11/11/2016 : Sometimes, when we’re bored and have nothing to do, and it's too early to start drinking, we like to go to a supermarket and have a mooch around.
After the depressing scarcity of food in Cuba, walking into the local Chedraui (Mexico's Tesco) was like when Charlie and the other kids first see the Chocolate Factory: our eyes turned to cartoon hearts, and I ran to the pastry section and started filling up my tray with the gusto of Augustus Gloop. That's right, my tray. In Mexico you don't buy bread and cakes by the small plastic or paper bag. Instead, you take a large, round, metal disc the size of a car tyre and some metal tongs, and start piling up the donuts, croissants, bread rolls and carrot cakes. “It's incredible that Mexicans aren't all enormous,” I said, wondering whether to get a donut or a slice of cake and choosing both plus a chocolate croissant and a cookie. I didn't know Mexico has overtaken the US and is actually the world's most obese nation. I’m pretty stupid sometimes, but not that stupid - I voted Remain. We also stocked up on shampoo and shower gel, which we hadn't been able to find in Cuba (we’d taken to washing with a mix of fruit juice, sparkling water and vinegar, as they were the only things sold in the one “shop” we found) in bottles so big they don't fit in my backpack and have to be carried around in their own drawstring bag. But the best moment was when we realised that the entire supermarket was essentially one giant Mexican-food aisle. We skipped through, filling our basket with sauces, tortillas, jalapeños, refried beans and bottles of Corona beer, before checking out absolutely everything else, from the cleaning products to the paper plates. We were just so happy to see products on sale, things that we could take home if we so desired, and not empty shelves and a (typically) grumpy, (surprisingly) large Cuban too lazy to squeeze behind the counter and sell me a Chupa Chup (that really happened).
I realise how awful it may sound that we take such pleasures from something as empty and soulless as simple consumerism, and I admit it is quite awful: I remarked as much as I chose the flavour of cereal bar I preferred that week (hostel breakfasts are rarely enough for a growing duck), but I will try to justify / defend this habitual indulgence thusly. Wait, I can't, I admit it: we’re a pair of shallow consumers who, despite our spurning of the meat industry and our good intentions, enjoy the convenience of a supermarket and will happily shop in one or, as has happened recently, pass the time in one until it's time to catch the bus to the next town.
So, in a vague and vain attempt to be better people, we decided we’d do some volunteer work during our travels and try and Give Something Back, or whatever it is good people do to feel better about themselves. We signed up to a website called workaway.info as a colleague told us his aunt had used it to find people willing to paint a door in her shop, or something like that, in exchange for food and a bed and, as I could imagine myself capable of painting a door, I thought it would be easy to to find somewhere. We scoured the site for something fitting our needs and preferences: no children-looking-after, Pól preferred not to work in a hostel, I preferred to work as little as possible, until we found something which looked both perfect and slightly unbelievable. It was described by the owner as an “eco village” (and we’re the kind of idiots who fall for things with the word “eco” in the title. If petrol were called “eco juice”, we'd probably be saving up to buy a car). The idea of the eco village was to be fully self-sustainable; produce enough food for the people both living on site and visiting, with a little left over to sell. The water all came from the ground, extracted by a solar-powered pump, and every day after some light gardening everyone would go to the nearby cenote (cenotes are below-ground-level pools created by the dinosaur-killing meteor, which landed in Yucatán) for a swim and a beer.
I ask you at this point to remember how far in advance I planned all of this. In fact, I'd contacted the guy that runs the eco village and told him we’d be there for a few weeks in November long enough in advance for a lot to happen. Long enough for, say, the whole project to go tits up thanks to an accidental fire on a neighbour's property, that project to be abandoned and a brand new project started in a different area of the peninsula. So when we rocked up to the site it looked completely different from the pictures we’d seen on workaway, all those many moons before. There were no fruit trees, no ducks (well, one duck), no pool, no hammocks; just a house, 125 acres of untamed land, a couple of dogs, a dying cat, and a tonne of (occupied) wasp nests. Oh, and there was no food. We were allowed to eat what we wanted, but there was no food.
The guy who runs the project is an ex-marine who has kicked so hard against the system that sent him to Iraq he has no faith left in politics, in his country (the US), or the people who live there. He was essentially a very nice person, with very positive goals (what bad can come from people growing enough food to live on while making as little impact on the earth as possible?) and when we arrived at the house (we were volunteers number 2 and 3 of this new project and number 1 had already left), we were super excited to get started. Now, although the closest I have ever come to the tight discipline of the marines is the after-school netball training I did when I was 14, and while I realise I am doing the equivalent of comparing being punched repeatedly in the stomach by someone with a brass hand to being given a wet willy by a three-year-old, it is the only way I can try and understand this guy's rebellion against hierarchy and chain of command. When we finished our training sessions I used to want to ram the whistle so far down the trainer's throat her farts would squeak, in the case of our eco guy, I imagine he had a similar feeling towards his superiors, and therefore shirked any form of command. As a result Pól and I, city rats as we are, having absolutely no experience in permaculture (didn't even know what it was - look it up, it's interesting), having never held a pick axe, never mind used one to dig a hole and plant a pepper tree, we found it hard, nay, impossible to take initiative when instructions were few and far between and consequently spent most of the time feeling as useful as a razor in a hippie’s bathroom.
