amazing.



This week the plan is to build a new foundation for the little house on mama roja and then insulate the walls. IT was built out of wood leavings a few years ago and thus has very poor insulation. We are going to use some cement to make a vapor barrier between the earth and the floor of the house (since it´s so humid), and then remove every other wood beam and pack the space between the walls with mud and sand. Exciting!! Then we are going to build this long drop tower toilet where instead of having to dump the buckets in a separate compost bin, you poop on top of the compost pile but it´s really far below you so not too gross (ideally). It´s built with two sides so that when the first fills, you just seal it off an dlet it work it´s composting magic while using the other side. IT has little doors at the bottom so when the compost is done, you just scoop it out! We are also going to make some balms and liniment for cuts and stings, liquor out of TOMATILLOS (what!!?), learn batik and go to an ëcological festival¨tonight, which actually sounds like a big outdoor party with bands and beer. So much for detoxing :) The only minor disappointment is that since we are all from the US, everyone is speaking English! I am hoping that now that we have spent some time getting to know each other pretty well we can slog through the process of learning spanish together, because everyone says they want to. Marcelo, who is Argentinian, has recommended that we have dinner and evenings in spanish only, so that should help.



In five days I have learned so much about how to live without all of the things I formerly thought were necessary. Cj and Bre and I have talked a lot about buying land together in Washington and building a home. Now i know this is possible and will not involve half the hassle we anticipated! I feel really excited to create a mama roja-esque home for myself, my family, friends and everyone who appreciates this way of living or wants to learn. Who´s in???!!



I love you.