Urban WWOOFer: Life and Farming in Bloomington

                                                                                    September 10,  2012

Farming in Indiana!
I am lucky enough to be staying in a household incredibly connected to small farms, exactly where I hoped to make connections.  Amanda works for the urban gardens of the city; Rob does a work-exchange on the raw milk farm; Mike works a couple of days on an orchard.  The forth roommate does urban planning for bicycles and pedestrians: I am such a good match for this bunch it is dumbfounding!


Schacht Farm:  

The first places I offered help was a turkey and pig farm.  They are organish, they say:  they do not give their animals antibiotics and generally stick to sustainable practices, but for a small farmer, organic feeds and the many hoops to jump through are far too large to become “Certified Organic”.  I arrived to the task of moving turkeys—1000 of them—from the indoor barn to a field.  Until that point in their first two months of life, they would have been too small to live through rain and cold nights outside.  Eventually, though, they grow to a point of overcrowding each other in their barn, and these were well past that (think PETA video). 

      The Job:

-          Unloading big, heavy turkey crates from truck to inside barn

-          Stuffing 10 turkey apiece in each

-          Loading full (and heavy) crates on truck

-          Hiking behind truck to field to unload all crates from truck and all turkeys from crates

-          Loading the truck with empty crates, returning to barn
-     Repeating x 3

      Highlights: 

-          Turkey feces and even turkey blood most notably on your shoes...but also everywhere else

-          Chasing turkey around in circles to catch them (a lot like the “Pig Scramble” I participated in at the Ottawa County Fair in small town Ohio at the impressionable young age of nine)

-          Shoving turkey in crate, scrambling for another, and watching the first jump out as you return to add the second

-          Being “paid” in sausage


Community Gardens

Bloomington has not only many community gardens, but it is small enough that they are organized collectively (not even conceivable in my oversized NYC).  The city partially funds both the gardens and actual paid employees (also not conceivable in NYC)!  There is a garden plot rental program through the City of Bloomington, gardening classes and information accessible through the city's website.  Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, a Bloomington nonprofit based on food as a human right, also runs several of the gardens.  They strive to ensure wide access to healthy food by maintaining a food pantry; by providing youth education and gardening education programs; and by maintaining several community gardens both with personal plots for individuals and collective plots that staff manage and volunteers help maintain from which anyone can come and take.

Community Past-times:

-    Alcohol.  For high schoolers, college students, and the community in general, drinking is a big part of life.  
-    There is very little dancing.  I was enthusiastic to explore any and all available dance, and found little supply and little demand.  If they worked on this, there may be less need for the alcohol!

-    Punk music.  Apparently, punk is big in midwestern cities. From the very little I understand about it from seeing it in action previously and in B-Town, it is the epitome of the Caucasian American music scene.  High noise but not necessarily high artistry, almost no dancing, lots of beers in hand.  Lukily, eventually I did find some great jazz (albeit everyone was consuming it standing still rather than participating by moving).

The Catholic Worker:
Dorothy Day was the founder and main visible symbol of the movement until her death in the 1980s.  She considered herself a "Christian Anarchist"--"Christian" in the sense of radical christianity, retracing back to roots in service, voluntary poverty, and acceptance, and "Anarchist" in the acceptance and approval of resistance against illigitimate authority.  

The CW's self-description in 120 words:

"The Catholic Worker Movement began simply enough on May 1, 1933, when a journalist named Dorothy Day and a philosopher named Peter Maurin teamed up to publish and distribute a newspaper called "The Catholic Worker." This radical paper promoted the biblical promise of justice and mercy.
Th CW movement has no centralized body and is comprised of entirely autonomous groups in different cities (or sometimes autonomous groups even within the same city) who rather than take orders ask themselves, "How can we live the mission and do good where we are?".  In that regard, it is much like the "Food Not Bombs" movement. 

Thus, each is structured differently. CW houses have "workers" and guests, whether they be semi-permanant, short-term, one-night, or visitors for meals only.  At Bloomington's CW, there are 6 permanant workers and space for about twelve guests.  Guests are allowed to stay for up to one year and can participate in the community at almost any level. They must be out between the hours of 9 and 5 Monday through Saturday, but have a room and the option of participating in community meals every evening.  They are not allowed to contribute finanically--they are allowed the time to get back on their feet.  One of the few rules is 'no untreated mental illness and no untreated drug problems' (implying that if they are actively seeking help, they are supported).

