Titania Veda

Whiff of Whimsy: Living Without the Bare Necessities

With fluffy pillows propped around me, I bounced on the soft white sheets of a bed in Mexico City’s new airport hotel, ecstatic to have electricity and a modern toilet at arm’s reach.

These may be simple necessities for some, but following a sojourn on a Mexican farm, they were luxuries for me. Less than 12 hours before, I had been deep in the hills, toiling away on one with none of the amenities listed above — unless one counts the compost toilet.

Finca Tres Mundos is a concept farm owned by Elham, an Iranian-American, and her Mexican husband, Luis, who decided to build a sustainable farm on the mounds of Mazatepec. They constructed a stone house on the top of a hill, an adobe mud hut at the bottom and sprinkled two donkeys, three sheep, two dogs, a cat and half a dozen chickens in between.

To reach the farm, it took over an hour to clear the massive metropolis of Mexico City — which has spread its growing tentacles of white-washed houses onto the mountainsides like an unstoppable disease — to Xalapa in the east.

From there, it was a 40-minute ride into the forest and the village of Mazatepec, where the bumpy main road can only handle one truck at a time, donkeys tied to the side of buildings bray incessantly and the local butcher sells her wares on the verandah of an abandoned building. Then, after 10 minutes of walking and lugging my 15-kilogram backpack over hills, slopes, muddy paths and a stony creek, I finally arrived.

A family of four Mexicans greeted me in front of the hut where volunteers sleep. Mariana, a 30-year-old painter and muralist, was farm-hopping around Mexico with her family, home-schooling her daughters, Paula, 12, and Valentina, 6. The children’s father was a bullfighter who Mariana eloped with at the tender age of 17 and divorced a few years ago. She was now with her sculptor lover, Cesar.

At first, I had been concerned about the sleeping arrangements, as the family was already occupying the place and there was naught inside the hut except for a large table piled with sleeping bags and thin mattresses. Elham, sensing my distress, pulled out another table from under the mattress-laden one and presented my “bed” to me with a smile. I spent my nights huddled next to a snoring Mariana, fancying myself to be in a war refugee camp — minus the bombs or killing rampages, of course.

My first sunset was spent roasting marshmallows by a bonfire and attempting to understand the Spanish jokes. Since there was no electricity, it was dark, save for the sky’s cloak of stars. Our dinner was simple: roasted potatoes, tomatoes and onions, and lemon juice as a dressing. As night fell, the temperature dropped, forcing us to head into the main house where we played card games by candlelight.

The following day, I worked with Cesar to take down the roof of a cob hut that was to be rebuilt into a chicken coop. Cesar barely spoke English and my Spanish was no better, so instructions were acted out like a game of charades.

After the laborious job of dismantling the roof and running away from angry wasps that were living in the wood beams, I was ready for more ladylike duties and turned to separating squash seeds, to be dried and roasted, with Elham.

At the farm, even the basics required effort. The compost toilet was an open-air two-tiered wooden shack with a cement seat to squat on. Bodily fluids amassed at the lower level, which smelled like a horse stable due to the wood chips masking the odor. What was most disconcerting was the quiet — how I missed the sound of flushing!

The problem with having one toilet for seven people occurred in the mornings when I, busting for the loo, would usually find someone already there before me. But at night, I discovered that counting stars could help pass the time.

Showering was another matter. On this farm, the act of bathing demanded planning and patience, as it involved using a bucket system and boiling water 20 minutes beforehand.

“The bucket system turns most people off,” said Elham, telling me of a previous volunteer who hadn’t bathed for over a week. These days, volunteers will find a sign in the adobe hut that reads: “In consideration of others, all visitors must bathe AT LEAST once every four days.”

Life here wasn’t much different from that of poor Indonesian villages, where poverty imposes these conditions upon its residents. Yet here were individuals putting themselves through the difficulties and hassle voluntarily.

Still, I was glad I tried it out. Even if only to discover that I, spoiled city child, was not cut out to be a traveling farmer. It took all of 48 hours before I sprinted back to Mexico City as fast as the bus could take me. After all, I had basic needs that had to be met. And a hot power shower in the winter was one of them!

Titania Veda writes a weekly travel column. She is a former features reporter at the Jakarta Globe.

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