Rejuvenated!
This delightful day was spent in the fields. We went out to pasture with the cows and spent the day there, very shepherd style.
They feed the cows and bulls alfalfa, but for some reason yet to be understood by me, you have to feed them the alfalfa slowly so that their bellies don’t swell and they die. If there is a chemist amongst those reading that could explain this to me I would GREATLY appreciate it. Anyways, we take the herd (of 5) to the field, tie them up, and cut alfalfa and feed it to them about one mountain every hour...all day. Cutting the alfalfa itself is kind of like mowing your tall lawn by hand with a knife. Once alfalfa is planted it re-grows in about a month (like grass) for up to 10 years without replanting. This is why it is such a great food source here for their cattle. However, the manner in which we must feed them is laborious. It requires you do be in the field just about all day every day, which is usually a woman’s job because she also handles the milking of the females. One of my little side dreams is to convince the kids in town they bring to the fields with them books to read instead of throwing rocks at each other or the cows.
But, slicing down the alfalfa doesn’t take a lot of strength, or thought, so it is a meditation I have come to enjoy. Being surrounded by the mountainous beauty of the canyon only solidifies my pleasure.
My host mother brought us lunch and my nervous stomach looked at the tuna/onion/rice mix without much interest. “Come, come, debes comer algo, debes comer todo.”- Eat, eat, you should each something, you should eat it all. In my consistent nature of never saying no to food I told my tummy to bucker up and boy did she. She ate the whole plate. I am back in full steam! Some mumbles and grumbles during digestion, but functional once again! Take that intestinal bacteria!
One of the joys of Peace Corps is the free time. While the cows and bulls munched their alfalfa, I laid on my back in the sun and read. I am finally able to read the pile of books I have been collecting all my life waiting for the free time to savor them. Last night I started Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, gifted to me by my mother years ago. It is marvelous. Every woman would enjoy the flavor of this book. It is written in a speech that is eternal and true and explores all reaches of birth, womanhood, faith, sex, death, relationships and beyond. Each woman’s story I have read in the bible, but this is completely new, and their lifestyle couldn’t be more relatable to me today. In every female character Anita re-introduces me to I can see the soul of a woman I have loved, and the antiquity of her language and her story connects my heart to the women centuries before me. I am a couple hundred pages in and must declare the tale is beautiful.
Now, I sit on my bed listening to the music of the rain on my tin roof and allow my mind to travel to Egypt with the wives and daughters of Jacob.
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