WWOOFing Chiloe, or Things Found While Weeding in the Jungle

When we first read the description of our farm in Chiloe, we felt like just the right people for the job. Homemade, communal vegetarian meals? Yes, please. Yoga and meditation? Sign me up. Growing gardens by the sea? I thought you'd never ask. We felt sure we had everything it took to reap the best of this experience.

We were mostly correct, I think, and did indeed find a lot of the beauty we expected. But we also discovered that we had undertaken our WWOOFing experience with some preconceived notions that would soon encounter challenges on the farm.

(1) We speak some Spanish.
(2) Pulling weeds is kind of fun.
(3) Humans cannot perform photosynthesis.

The first two assumptions quickly failed the tests of, respectively, (1) producing grammatically complete sentences in Spanish and  (2) extracting root structures the size of the New York subway system. The third - despite a very earnest anecdote from our far-out hosts about a man who has lived in Argentina for seventeen years without food or water simply by staring intensely at the sun for a couple of hours a day - we're still going to stick to. Brianne and I do not usually end up on the skeptical side of a conversation, but in the case of human photosynthesis we're going to remain repsectfully agnostic.

At the end of the day, however, we had the unbelievable patience of Nelson and Venecia to give us practice understanding 75% of an incredibly complex Spanish conversation and then answering with a three-word fragment or just "Si, claro." We had the friendship of Tatiana, a great traveler and incredible artist,  who taught us the etiquette of mate-drinking and helped us with this sun mosaic, our artistic project for the volunteer's cabin:

We also had the companionship of Celti and Gata, this adorable duo:

And even after tackling weeding jobs that made us feel like we were scalping the earth trying to pull out Jurassic-age plants (see evidence of our efforts above), we still got to call this place home:

We gave our new panchos a workout in the unseasonably cold Chiloe spring. We acquired yet more artisinal wool to worry Chilean customs officials at a market in Dalcahue. We got enough dirt under our finger nails to pot a geranium. And most importantly we had a week and a half to unpack our bags, our memories of the first month in South America, and our hopes for the rest of the trip. Though our backs may be aching, and our bank accounts might be making feeble protests, our spirits are feeling much better rested for all the adventure left ahead of us. Next step: the very obvious combination of backcountry Patagonia trekking and crafting graduate school writing samples. A match made in heaven.