Speaking of hippies, free spirits, earth children, smartypantses of yonder, I'd never really spent time with their kind. I’d seen them around; recognisable by the abundance of ankle bracelets, hamsa tattoos and (what I now see as) an air of superiority, and apart from being called a hippie when I was a teenager due to my tendency to not wear tracksuits (despite growing up in the north of England) and my (ahem) dreadlocks, I’d had very little experience of these (what I now see as) pretentious wankers and the world they inhabit. I had no idea, for example, that a lot of them live in another reality, in which they are the centre of their own universe.
The hostel we stayed at in Tulum was full of young people with long hair and even longer opinions of themselves, recently graduated or studying things like dolphin poetry, who were still trying to decide what to do with their precious selves and meanwhile spending their parents’ money on diving courses and yoga classes. One girl, who was studying water therapy (I’ve googled it and I’m still not sure), and who wore a turquoise green velour skirt and a pink shirt, would position herself at different points in the hostel garden and either cry until someone went to ask her what was wrong, or dance. She would then pretend to be embarrassed when caught crying or dancing with a falseness only true exhibitionist dickheads can achieve.
So when a third volunteer arrived at the not-quite-but-soon-will-be eco village, we were worried she would be like the people in the hostel and look down on us for washing our faces with soap and eating food that comes in boxes. She wasn't though, she was very nice and the three of us dug holes, planted trees, tried to clean the house despite the lack of cleaning products (“chemicals” are bad, you see, but only some chemicals, marijuana is fine, coffee is fine, salt is fine...) and generally had a nice week.
Pól and I fecked off for my birthday weekend, ate as much food as we could, and when we got back another volunteer had arrived. He was a softly spoken, public-school educated, angel-faced dickhead who had obviously only ever been encouraged by doting parents and was consequently a precocious numpty. He didn't manage to charm either of us, mainly because he spent most of the time telling us how to use a spade, how to cook potatoes and how to make an e-coli water filter out of ferns. Now, the first two things we can already do, not incredibly well I admit, but well enough so as not to need a teenager to help us, and the third thing we don't really care about, so you can imagine how much fun our chats were.
But there was worse to come. Like moths to a flame go the hippies to the volunteer projects (we should have known). The next day a couple with identical dreadlocks and shoes made out of used nappies and old rope turned up while we were eating brelinner (our only meal of the day - food was so very, very scarce) and within five minutes had already challenged us to open our minds and accept that we don't know for sure that breatharianism isn't a valid life choice. Breatharianism, if you don't know (I didn't), is a diet where you eat nothing. You survive (of course you don’t survive) on sunlight, which they call prana and the rest of the world calls bullshit. I started to laugh when dude hippie said this, until I realized this wasn't a laughing matter and I was being judged as rude for dismissing the possibility that people survive without food and water. I know for a fact they can’t as we’d been trying the week before.
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| Needless to say we got fat in Mexico. |
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| Breakfast, lunch and dinner for two weeks. We soon got less fat in Mexico. |
It carried on like this. Some of their bullshit was funny: “I don't like to wear shoes because I like the challenge of walking barefoot,” (we were working in the jungle, finding tarantulas on a regular basis and swinging pickaxes in a way that would have probably made our parents tell us to get inside right away and stop playing with the danger toys). Some of their bullshit was less funny. A theme that came up a lot in their conversations (although their exchanges were less chats and more choruses of appreciation for the others’ wildly nuts assertions) was all the ways you can prevent, or cure, cancer. Minerals in the earth, for example, will stop you getting sick if you stick your hands in soil every day, apparently. Organic food was the reason given for an 80-year-old neighbour being healthy and sprightly. I agree that your diet will affect your health, of course it will, that's why I don't only eat Doritos and ice cream (at least not all the time), but this insistence that everything you needed to avoid dying from cancer (and they were pretty insistent on this point) could be found in a vegetable patch took on an extra element of danger when it was declared that chemotherapy was a poison and killed more people than it cured. Twenty years ago, when my mum survived cancer, I'm pretty sure it was down to the drugs she was given in the hospital and had much less to do with anything being organic. Back then our diet was mainly shepherd's pie and angel delight and no one gave a crap about GM or pesticides (I'm not saying that was a better time; I'm just saying people have survived cancer despite their inorganic diet and thanks to western medicine).
