The Farm

 It appears that the coast is clear for at least the next few minutes so I'll take the opportunity to write a bit about life here on the farm.
Life here as a volunteer has changed a lot over the last few years. It sounds like things used to be pretty jolly here. Amnon would play football with the kids and the volunteers, and the tips from the restaurant used to go towards a weekly night in the local pub (run by Amnon and Dalia's son and his wife) and there was even a weekly trip to the hammam in town. There still is a room for the boys and a room for the girls but, for the moment at least, it's just me in the boys' room and just Daphne, the Greek girl with the exceptional Hebrew, in the girls'.
Perhaps because of Covid or maybe because of Amnon's age and recent ill health, life for Daphne and me feels much more like working on a farm, and much less like an international volunteering vibe. There's a lot to do just to keep things ticking over and, inevitably for a farm built very much by hand over the years, there are things which need fixing every day which means that the basic daily tasks are just a background rhythm against which the remaining work takes place. Dalia is a wizard in the kitchen, creating two delicious and satisfying meals a day from seemingly very few ingredients, but Amnon can't help out and the son-in-law Yakov has taken another job in town as a history teacher so he's out on most days.
This means there's a lot of work but actually, despite the moany nature of the opening to this post, it's kind of fun to be working so hard and so physically for so many of the daylight hours. Now I mention it, it might also be the season that means the working day is so intense. It starts to get dark at around a quarter past four here, so there are fewer hours in which to do everything than there would be in the summer.
The day starts at half six with my first round of feeding the animals. I have to give grain, water and corn to the cows; grain and hay to the sheep; grain, straw and water to the horses; food nuggets to the dogs; and take grain and straw in a wheelbarrow down to "the hospital", a field further down the hill where a few of the apparently sick goats and sheep are kept. When I first started this routine, wheeling the wheelbarrow back up the hill from the hospital was the hardest part of the whole routine, but its amazing how things like that quickly become easier as your body gets used to physical labour. I'm also 10 per cent less terrified of going into the horses' enclosure than I was when I started all those eons ago (it's actually only day five.)

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A second round of feeding starts around half three in the afternoon after lunch, which is almost always attended by an ever-changing cast of guests, many of whom are actually here as contractors to do one job or another but who are universally invited to join us at Dalia's table.
This means that I'm hearing an enormous amount of Hebrew which is exactly as I expected: a great way to learn and a weird and isolating way to socialise. Although at yesterday's lunch I asked my first ever question of a guest although I've already been comedically wide of the mark as to what's actually going on as to raise a chorus of laughter. (Today at breakfast, the daughter-in-law who works in the bar was talking about some rude French women who were dismissive and asked too many question. "Wait," I interjected, "was this in the bar?" It turns out that the story was about her visit to the French embassy in Tel Aviv, not about a group of French women coming to an extremely rural local bar. Ah well.)
Each meal starts with a few moments of silent prayer, which is introduced by Amnon falling silent and everyone else following suit. It's broken by him starting to serve himself food and maybe saying a blessing on the bread. Needless to say that it took me a long time to realise that this is what was going on when I first encountered it. I thought it was an uncomfortable silence and, as is my duty as an English person, I broke it with some merry chit-chat. Maybe they need a laminated information card for new volunteers! This would be high on the list.

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On top of the two feeding rounds, I have variously: manhandled animals around the farm, swept leaves from the road that runs from one end to the other (a truly Sisyphean job which seems to end up with things looking more-or-less as they started), carried huge sacks of grain, moved wheelbarrows of big stones, been a waiter in the restaurant, fixed a fence in a far-distant part of the farm, hitched a trailer, built a stone barrier to prevent goat break-outs, cut barbed wire to length and torn fence posts out of the ground with my bare hands.

But there's sweetness here too: the trees are absolutely bursting with fruit so we get amazing oranges, tangerines, star fruit and persimmon, and Daphne likes to sing so we've had some nice evenings of playing songs on the guitar once the evening meal is finished.

Needless to say I'm filthy from dawn until dusk but, as I've noticed before in these periods of physical labour, there's a sense of well-being that is absolutely unique to sitting down after a long day's hard filthy work. So maybe it's kind of worth it. At least for a week or so until I've finally had enough.