Day 35.

Today was my last working day in Sasayama... It's both - nice and unpleasant. It's kinda nice, because i know i'll get almost a week long vacation before my next host, but it makes me sad to realize i'm really leaving. The time here passed by faster than expected. I really hope i'll have the chance to come back again!

For my last day at work i had a really precise work to do, so i was crouching, kneeling and sitting in between the rows the whole day. I had to thin out plants that someone fucked up really big time. When you're doing job like that you really think: what the fuck did someone do here?? You clearly see how much someone care about the job they're doing... It's a pity someone just doesn't give a shit about this place, they come and leave, they just do anything to be in the schedule of those working hours, but they don't really care about our community. What you see in the picture is before and after and for this kinda result you spend hours! And with every plant you tear out you are getting angrier and angrier at that Mister Someone and also, with every plant you think how much could you harvest if that job would have been done right. I had to take about 95% of the plants out and just simply throw them out.

Culmination of those thoughts about how much did we throw out today was a movie called Home, which confronted me not just with beautiful pictures of this planet, but also with the real facts and images of people, bringing this world down.

And after the movie i think about where i am right now and what i'm doing and i'm at ease with my doings at the moment... I know that at the moment, i'm not one of those bad guys. I always liked healthy living, simple foods and i assumed i'm environment conscious and that was true, but i had more thoughts in theory than practice. Wwoofing in Sasayama gave me yet another perspective, it proved to me, that it is possible to live in a different way and i am gonna change a lot in my life after i come back to Europe.

If we talked about food a bit more, today something really simple made me happy. We had bread for lunch and everyone was satisfied because of that! It's so nice to see that people do appreciate things like that, but of course, when we're back to our regular lives, we'll go to the supermarket, throw a pack of bread into our baskets and won't think about appreciation anymore. If people would eat simply at least twice a week, it would already make a difference, but most of the people are so spoiled by all this supermarket consumption culture, that they don't care what they eat, because they know - supermarkets are gonna be always full. But what are we gonna do with full supermarkets, when the whole planet is gonna fail..??

Day 30.

Today we have yet another person to stay at our place. It’s not a wwoofer, but a girl from our host’s english school. Parents decided to bring her over here for couple of days, so she can have the chance to hear and speak some english, but also experience the life on a project like ours. She’s a lovely 12 years old and i really hope this is not gonna turn into a bad experience, but her english is quite ok, so i’m sure she’s gonna be fine. Yumi is really friendly, even though sometimes too shy, but we do our best in not scaring her!

I cannot decide if the parents sent her to us for the experience or for discipline. We were joking, that Yumi’s parents are gonna remind her about that place and threaten her when she’s not doing homework - might be true.

One farmer family today made us really happy. They brought us a huge bag of rice, pork,

chicken, watermelon and eggs! That’s was really generous of them. So in the evening we had pork and chicken kaboobs on the barbecue. Was a really nice dinner... And we’re saving the watermelon for tomorrow’s tea breaks. At those points you bow really low, because you know they don’t have to be that generous, so you bow not just for the goods you get, but you bow for them as human beings. And inside you’re happy that there are still people like them, who want to be friendly, who want to make other people happy and who want to share. They still haven’t forgotten, that they’re not alone in this big world.

Day 27.

Such an onion day! Today our small group of four people went to another location, to help out with sorting onions. Even though we were working in the greenhouse (fucking hot!) it was really pleasant day... The farmer was interesting and could speak english, the other two helpers were fair age women. Those were the craziest women i’ve ever met! They spoke just japanese

and really fast, but i sure did my best in communicating with them a little bit. It is always so funny, when people don’t know that i speak japanese, and then in the middle of nowhere i start translating what other wwoofers try to say in english, or reply to them when they’re talking about something that’s regarding us. That’s always a surprise to them! During the breaks we had, farmer brought us ice cream, snacks and drinks - so nice of him, isn’t it?

We got tons of food to bring back from the farmer. Normally i was all the time working in our fields, and then you’re not getting anything to bring back, because you’re working for yourself. We do harvest things and i’m always happy to bring back as many vegetables as possible, but today our group got a big paycheck in form of food which made me so proud of ourselves. We are providing food and that’s really important to our community, since we eat what we get. Lately the food wasn’t too good and all the time the same and we kinda ran out of fresh tomatoes - they are getting ripe again now, but it was just couple of days, where we had over 20 people and all the ripe tomatoes and other vegetables were eaten. The same food is pretty good for your body, but it gets on your mood sometimes, when you don’t really know what you’re going to eat and you’re not really sure if there’s gonna be something to eat, although we never ran out of food and all the time were full - never hungry. Anyway, today we all felt a little bit relieved, having pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, we harvested quite a few eggplants and squash, had cabbages, so we had the reason to smile.

Our "paycheck"

This wwoofing place is really interesting, because we are all part of a project, which involves the whole region - we’re not really wwoofing for the host himself, we’re working in our fields and growing things for ourselves and also we’re everyday doing volunteer work for other (!) farmers, who need help but cannot pay. There are many farmers around this area, who are already old and it’s hard for them to manage all the fields, so what they would do in weeks, we can make it in a day or two, because we have lots of workers. All they give to us is bag of potatoes or rice, sometimes soup or other household tools. It is impressive when you’re thinking about the help we are actually giving to the farmers. It’s a beautiful project and i’m glad i can be a part of it...

Tomorrow three other guys are leaving us and our family is getting smaller again. So we decided to have a dress up party tonight and just go crazy, since it’s our “Friday”. It was nice, because even though we spend lots of time together, we haven’t done any parties or anything of

that kind. We had some snacks and guys had drinks. The drinkers played a sake game, so lots of them got wasted by the end of the day. It was good to ventilate our mind a little bit.

In the evening we had one new wwoofer from Germany, but we’re still a pretty small family in comparison to what we had when every room was filled with couple of wwoofers! I really like this place, even though it has lots of bad sides, but overall rating would be definitely a good one!

I decided to manage my blog in a different way. I’m not gonna merge the posts itself, i’m trying to write about each day separately. But i cannot publish the posts as often as i would like to, so it might happen, that i publish two or three posts at once. But i think it’s a better way to deal with it in this kinda situation.