by Eliana Durnbaugh, of Carleton College

Patagonia Study Abroad – Fall 2019 Semester

Unexpectedly, this past week has been one of the more transformative weeks of my time here. At my homestay, my perception of time, work, and relationships to land were revised in unconventional ways that I could never have picked up from any classroom, cliché as it sounds. At homestays, the Round River students stayed with another student or two at a nearby campo (a homestead farm) outside of Cochrane, Round River’s home base city.

For seven days my Round River companion Anna and I lived with Leo (last name unknown) and her husband Modesto, son Ivan (23) and daughter Camila (7) on their campo a 40 minute drive outside of Cochrane. I could not tell you how many hectares of land they had, but on their property, they had a herds of about 40 cows, 40 sheep, chickens, geese, turkeys, a goat, and a handful of sheepdogs. Since it is spring in South America, we were swimming in baby lambs, puppies, chicks, and calves. My favorite animals were two 8-day old goat kids, named Chiqui and Coca, who Anna and I helped bottle feed four times a day, their mother having passed away. Leo’s family lived in a bright-purple house, with a main room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom attached from the outside. Since the house was small, Anna and I shared a tent in their front yard, which also served as grazing land for their sheep. Every morning we woke up to rooster calls and newborn lambs bleating. (Figure 1a: a view of the front yard. We stayed underneath the trees, next to a small stream. (Figure 1b: A mother ewe and two lambs. We got to watch this sheep give birth to her babies four days before this photo was taken.)

My day started at around 8:30, when we joined the family in the living room and passed around a gourd of mate, a bitter caffeinated tea that is sipped through a straw stuck in the tea leaves. We would have a breakfast of eggs and bread while watching the news. Morning work usually started around 9:30, starting with baking bread or sopapillas, spongy fried bread. Leo’s house was heated only through a wood stove, which also heated hot water for the kitchen sink and the shower. (Figure 2: Wood stove and skittish cat on the left. Picture taken from the table, to the left was a sitting area with two couches.) The family got their electricity through two solar panels. After putting the bread in the oven compartment of the wood stove, we often planted seeds, usually lettuce, in some starter planters while sitting on the couch. Leo’s big love on her campo were her greenhouses, of which she had six. She grew all varieties of food: lettuce, chard, shallots, cilantro, cucumber, radishes, pepper, and strawberries. She explained to us that she had attended a week-long class in Santiago, which feels very distant from her remote campo, to learn hydroponic techniques. She had rigged up a complex drip irrigation system in all of the greenhouses, and they were luxurious to work in during the chilly mornings and evenings. (Figure 3: Anna and Leo looking at the lettuce in one of the smaller greenhouses.)

Planting was a time that we did a lot of our talking to Leo. Her son Ivan was the only person on the campo who spoke a little English, and I could feel my brain stretching to get across what I wanted to say in Spanish. Adapting to Leo’s Patagón accent was at first challenging, as she typically dropped the ends of words and replaced the ends of sentences with “shh” or “che” for emphasis. She was extremely patient with our slow speaking and incorrect grammar, and each day she gave us a new phrase to explain what we did that day, which we then would report back to Modesto and Ivan at dinner. I had a great time speaking in Spanish to Camila, because she expressed no gracious bashfulness for my own embarrassment, like the adults did, instead forging ahead to correct me. She and I also played a lot of games during down time, teaching each other clapping games in English and Spanish. We also liked to draw together. (Figure 4: Camila holding a puppy. Baby goat Chiqui at her feet.) In addition to the greenhouses, invernaderos in Spanish, we also helped Modesto make raised beds for future strawberry plants. The whole family helped in this task, and we were often accompanied by a sheepdog or the baby goats, the latter of whom got smarter by the day and escaped under their fence when hungry. There was a specific science to the layers of dirt, fertilizer, and calcium herbicide we shoveled, and Modesto strung twine between posts to create perfect rows. Prepping the strawberry beds was always a joyful time of day, with people standing in the back of a truck shoveling dirt, others bringing wheelbarrows of dirt to the rows, and still others raking the piles of dirt. Often Leo would yell, “we need music!” and Ivan would bring out a waist-height floor speaker. Anna, Modesto and I took turns choosing the music, which always sparked fun conversation about lyrics, as well as some impromptu dancing. 

The family would call Anna and me “chicas” as one unit, and we had fun exchanging bad words in English and Spanish with Ivan. Eventually they called us “chivas locas,” crazy goats, calling Anna and I “Chiqui y Coca” after the real baby goats. We also learned about Ivan’s passion – working as a rafting, kayaking, and climbing guide north of Cochrane. He told us that he hated going to university in a city outside of Santiago, because “there is not life in the city like there is on the campo.” These two perspectives felt very fresh to me: A young person who truly wanted to inherit the campo lifestyle instead of escaping to the city, and a campo kid native to the area who took interest in outdoor recreation. This second facet was important to me because I view outdoor recreation in Patagonia as an endeavor typically only done by rich, white, foreigners. Talking to Ivan every day about his dreams and interests, and the things we had in common as people the same age, I got a glimpse into the life of a of young Patagón person. (Figure 5: Ivan and a puppy outside of the enclosure where the baby goats were supposed to stay. Around his neck he wears a wooden raft and kayak, carvings he made himself, and a small vial of water from the Río Baker, his favorite river to whitewater raft. The Río Baker is especially important in the narrative of conservation of Chilean Patagonia because it is a site where a private dam company hoped to build a dam, which would have large ecological consequences. Knowing that local people like Ivan care deeply about the conservation issues that we are learning about in Round River gives more weight to my own studies here.)

