I find myself now in the north of Germany, in a small village near Tostedt, between Bremen and Hamburg. This morning while feeding the animals, my hands and feet froze, for the first time since last Winter; I had forgotten how much I don't enjoy this feeling.
I have a lot to say about this new place and people, but I still wish to say a few words about the last farm in Baden-Württemberg. For some reason I have trouble writing these days, but I must make an effort and record at least something about this family with whom I spent these two weeks. All I have written about it is a complaint about the silly conversion of petrol into milk by sick cows (although I just learned that in this area they do something which sounds even more silly: growing corn to make biogas, more on this later).
I don't know how. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to explain... The morning when I left, Hilse and Helmut and Oma all had tears in their eyes when I said goodbye. Tears that they didn't want to show, that they quickly hid behind a smile, and just to think about it I want to cry as well. And I could not say why. We are quite different in many ways, and yet, we love each other so much. This is all quite strange.
They were all such interesting characters.
Oma ("grand-mother").
She is 90 years-old, but you would never guess. She has trouble walking now, but her mind is sharp as an eagle's beak. All day long she works in the kitchen, preparing food for at least seven people every day, and besides the stable times, I mostly worked with her in the kitchen. She had an infinite patience and understanding, and it seemed that you could do all the mistakes you wanted and that she would never get angry.
Once, I cooked lunch, and made and experimental leek pie. The next day Oma said, "so today I will experiment as well", and she mixed left-over lettuce and brussel-sprouts for the salad. She seemed to feel quite rebellious doing that.
The farm used to be hers and her husband's. In her time, they farmed a little bit of everything. For a long time she had to do every thing herself because her husband got injured first on the farm and again in the war. One day, she told me that had been against the farm becoming so big.
Siegfried, the helper (picture on top).
He is 70 years old and slightly mentally handicapped. He has been working on the farm for ages, and now that he is so old, they would have returned him to his family - but as of family, he only has a sister, who is even more deranged than him - so they kept him. He still works every day, cleaning the stable, feeding the animals, sending the cows to milking - and seems quite happy about it.
Siegfried mostly smiled, and looked at you straight in the eyes when you looked at him, and often I wondered if he was not the bright one amongst all of us. It seemed as though in the end he never said anything stupid.
He used to be alcoholic and to drink several litters of apple-schnaps every day, until the day when he ended up in the hospital and the doctor told him that if he didn't stop then he would die; so he stopped.
One evening, as we were both going to our respective bedrooms, Siegfried invited me into his. He showed me his collection of Teddy bears, his tape-player on which he plays german folk music every night when he goes to bed (very loud, because he is a bit deaf). Some of the Teddy bears could make a sound when you pressed them, and he particularly wanted me to hear those.
One day, Siegfried dressed himself quite clean. I asked where he was going, and he happily joked that he was going to find himself a young wife. In fact, explained Hilse, he was going to some pig celebration in the neighborhood.
Hilse and Helmut.
Helmut is Oma's son. Hilse grew up in a neighboring village. The two run the farm today. They had three children, and of them one still works on the farm. Hilse: The first moment I saw her at the train station, when she picked me up, she was smiling - and she never stopped. Always full of energy, she always does everything well and fast, and she seems to have infinite joy and love for life and people and animals. Helmut: often he was not present at meals, because he had to take advantage of good days to go work the fields with the tractor. He asked me lots of questions about what I want to do with agriculture, and he was interested to know what is permaculture, and he wanted me to go and visit a school-farm which is in the area.
And I could still say lots of things about the other people (the grandson and the two other helpers who were there, a mexican girl and an australian one). They were all so special, such strong people.
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The work.
At the beginning, I thought it was abominable. I had a lot of trouble not to be disgusted by the shit everywhere (for, to increase milk yield, the cows are fed silage, fermented grass and corn, which gives them diarrhea), on the floor, on the milking tubes. The shit which would splash onto us, in the milking hole, when the cows above would shit on the concrete floor. I was disgusted to see Hilse and Helmut's clothes and hands always stinky and covered in shit.
The first days, I was horrified to give milk to the calves to drink in a bucket (because the calves in conventional farming are usually separated from the mother, because it's inconvenient to keep them together). At the beginning, they don't quite know how to drink in this way, and they desperately search for a teat to suck, and they plunge their head fully in the milk and half drown.
But then, after a while, I got struck to notice that I started to half enjoy all this - the shit, the cows, the calves drowning in the milk buckets. I found myself laughing, yes, laughing, when the calves could not drink in the bucket, but instead mostly made lots of bubbles in it.
How striking. What I had, at first, found horrible, could become, after two weeks, almost enjoyable. This reminded me of Georges Orwell's account of the spanish civil war ("Looking Back on the Spanish War"). I had been struck when reading it, by how badly he wanted to fight, and by how much, in the end, as awful as the conditions in the trenches were (even though there was no fighting), they enjoyed it. Now I think that it must be the feeling of brotherhood that does that.
And I am so shocked to see this in myself as well, in this travel. I would much rather dig shit every day all day long with people with whom I get along, than do the most beautiful and meaningful work with people with whom I don't.
A friend of mine who studied anthropology and other social things, says that the greatest need for humans is to be recognized by a group. More and more, I think that she is probably right.
