Trabajo

8 marzo, 2014

a’ight folks, this is the last of my daily posts for a while. from now on it’ll be a week or so between updates. i’m still available via text if you’re having withdrawals. =)

so today was my first day of work, and there was no spanish and no gardening. and no bee keeping. the latter i’m not too worried about; it wasn’t an essential. but you know i’m disappointed about the spanish! of course, it’s one of my primary reasons for being here. because the people living on the actual farm speak fluent english, and 1 of the only 2 who speak fluent spanish (lizzie’s son) does not want to speak it at home, it’s not happening the way i’d planned. and -- although it was hard to reach any farms as far in advance as i needed to (6 months) in order to arrange this trip, and lizzie was the most responsive person i’d contacted -- i probably could have planned a bit better. i could have given lizzie a maybe until i reached a more spanish-speaking farm. and if i’m being completely honest with myself, i must admit i was anxious about going to a farm where no one spoke english. but now that i’ve spent a day and a half in madrid and granada (before i got to the farm) where i ran into only one english speaker, i’m realizing that it would not have been that bad.

but, i have asked lizzie to begin communicating with me in spanish only in the coming weeks. meanwhile, we are looking into other immersion opportunities in the nearby villages (orgiva and torvizcon). i will probably link up with a spanish partner who wants to learn english too. and lizzie and her partner have hella spanish language learning materials. we’ll see...
…otherwise, my intonation is already somewhat british. funny.

as for the gardening, well, i’m less concerned about that. the activities will vary so i'm sure some gardening will happen soon. and today, i learned some valuable stuff about eco-building:

yes, it is entirely possible to build almost an entire house out of reused materials. lizzie is about finished doing so. and today i helped. she needed a large tube through which to run some electric cables across the ceiling of a hallway and a bedroom. she found that this kind of tube would cost over forty euros at the store. deciding that she could make her own damn tube, she repurposed about fifteen plastic flower pots that were sitting around for months in her homemade shed. i sawed the bottom off of each pot and duct-taped the openings together to create the long plastic tube. and that was it.

we installed the tube in the ceiling and lizzie used pillows and lawn chair cushions she found in a nearby dump to insulate the ceiling. now, some space is cleared in the shed, there’s a tube for electric wiring, i know how to use a saw, and my biceps and triceps are that much stronger for it. done!

(photos by lizzie wynn: http://www.lizziewynn.co.uk/)

now back to that nearby dump: lizzie and family find much of their materials in dumps and other areas around the nearby towns. they have a trailer, which they attach to their car and drive around gathering useful materials with which to build and add to the house. today, i also cleaned out the trailer and organized some of these items: pillows, large plastic tarps, tiles, bricks, crates, metal mesh, large slabs of wood, cans, wheels, bottles. usually they sit out in the sun for a few days so it can kill off any organisms left over. the sun shines bright here and the air is very dry, so it works out. just counting today, the pillows and crates have already been handy. but as you may have seen on the farm blog i emailed, lizzie uses bottles for decorative windows in the house where light needs to get in for heat or energy, but not to see anything that’s going on in the house. this is much like the arrangements of stained glass you'd find at church. creative.

anyway, all that took about 4 or 5 hours, and then we were done for the day (lizzie spent much of the day hand mixing plaster and using it to close the walls in the house).

that was a lot i know, but here’s the end.

ciao.