A corner is turned with Dalia

Today for the first time Dalia, uncompromising and severe owner of the goat farm and associated restaurant, smiled at me properly. An actual human connection was formed.

***

It's been a day of unlocking and possible corner-turning in my Israeli agricultural labourer's life. The catalyst for this has come from a most unlikely source. An actual agricultural labourer, rather than a tourist temporarily posing as one, has arrived from the North of Thailand, near Cheng Mai.

There seems to be some kind of agreement between the governments of Israel and Thailand that labourers can come here for five years and send money home to their families. It's the same story as we have in Britain: apparently there are some jobs that Israelis just no longer want to do. (Having done seven days of such a job, I think I can say "fair enough".)

Our Thai labourer arrived lost and alone and utterly confused, speaking not a word of English, never mind Hebrew. (This actually turns out to not quite be true: he knows about a dozen words, and seems to know most of the numbers up to ten.) To make matters worse his brand new Israeli SIM card, purchased very wisely by him at the airport (I don't know how this transaction took place), will give him calls and texts but no internet which means no Google Translate and god knows what he will find to do in his room in the evenings with no books, no music and no internet.

But the arrival of this 26-year-old has instantly transformed my existence. It was clear from the first morning, when I showed him the routine, that he was already much better than me at wielding a pitch fork, pushing a wheelbarrow and filling giant sacks with hay. In an idle moment, we chatted via typing into Google Translate, and it turned out that his previous job had been working with goats and horses in a Thai military camp. (Both Amnon and Dalia, when I told them this, separately asked the very good question I hadn't thought to ask: why does the army need goats? I asked him later and he didn't know.)

Now I'm no expert on the Thai army, but I would guess that they run a tight ship and that there's not much lazing around or skiving from the workers. It's a pretty safe bet that what I'd found to be back-breaking toil will appear to him to be the most comedically easy job of his adult life. He's a fast learner, a quick and attentive worker and basically he already kicks my ass in all the things I've been doing since I got here. Excellent news.

***

This, and the departure of Daphne, the Greek goddess of the Hebrew language, means that I have now been put into the role of the female volunteer and am helping out in the restaurant. This is extremely welcome news to me, and meant that today Dalia and I have been in cahoots. At around 11am, a never-before-heard-of coffee break took place in the kitchen while the labourers continued their toil. During this break, I spoke to Dalia properly for the first time as a fellow human, not as someone who is doling out the next task, or assessing the quality of the previous one.

I asked why she's not making more of an effort to get more volunteers, and she described to me how exhausting it's been, over the last 30 years, to constantly have to tell a never-ending stream of newbies how to do the same small number of tasks and to watch them get in wrong in every imaginable fashion.
She told me of a volunteer who, having been told to weed a vegetable patch, dug up every plant in the garden, apparently including a sage plant that had been established for decades. She told me of flooded pathways, spilt milk, garden tools in the cutlery drawer and every manner of mistake that, to someone who knows how things should look, seem like the most idiotic things in the world but to someone who has no idea of what good or bad are supposed to look like, might seem completely understandable.

So she's tired. Tired of explaining every last tiny detail of every last job, for fear that a misunderstanding or a misalignment of vision might lead to some new catastrophe. She needs an assistant; someone to look after the volunteers and make sure they're not making things worse.

She's also set the bar very high in hospitality terms because she makes two or three excellent meals a day from scratch for the volunteers so if the numbers swell this becomes a serious undertaking (and doesn't actually bring in any more money because more volunteers just means that the existing volunteers work less.)
So I can totally understand her manner. Her tone of utter exhaustion when a tool you've never seen before ends up in the wrong one of six rusty containers full of things you don't recognise. She's had enough.

I described to her how she comes across and she said "it's not you, it's everyone for thirty years."

It's impossible to argue with that.

Just one of the incredible and delicious meals Dalia has been serving up to her volunteers day in and day out for 30 years. This was breakfast a few days ago. Wow.