The Humans I Work With

After being on a farm for a week and driving down endless country dirt roads, the town of Jyväskylä, about 30 miles north of where I'm staying, seems like a veritable metropolis.  By Finnish standards it basically IS a veritable metropolis, since any town over 50,000 people in Finland is more or less gigantic.  Jyväskylä has about 130,000.

The first things that have struck me here is that there are people whose skin is not blindingly white and that you have to pay to go to the bathroom.  One euro.  You actually have to pay.  For the past week I have been peeing in fields 98% of the time so this is a little bit annoying.

It is nice that there are immigrants here.  In Finland there aren't nearly as many as in other Scandinavian countries (in Norway you can go to any town, no matter how big and no matter how in the middle of nowhere it is, and there will always be at least a few people from the Gambia or Liberia or some other faraway place).

But enough about Jyväskylä and the commerce I'm currently enjoying.  Today I'd like to describe the people I work with on a daily basis, since people are the only thing that ever really matter anyway.

Ari

The boss.  The patriarch.  Answers his phone "Ari Seppälä" barely in a whisper and then talks progressively louder as the conversation goes on.  I regard him with a mixture of respect and unbridled terror.  He is one of the hardest working people I have ever met, but a TINY TINY part of me suspects that this is only because he doesn't want to be dealing with his family all day and just wants his "me" time.  The other night at dinner Marja (his wife) said she thought Helsinki had the best engineering school in the country and Ari said, "You have no idea what you're talking about".  He can be a little rough around the edges but also joke around and be kind, too.

Marja

The real boss, and I say that because apparently she has the final word in everything and because Ari sometimes refers to her as "the boss".  She is wonderfully kind and somewhat reserved but for a Finn she is basically as outgoing as they come.  Last night after dinner we had about a twenty minute conversation in which she explained to me how she doesn't get along well with all of her sisters, especially after she urged one of them to divorce her husband.  Come to think of it Finns are generally pretty reserved but can casually say things that most Americans might consider kind of private.  The first day I got here Ari casually brought into the conversation the relationship he had growing up with his dad (apparently it was more like two friends living together than father son) after we had only known each other about an hour.  But anyway, Marja is wonderful and cooks a mean perch stew.

The Kids

Ako, Virti and Peppi.  I have exhanged maybe 15 words with all three of them combined.  They're so used to having strange people in the house they don't really care who you are.  And I get the feeling they resent a little bit having to compete with strangers for their parents' attention.  But I could be reading into this.

Irina

At first I liked her, now I more or less despise her.  She's blunt and has the sense of humor of a bag of tacks.  Irina is the other WWOOFer and she's from Russia.  You only need to know three things about her: 1) She doesn't use toilet paper because she "spent some time in India".  2) She won't kill the wasps that fly into her room and harass her every morning because she "doesn't like to kill things".  And 3) She uses a wood-burning stove even though there's a perfectly good electric range right next to it that takes about 1/15th of the time to use.  And she says the word "porridge" about 100 times every morning.  At first we got along swimmingly (sort of) but now we barely speak.

Madders

I still have no idea how to spell this guy's name.  He's from Latvia and he's been working on the farm off and on for five years making 7 euros an hour.  Ari said at one point that Finns won't do this work and now I understand why -- it pays horribly.  Madders is a great guy and I love him to death but he's also horribly racist and I'm having a hard time dealing with it.  He's said some fairly offensive things and I fear that we might have a confrontation in the near future, but also get the impression he knows I'm not ok with some of the things he says and maybe avoids the subject.  All that aside, yesterday we packed honey together for about three hours and listened to the radio and (I) sang and it was a great time.

I better go now though.  I'm at the tourist office and there's a girl who I think's waiting for the computer.

Hei hei!