Working and living with the extra volunteers was tough. There weren't enough tools to go around so we continued feeling as useful as a homoeopathic cure in the face of, well, anything, and also, with the extra bodies in the house and continued lack of cleaning products, the place was starting to get the kind of dirty you expect to find on the inside of a skip. The bathroom still haunts our nightmares. None of this seemed to bother the others: they flounced around in their bare feet, girl hippie sat on a stool in the kitchen and made batches of shit-tasting lemonade and complained that there weren't enough pans (she was German and pronounced it “pen”, as in, “I can't verk vithis peeen”). She couldn't work outside though, as she'd stubbed her toe or something. Poor darling, she should have drunk some water that had contained medicine a million years before and seen if that worked. It wouldn't have worked though, because homeopathy is bullshit.
As the days went by, I started to notice similarities between my two least favourite groups of people. I recently saw an interview where a TV presenter asked the amphibious Newt Gingrich how he could insist crime rates had gone up during the Obama administration when all available data showed they had actually gone down. “Well,” slobbered the shit lizard, “it’s your opinion that crime rates have fallen.” “No,” the presenter answered patiently, “it’s a fact. And facts and opinions are different things. That crime has gone down over the last years is a fact, that you are not a mouth breathing pond gecko is an opinion.” The reptile in a suit rebuffed saying people “feeling” that crime rates had gone up was akin to them actually having gone up and tried to muddy the line between fact and opinion until it resembled the puddle he’d been born in. It continued like this until the presenter became so exasperated she strangled him with his own tie. I felt her frustration when, for the millionth time I heard, “how do you know for sure?” They would ask as you thrust page after webpage in their faces explaining the basic chemical pathways used to convert carbohydrates into energy; energy which you need to not die, until your arm was tired and your phone was out of battery. “That’s your opinion,” they’d say, “I think the body is so complicated we can’t understand it or rule out that breatharianism works.”
As well as having a dangerously lackadaisical approach to fact, the hippies listened to music which either sounded like it had been made by people with access to a primary school’s music room and a drawerful of hallucinogens, or else contained a shouty man’s voice which reminded them how to be a hippie. I have a knack for tuning out stuff I don’t want to hear (two years with Pól will do that), but when I paid attention to the lyrics of the shouty man song (yelled over a hardcore techno beat, I must add) I realized it contained lines such as, “who is the enemy? The church is the enemy……..” which was repeated again and again until the ideas of “church” and “enemy” merged into one terrifying blob, which I guess was the intention. Now I’m not sure which church this particular song was talking about, if it meant religion in general or one particularly ugly spire-topped structure, but just like with Trump supporters and their general, non-specific hatred of all things they're told to hate, I don’t think it mattered.
The lowest point came on Tuesday. I imagine the low point of a lot of people's weeks, months, hell, lifetimes came last Tuesday. We’d discovered CNN would be streaming the election live and for free, so we bought some beer and were planning to stay up and watch the event as it unfolded. The attitude of the others towards the election was one of condescending apathy. “Why do you even care? You're not even American,” they asked us no less than a thousand times. When I expressed excitement at the thought that by this time tomorrow there could, might, dare I say probably will? be a female president-elect, girl fuckface helpfully reminded me that Clinton's being a woman didn't automatically make her a better person than Trump. I thanked her for her deep and well-thought-out insight, promised never again to be so binary and simplistic, and threw a jug of shit-tasting lemonade in her face.
By the time they announced the apocalypse, Pól and I had been silently crying for about three hours, and were still pretty glum when we woke up the next day. We're not from the US, but just like millions of people around the world, we’d followed the primaries and election run-up with amusement (Trump4president haha! yeah like that will happen), confusion (shit, he has the nomination), glee (“no, you’re the puppet!”), revulsion (“you can do anything when you're famous…”) hope (hurrah! he’s fucked it!) despair (FBI investigations into Clinton's emails to be reopened), and disbelief (“they’ve fucking elected him,”) as Philadelphia looked set to turn red.
Wednesday morning was hot and breakfastless. We tried to distract ourselves by playing pickaxe, but as we dug for soil in the boiling sun, our patience over the fact that we’d bought and cooked more food than anyone else, were brushing our teeth in the kitchen sink because the bathroom smelt like a drain on a hot day, and were constantly being told how to use a spoon by a kid who was sucking up to a pair of precocious arseholes whose minds were open enough to accept homeopathy but not the fact that the election of Trump is a disaster for everything they care about, was wearing thin. Plus, I'd run out of cereal bars.
So we told eco-village-leader-not-leader we had to head off early because there was so much we wanted to do (like spend a week at Playa del Carmen) and got him to give us a lift to where we’d be able to pick up a taxi. He drank a seventh beer (we were trying to finish the beer we’d paid for so we didn't leave it to the freeloading earth savers), smoked another joint, and off we set. After listening for a week and a half about what was good and healthy, we did the single worse thing for our health we’d done in months by getting into a car with a driver about as competent at driving as Louise Woodward was at babysitting (sorry, that one’s on Pól).
But we survived the ride and off we buggered: our desires to be better people than the supermarket-loving consumers we feared we'd become weaker than our desires to lower our risk of contracting ebola every time we looked at the sofa.
Volunteering, two stars.
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