Yelling at animals

It´s raining a lot here, so I´ve had to move most of my farm work from the veggie garden to the chicken coop (ground is too wet to work). This wouldn´t be too bad if every tool I´ve had to use weren´t rusted and broken! I´ve managed to clumsily cut my fingers and wrists several times in attempts to remove rusted nails with rusted screwdirvers, but at least I´ll be able to appreciate the wild one´s garage full of quality equipment when I return! Especially the John Deere tractor. In its place, I´ve been using a small electric mower that´s missing one wheel, is about to lose two more, has to be plugged into a never-quite-long-enough extension cord, has blades about as sharp as the head of a spoon, and is in serious need of some electrical tape to eliminate the perpetual shock from the swinging exposed wires. Ahh, farm life. It really is great though, partly because of these eccentricities. The three-wheeler certainly makes mowing more exciting, if not overly efficient.

I had rabbit for the first time. It was pretty good.

Jesús, another wwoofer that joined us at the farm recently, has been keeping me company and translating all the spanish I manage to forget or horribly mispronounce (he speaks spanish, english, german and catalan!). He was also instrumental today in our nearly fruitless attemtpt to scare the bull, who had escpaed, back into his confined area. It took about 35 minutes, as well as a lot of clapping, yelling, and waving of sticks. I have to admit that I was pretty thankful at the time that we´d castrated  him earlier...he might have been much more aggressive otherwise.

The school system is really interesting here...Joaquin, who is seventeen, goes to school one out of every three weeks. He stays there all week (it´s about 30km away), has class from 8 to 8 every day, then spends the next two weeks at home working on the farm. He has homework, but not too much. The kids are on a rotating schedule (three groups, they all have a specific week), but the poor professors have to teach nearly 12 hours a day! Apparently they´re payed very well. The school is designed this way partly to allow kids to work on their parents farms and partly because public transportation is terrible in the area, and not many families own cars. It´s an innovative system (originating in France, says Cynthia, my host), but it seems pretty undemanding.

I´ve got one more day of farming ahead of me, then I´m off to BA for a tour of a famous old cemetery, including the grave of Evita Perón, a few craft markets, a day at Tigre, a small lake town an hour north of the city, then a week in the city with Warfield V, followed by a week in wine country, interspersed with some camping. Woo!