Cough it up, Farm Girl

I have a cold. It's July, I'm on an equatorial island, and I have a freaking chesty cough and sore throat. On top of that, today was the first time in days that we got a few solid hours of sunshine and I think I got sunburnt, AGAIN. I kid you not, work this week has consisted of me standing in the middle of a patch of lava rock, shivering and hacking away like a Victorian urchin. We've been making a rudimentary road from locally sourced materials (digging lava rock out of the side of a hill, throwing it into a pick up truck and then throwing it back out of the pick up at the other end). Respect to the Romans- road building is hard work, and I doubt they had pick up trucks.

Some shit hit the fan when I got here. Our awesome 6 wheeled all terrain vehicle (a John Deer Gator) got stolen on July 1st, which sucked ass. It could handle the mud on the land and only needed one person to push it out if it got stuck, and I was learning to drive in that thing. As such, my first week everyone was a bit on edge. And then the pick up truck got stuck in the mud and took 5 hours, 3 strawberry guava trees, a ton of ferns, and a barrel-full of lava rock to get it back out. There are days here when you quickly give up on avoiding the mud, and that was one of them.

Apart from a mongoose we trapped on the land, I haven't seen much wildlife here. Animals on Hawaii basically fall into 2 categories- endangered and invasive. There's nothing else really. We saw some weird pheasant things on the land and they looked tasty so I guess they count as endangered. Apart from that there's a few cardinals and birds that look like starlings. And cats, dogs, rats. Mosquitoes.

I've been made honorary farm girl down on the land, which I like because it means it's my job to sort out the pigs and chickens first thing every day, so all the animals have gotten used to me. The chickens now eat out of my hands (but I don't have skanky callous hands so it kinda hurts) and I can usually distract them long enough with food to grab one. They're getting big so we should be getting eggs soon, and the rumour is that one of our two little spams is getting luau'd next week. I haven't named the pigs, I just collectively call both of them Spam. There's a lot of chickens that look the same (we've got about 15), but 2 of the more distinct ones have earned names- Rammstein and Dreadnought.

There's not much to do in the evenings unless we go to the beach. The beach has black volcanic sand and I can't really swim there because it's pretty ferocious but it's still a fairly good spot to chill out at the end of the day.

Today I finally got to do some yoga with my David and Rebekah and a friend of theirs. They do acro-yoga which basically involves being lifted up by David's feet and spun around upside down whilst being told to keep your legs straight and down, which by then is completely impossible because the concept of "down" has been erased and you now only believe in one direction and that's hitting the floor. It's freaky circ-du-soleil stuff, but you feel good afterwards. Hopefully I'll be much more flexible when I leave.

Anyway, as a last note, here's pics of me before and after the demon barber of Samadhi Village got hold of my hair:




As you can see, David forced me to ride in the back of the truck like a dog because I said I'd never had that experience. I'm on my way to becoming a fully fledged hick (no dermatologist wants to see my neck and shoulders right now).