Mark

Bee Keeping

Hello everyone --

I have decided that since I am once again in Finland, and it is once again (almost) summer, that I should make an attempt at reviving this blog.  Plus, since I'm currently an indentured serv --  worker -- on an organice honey farm in Finland, there should be plenty to write about.  For whatever reason, as Im going about my daily work, sanding 2 x 4s and putting up bear fences, beautifully crafted sentences always flow freely in and out of mind, and then of course the minute I sit down to write I have trouble putting anything more than four words together.  But Ill do my best.  And also please pardon the lack of apostrophes.  I dont really know where they are on this computer, as they have been replaced by the "ä" so important to Finnish words like "nähdään", which means "see you".

I live with a Finnish family.  Or actually I live in a little cottage by the lake with a sauna next to it.  I cant lock the door, and on the first night I was afraid a lumbering brown bear might try to poke his head in to investigate or that one of the neighbors might steal my socks when I was sleeping, but the only problem Ive had so far was a wasp that would come in every day around 6am looking for a place to put its new nest.  I dont like killing anything but in this case it was unavoidable.  As Ari said, the father of the family and guy I basically work for, "Life is cruel".

But life isnt really all that cruel out here on this beautiful farm.  Its just tons of hard work.  Ive never seen anyone work harder than Ari and Marja do.  Ari more or less works continuously from 10am to 9pm every night.  But they dont really consider it work.  The just consider it "things that need to get done".  And when you have about 800 bee colonies there are always things that need to get done, like the bear fences weve been putting up since i got here.

Apparently there are brown bears in central finland.  I always thought bears in Finland were only in the east next to Russia and and the north, but four brown bears have been terrorizing Aris beehives for the past few weeks, the first bear problems in this area since the mid 90s.  It doesnt sound like a huge deal losing a bee colony (which basically looks like a small filing cabinet except filled with a thousand little insects that desperately want to sting you in the throat), but Ari calculates that the loss of each colony costs him about 600 euros.  And the government, bless its Finnish heart, compensates bee farmers 300 euros, but it can still be a very substantial loss.  Hence, the fences. 

The reason I used "throat" as the part of the body that bees desperately want to sting you in is because on my first day here I got stung in the throat.  But it was actually (sort of) my fault, as I was standing directly in front of the flight path for the bees to get back to their colony and I wasnt wearing any kind of protective gear.  But I havent been stung since, and Ive come to learn a lot about bees, which has been one of the best parts.  Here are a few things Ive learned:

1) Bees will never sting you just to sting you.  The only sting you when you make them mad or when they panic.  One thing you can do to make them REALLY mad is try to take their honey, since you are essentially stealing their food.  One time during honey harvesting Motters, a racist Latvian kid whos been working here on and off for the last five years, got stung in the face twenty times when a nail in the box he was carrying ripped a hole in his suit.  Twenty times.  Apparently your body gets somewhat used to it after you get stung enough, but I dont think it could ever get used to that kind of attack.

2) All worker bees are female.  Plus the queen, of course, is female.  So where are the males and what do they do?  Well, the males are called "drones" and they do nothing.  They sit around and eat until theyre grown up, and then they go off in search of a queen to impregnate.  If they find one and mate, they die.  If they dont find one and dont mate, the eventually die.

3) The queen is an interesting character.  The only difference between a queen and a regular bee is her diet.  A few days after theyre born most bees stop receiving proteins and become workers.  But the queen keeps receiving proteins and become bigger and more prominent.  I always thought the queens just kind of sat there in one of the cells of the honey comb, but this is not the case.  Shes always walking around looking busy, because if she doesnt the workers start to think shes sick or that somethings wrong.  She must keep up apprearances.  Also, whereas the workers die off every year, she can live for up to five years.  Imagine if all your acquaintances died every year and were replaced by a new crop, for lack of a better word, the following year.  The queen must be emotionally tough.

But enough about bees for now.  I also feed the chickens every morning, for example, and I catch the mother hen eyeing me with undisguised loathing every time I come into the coop and take the one egg she layes (though yesterday she laid two).

It has been an interesting few days here on the farm and Im excited to see what comes next.  The sun is setting sometime after 10pm i think and it never gets fully dark.  At 11pm you could easily sit outside and read the newspaper.

I hope all of your are well (and by "all of you" i mean the two or three or zero) who have read this far, and enjoying your springs.  More to come soon.

Mark