Workers, on the other hand, are expected to work part-time and contribute 50% of their income to the collective pool of the house.  The other 50% is theirs.  That money will cover food, housing expenses, etc. for everyone.  Other CW groups have completely different financial systems:  some ask you to contibute all income, while in  larger city like Chicago, for example, volunteers may be expected to give 40 hours a week at the CW.   Some have meetings to decide whether you can take out money from the discretionary funds for something you need/want, while others allow a weekly allowance that you can use as you like.  
In Bloomington, none of the workers are Catholic, but most associate themselves with some religion (Quaker, Methodist, Buddhist, etc).  Some are markedly non-religious; some only allow Catholic workers.                                                                                                                                      Bn
            

Catholic Worker (CW) homes are in about 200 cities across the country and around the world, but the first one I encountered was a CW from Chicago where I would have expected anything by that name:  at a massive political protest in Georgia of the School of the Americas.  The CW movement is materialized today in many different forms, but generally speaking it manifests as a collection of independent Houses of Hospitality, where Catholic Workers live alongside less permanant guests:  whoever may be passing through, the poor and the suffering.  Catholic workers strive to serve people, anyone and everyone, by offering shelter, distributing free lunches, running free clinics, community gardening, services for inner city children, political street theater, campaigning...etc.  Catholic Workers see themselves not as a charitable organization but as a family striving to live a beautiful vision of what could be rather than lamenting our broken society.  Many have chosen "downward mobility", that is often choosing to live a life less dictated by money and thus often without much.  

Grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person, their movement was committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and the Works of Mercy as a way of life. It wasn't long before Dorothy and Peter were putting their beliefs into action, opening a "house of hospitality" where the homeless, the hungry, and the forsaken would always be welcome.

Over many decades the movement has protested injustice, war, and violence of all forms.Today there are some 223 Catholic Worker communities in the United States and in counties around the world." 

Apple-Picking at a Mennonite Orchard:

I stayed for three nights with a Mennonite family on their orchard outside of Bloomington.  The parents had nine children, all of them home-schooled.  They had built their own house and had gardens and orchards on both their land and rented land.  They both also teach in the winter at a local Mennonite college when Mennonite students from around the country come to study. 

I had not expected that their house would be very modern, their gardens not organic, and their diets industrial.  Mennonites are not Amish, although they have many of the same beliefs.  Both are Anabaptists, notable for: taking the Bible literally, women covering their heads, dressing simply, taking nonviolence literally, and having "believer's baptism", or baptism when they are "old enough to decide as adults to take god into their lives".  That said, while Amish accomplish their goals by separating themselves from mainstream society, Mennonites see their goals and needs being met by integrating into mainstream society.  

While there, I spent my days picking apples, picking weeds, sorting apples, and doing dishes.  Twelve people at each meal dirty a lot of dishes.  

I decided to join the family for the midweek church service for the experience.  I did not realize until we arrived that the father was the pastor!  The church was simple with wooden pews, a piano but not a single musician, and hymn books to be shared.  There were about 20 people in attendance:  11 of whom being the family and myself and 2 more grandparents.  Low attendance may be a good sign for heathens everywhere.  The service was terrible:  a form of torture.  The wooden pews felt as though a team of scientists had studied ergonomics and then designed to oppose their findings intentionally (perhaps preventative measures for sleeping in church).  No carpenter could have accidentally gone that wrong.  There was no music to join our singing, and all of the songs sounded quite meloncholic and depressing (even "No Tears in Heaven" was so depressing it made me want to cry).  The pastor had no intonation, no interest in his voice, none of the liveliness that other cultures expect in their church.  There were no bibles to be found; everyone carries their own regularly.  They ALL have memorized and can randomly recite bible passages.

The children participate in the yearly "Bible Bee".  The second eldest, now a freshman in college, has gone to nationals all three times that he has competed.  They study regularly:  in the car, one read the title to another (such as Job 1:1 - 2:10), and the daughter of about 12 recited verse after verse of King James with language so dated that I could not understand most of it.  To think of what it would take my brain to memorize like that; I can only imagine the amount of time these kids spend with their Bibles!