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Published: November 22nd 2009
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In Which I Leave My Mark on Prince Edward Island
I am volunteering on a farm that makes soap from goats milk, which sounded interesting. The family I am staying with are ... somewhat different to my previous experiences. The mother - Em - runs the soap making business, the father is a freelance homeworker, and the two children are homeschooled, and so are like precocious little adults with limited social skills. Or perhaps they're just being normal teenagers, I am ill-equipped to judge. There is also a foreign exchange student from Hong Kong living here, and two very loud chinese toddlers the family have recently adopted, that are allowed to run riot. I sense some 'modern parenting' at work here. At meal times, they do not say grace - they sing it, while everybody holds hands. I cannot tell you how surreal this is for me, holding hands with whoever I happen to be sat next to, miming the words to a song I don't actually know, whilst two unruly chinese toddlers scream and shout and pull faces throughout the whole thing.
But after a few days I start to get used to things - the family all
turn out to be very likeable, and even the toddlers become bearable. Actually no, they don't - I never really get used to the toddlers.
I spend the first few days doing manual labour tasks that they seem to have saved up for a male WWOOFer (a rarity here, it seems), and so I muck out the goat sheds for a couple of days, and dig a five foot deep hole for a plumber to come and fix some water pipes. I am starting to get a bit fed up with this sort of thing, when Em suggests I take an afternoon off and go to the beach. She has to take her daughter to a birthday party on the other side of the island, will drop me off on the way and pick me up on her way home. This sounds like an excellent plan to me, and I grab a coat and we drive off.
I am dropped at the Cavendish Grove park, where I take a nice stroll down to a deserted beach. The sun is shining, and although the wind is bitterly cold, it is all very pleasant. Or at least it would have
been had I not felt the sudden urge for - how can I put this - a 'number two', the moment they drove off. This place would be swarming with tourists during the summer and so has loads of public conveniences, all of which I discover - to my growing alarm and dismay - are locked for the winter. Walking seems to help, and I take a long path out from the dunes and end up at Green Gables. This is the place where the famous book "Anne Of Green Gables" is set. However, just after I arrived here The Urgent Need returned with a vengeance, and so I will always remember it as the place where I almost shat myself.
I make my way (with what can best be described as a kind of clenched waddle) back to the car park where Em is to pick me up, and arrive at the appointed pick up time. There is nobody there. I sit down on some steps in an attempt to alleviate The Urgent Need, and this seems to work. Half an hour later and there is still no Em, I am getting cold and p*ssed off. (I was
also quite bored, and took a photo of myself waiting. That's how bored I was).
An hour after the appointed pick-up time and there is still no Em. It is almost dark, I am very cold, and getting worried that something has happened. After a further fifteen minutes, I decide action is necessary to avoid my frozen corpse being discovered here next spring.
So it is that I leave my mark on the island, and scratch the following message with a stone onto the car park tarmac: "EM. HITCHED. STU."
Then I walk to the road to try my luck hitching back. I don't actually know where the farm is on the island, so it is probably quite lucky that Em chose this moment to show up. The ensuing conversation:
Em (cheerily): "Hello! Sorry I'm late. I got involved in some party games."
Me (manfully keeping rage in check): "I see. How late do you think you are?"
Em (slightly puzzled): "Fifteen minutes - why?"
Me (unable to hold back any longer): "Actually you're an hour and fifteen minutes late."
Em (confusion reigns): "I... Really?"
There follows a long period of silence as Em absorbs
Green Gables
Nearly the scene of an unpleasant incident this, while I radiate cold into the car. It turns out the clocks in the party house had not been changed to Daylight Saving Time, and she is suitably apologetic. When we eventually got home I managed to satisfy The Urgent Need without further incident, and Em bought me a massive bar of chocolate. Which was nice, and strangely appropriate.
I spent the rest of my time here making soap, which is ironically a hugely messy business. My tasks included melting coconut oil, cocoa and shea butters (but without getting them too hot), taking the temperature of lye solutions and goat milk, mixing soap, pouring it into moulds, dismantling moulds and cutting bars of soap, then setting them in the drying room, and applying labels to plastic bottles, then measuring and filling them with liquid soap.
I also manage to fix the Hong Kong student's laptop so it can connect to the internet - no mean feat given that it is all in mandarin. Since many others have previously tried and failed to fix it, the student is convinced that I am a computer genius, and I am treated like a god for the evening. Which status, naturally,
I accepted with due humility. Praise Me! etc.
By the time I leave I have learned the very basics of soap-making, I can now milk a goat, and have thoroughly enjoyed another WWOOFing experience.
I am headed into Nova Scotia next to work on another goat farm - this one makes goat cheese. The bus stops in Halifax and I have to waste an afternoon there before catching the connecting bus, so I do the only sensible thing: go to the cinema and see a film called "The Men Who Watch Goats" (which is excellent, by the way).
Next stop: Nova Scotia goat cheese farm - my final WWOOFing experience!
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anonymous
non-member comment
I make soap and it really does not need to be that messy. I wouldn't say those pics demonstrate "best manufacturing practices"