By Harriet Winterer from Colby College
Homestays part two! Unfortunately, my counterpart Jackson (you may know him from the first homestays blog) felt gravely ill halfway through our homestay. Luckily, I was ready to step into the role. We were on the homestay together regardless, so prepare for a seamless transition…
Our last day with a living Jackson was on a rainy day spent inside the hydroponics greenhouse pulling weeds. Leo (our host mother) had bragged to us at dinner the night before about how her campo had the only hydroponics system in all of Áysen, so we were all basking in the glory of our proximity. I admit the science of her specific system went over my head a little (understanding scientific processes with a very simple understanding of Spanish is not the easiest task), but it definitely looked pretty cool. The day only improved at lunchtime when we learned that Caroline would be joining us, and our new group of four finished off our weeding job in record time together. After dinner we were told that our tents were perfectly situated in the flood path of the nearby stream, which would have been an extremely unfortunate discovery to make in the middle of the night as it continued to rain. We resituated and slept peacefully and dryly through the rainy night.
The next day was dedicated to turning a grassy field into rows of strawberry plants. There were three previously existing rows that we had to remove the weed barrier from, weed, and put small strawberry (frutilla, in Spanish) plants into. We got that all done before lunch, and began with the heavy lifting fortified with some fresh sopapillas that Leo’s daughter, who is a baker in the nearby town of Puerto Bertran, had made for us. The afternoon consisted of driving around a machine that tilled the field into soft dirt, then raking and compacting the dirt into ordered rows a little less than a meter wide. After the rows had been shaped and leveled to Leo’s approval, we covered them in a weed barrier, cut holes a palm’s width apart, and planted more frutillas
Hannah was on hose duty and doused the little frutillas in about a gallon of water each. In the time that the three of us (Caroline, Hannah, and I–we hadn’t seen Jackson yet that day) had built three rows, Leo and her husband Modesto had shown up. Together they had cut down two fully grown lenga trees, removed the root balls, and tilled it all down so I couldn’t tell there were two 20 m tall trees there in the first place. Definitely a power couple.
We were surprised with a stop at the land where the sheep lived on the drive home. After we’d walked through the woods for ten minutes, a sudden explosion of yapping disrupted the sheep noises and five of the cutest border collie puppies I had ever seen came tumbling out of the trees towards us.
Dogs that live in campos in rural Chile are all typically given a job at birth: each of these were destined to be sheepdogs for various families in the area, so they were being raised with the sheep so that they could learn to regard them as family. One of these puppies would be kept by Leo’s family and become the new sheepdog, but all of the others had already been gifted to friends and family.
The next day was spent, similarly, raking and shoveling dirt. Leo was a madwoman with the tilling machine; when we arrived, the field was half normal looking grass, the same as any backyard. By the time we left, it was at least a meter of the fluffiest dirt I had ever waded through. We built four more frutilla rows and assisted with the removal of another huge tree, then we were waved away by Leo to go hunting for morels (morillas). The first time we hunted, Leo did most of the spotting and we walked away with two kilograms of morillas. This time, left to our own devices, we left with a measly 20. Even still, half of those had been found by Leo’s daughter who had come to hunt with us. We definitely have some practice to do.
Before dinner that evening, we had some business to attend to. The family was having an asado the next night—basically the Chilean version of a barbecue except it’s just an entire animal roasted in front of a fire and then divided into portions—which meant that we had a goat to slaughter. Luckily, we did not have to participate, but Hannah and I watched while Caroline the Vegan called it a night. The process was much cleaner than I anticipated, and we got some epic pictures holding the goat’s head once it had all been finished.
The next day was our last full day of the homestay. Jackson had still not yet emerged from his tent, but Leo had whipped him up an “abuelitas locas” remedy with some garden herbs so we were all sure he would be just fine. The frutilla field seemed to be in good order so we spent the day collecting dirt from a lenga forest across the road from the house and moving it to a new garden box. We took dirt from the areas under the trees with a lot of decomposed leaf litter, only taking the top few layers of earth as to avoid the denser underlayers. Once we had collected enough dirt to fill the garden box (it was a lot) we planted onions and flowers in the box.
The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to asado prep. “Prep” in this case entailed the men tending the goat that was roasting by the fire, and the women having una fiesta de las mujeres (women’s party!) making sopapillas and drinking micheladas, a drink with beer and lemon juice with salt and the spice merkén around the rim. After three hours of goat roasting, we tore into the goat, danced some traditional Chilean dances while Modesto played the accordion, drank piscola (pisco + cola), and shared some hilarious broken-Spanish humor (Hannah learned her 7th word—“siete”). The Chileans do not mess around when it comes to fiestas, and the gringas had to admit defeat around 3am.
The next morning Ben arrived to pick us up at 10am and we had to say some very hard goodbyes. Firstly, to Patatita, the baby duck that had been saved three days before from her lunatic mother after Patatita’s seven other siblings had been killed.
The duck had been moved into the house until she was big enough to make it in the world on her own, and we had been falling deeply in love with her. Next, the seven dogs and eight cats who lived on the campo, including the three-month-old crazy kitten Lulu and the six-month-old puppy Molly. Finally, it was a hard goodbye to Leo and her family. After our week at the campo, we felt like part of the family and it was hard to imagine not being coated in a pervasive layer of dirt or waking up to their extremely vocal roosters at 5am every day.
My homestay on the campo taught me a lot about the potential for connection between humans and their environment and made me reflect on my lack thereof in my life in the US. I will carry this experience with me and hope to retain the lessons I learned with Leo.