WWOOF

Buri Ram, Thailand
This last week we had the chance to work on our tans...farmer tans. Steve and I spent the week living in rural Thailand volunteering on an organic farm. We found the farm through the WWOOF website. The deal is that you volunteer to work and in exchange the farm provides food and accomodation. So, each morning we worked under the hot Thai sun on various tasks such as removing caterpillars from fruit trees, helping with the rice harvest by carrying bushels of rice to a thresher, adding manure, fertilizer and mulch to young plants, visiting the local rice mill to get husks for mulch, and shoveling gravel. In exchange for our four hours of labour each morning we were hosted by a Thai family in a village 7km away from the farm. The accomodation was basic (ie cold shower available only when the water was working and a squatty potty) and somewhat unclean (ie mouse turds littering our bedroom floor, bed and pillows...I had to close my eyes in the kitchen) BUT the couple was extremely hospitable. They took us out for dinner in neighbouring towns, visited with us, invited fellow Canadians over, introduced us their colleagues, and of course fed us great food. My personal favourite was the steamed pumpkin filled with sweet egg custard that we were served as part of breakfast one day.