Another big task we helped with was herding half of Leo’s cows down the road from one pasture to another. Most of the cows had recently given birth to a calf, and they were all very skinny, so dividing up the herd would help all of the cows get enough food. This job was dominated by the womenfolk: Leo brought me, Anna, Camila, Leo’s sister, and Leo’s mother and great-aunt walked by to join, as well. Ivan and his teenage cousin also rode on horseback.  It was at first very intimidating corralling the cows through the small gate opening in the wire fence, but after seeing Leo’s seasoned and casual confidence we quickly became more comfortable, and even learned how to use their lasso. (Figure 6: Camila, Ivan, and Anna walking the cows down the road). Every day, when the time was convenient, Leo took us to the pasture down the road to help a 23-day-old calf whose mother had no milk. She would rope up the hind legs of a specific huge brown cow with swollen udders and lead the hungry calf over. (Figure 7: Leo and calf in their easternmost ranch.) We also went to the cow pasture, which was a large lenga (southern beech tree) forest, to collect firewood. In her sneakers, leggings and unprotected eyes, Leo brought out a tiny chainsaw and started cutting dead pieces of fallen trees. She also carefully selected a live lenga tree, I guessed about 50 meters tall, and felled it with impeccable chainsaw technique; she explained she did this so that the cows could eat the fragrant leaves. 

In addition to learning many things about how to work on a campo, from getting comfortable working with animals to how to best plant in a greenhouse, I gained huge insight into how I perceive time. The family’s biggest meal was lunch (almuerzo), which happened anywhere from 2 to 3 every day, and we had a siesta until 5 or 6. Afterwards, we would do more farm-work until a small dinner at 9. This structure of taking time to rest every day was new to me, and I found that dividing the day in two like this increased my physical and emotional stamina. Anna and I wanted to be as helpful as possible, and to us that meant working as hard and efficiently at every task. One morning we weeded an entire row, about 40 meters, of lettuce. The weeds go to the chickens, and we gave so many weeds we seemed to overwhelm them. When we got better at observing the way Leo worked, we noticed that she worked to fit in the cyclical balance of the needs of the farm – keeping in mind her own energy, the food she needed to provide to the family and the animals, and the progress that needed to be made in the planting season. Anna and I saw our tasks as linear goal, a concept that I think is endemic to America and capitalist Western principles of progress in general. In contrast, Leo’s campo followed the nonlinear oscillations of the climate, weather, and more peaceful approach to “getting things done.” I noticed an attitude of “we will put in the work, we will get done what happens, and we will come back tomorrow.” At a point, it didn’t even seem like there were “tasks” or “work to do,” simply doing things to follow the cycle of the growth season. Writing this blog, I was afraid that my description of this patient approach to campo work would seem somehow inferior or tokenizing, but I believe that this is due to my own internalized perception of how work “should get done.” Talking to Leo and her extended family, the words they used to describe the area in which they lived and their life on the campo always portrayed how highly they value tranquility. I very much admire the non-linear sense of time that Leo and her family followed, and it something I aspire to. (Figure 8: Four morel mushrooms in Camila’s hands that she found herself. The family forages for morels on their property in late spring, an example of following the seasons. Leo graciously accommodated my vegetarianism and fed me platefuls of these delicious buttery morels.)

The family, in my perception, did not react to stressors the way I have seen American farmers (keeping in mind that we were guests in the house, and therefore were presented the campo through a lens of hospitality). If a cow passed away, the bread burned, or the strawberry row was not completed, a family member would say “no importa” when Anna and I expressed concern, because life goes on regardless of if we are distressed or at peace. They joked constantly with each other, especially physically, throwing dirt, water, or milk playfully at the other, or stealing food from another’s plate. Later in the week, they teased Anna and I in the same way and encouraged us to reciprocate. I got the sense that Leo’s house was a hub in the area, as there was often a neighbor visiting, and they let their “adopted son,” as Leo called him, even though the man seemed older than her, crash on their couch the latter part of the week. We felt so welcome in this house, and even gained our own small sense of independence in work on the campo. When Ivan wanted to make a cake without a recipe, and Anna and I thought it wasn’t possible, he told us a common Patagón phrase: “Nadie nació sabiendo” – no one was born knowing. The cake came out delicious, perhaps because we put in the work with all the patience and love that we had been given and in turn learned from this homestay week. (Figure 9: Anna and baby goat Coca, whom I was named after, by the campo’s front gate. Figure 10: Me (Eliana) and my favorite calf, Mariposa. All pictures were taken on my phone by me, except for this one, which was taken by Anna.)