Seven Days Of Work

A quick closure of our WWOOFing experience for this entry, as we’ll be loading more pictures on Facebook soon.

Firstly, to properly introduce our hosts. Lukas and Klara Hadasovi had come a long way since their urbanite lifestyles in Prague, to their current ideal of a mostly self-sustaining 20-hectare farm in a rural part of Czech Republic, near the Polish border. A non-commercial outfit, their 3 dairy cows and 8 chickens produce enough to feed their family of six. You can say they’re dreamers. But certainly not a dream for everyone, lovely as it sounds, beautiful are their fields and 4 children. Took them many years of musing solitude before they painstakingly self-learnt how to run a farm, and much trial and error before their homemade food taste scrumptious.

There’s not much of a routine here except to milk the cows, feed hay to the 2 horses, and for Klara to home-school her kids for one fidgety hour. So our work gets pretty varied – Chopping/burning fir-wood, fixing up fences, transplanting seed(lings), shoveling compost, attempting to help with cooking or babysitting etc. Gets tough sometimes but certainly good exercise for us both!

We learnt quite a fair bit too from our daily interaction with the Hadasovis. Like the rest of the ex-communist satellite countries, nobody in Czech Republic likes Russia. Parenting also seem to be a common thread running through our travels as people have been talking to us about a variety of parenting issues. In this farm with 4 children under the age of ten, the discussion centered on freedom and space for children to play, including ideals on safety (like internalizing in children awareness through experience for heights, hot surfaces, sharp objects etc and thereby allowing the parents to trust and leave them largely unattended), training them not to seek attention cry over cuts and bruises (We were very impressed), spending family time, etc.

We also really enjoyed listening from them about nutrition (on natural versus chemical laden), ecological sustainability, and how slower is better than faster, handmade is better than factory produced, poorer is better than richer – it was definitely a refreshing change from urban life. The Hadasovis aim to be fully self sustaining rather than selling their organic products or having a small homespun businesses to make money. We thought that was an interesting paradigm shift.

Besides the philosophy discussions, we learned the multiple uses of milk including butter, cheese (in 7 days Sharon saw Feta, Mozarella, yogurt cheese, cottage cheese, hard cheese, and cheese steaks being made!), curd, yogurt, and cream. We ground raw wheat for bread, pasta, dumplings, pancakes. We made mayonnaise. Klara makes supermarket bought ingredients look like instant food: before use, raw wheat needs to be ground and sifted. Milk needs to be born, fed, de-cowed (‘milked’), filtered, and pasteurized to 65 degrees. Somewhat similar process for eggs. Butter needs to go through the ‘milk’ process then go through several further steps. Tea is gathered, dried and steeped in boiling water. One gets the idea. We do some of these steps while actually preparing meals.

So all these and much more, as we venture towards our travelling phase based on volunteering opportunities around. :)