The Village of Happiness

Below you will find the day by day account of my time at the village of happiness (not its actual name mind).

Day 1:

I arrived at the village with very little fanfare. I met some of the devotees and 2 English girls who were already volunteering there and who were to become my besties for the next week. 
In terms of people, the village is divided up into:

Devotees: They stay for free it appears. They chant a lot and wear a great deal of orange and the males have rat tails at the back of their heads.

Workers: They get paid and actually look like they do some work.

Volunteers: These suckers PAY to work at the village, while hopefully being converted to vegetarianism.

Highlight: Making bread.

Lowlight: Being told that I have an Australian accent

Day 2:

I did some light yoga in the morning, followed by some heavy weeding of the sweet potato patch for several hours before lunch. In the afternoon a few more people arrived to join our volunteering happy family. We even attempted a sing-a-long to a guitar and ukulele combo in the evening (before our dinner of a dry sweet potato and piece of corn bread). Everyone agreed that I had the voice of an angel and kept asking me for encores. It was embarrassing.

Highlight: Fleeing the coop for a few hours to the town down the road and eating ice-cream.

Lowlight: Dinner.

Day 3:

Yoga in the morning to welcome in the new day!

Highlight: The art workshop in the afternoon, which involved drawing the other volunteers in various poses. I remember winning an art prize in like Grade 5. Not sure what has happened to all that raw talent as I was completely rubbish at the drawing. But it was still fun and we had a lot of laughs.

Lowlight: Cleaning out the shitters. The village only uses ecological toilets which are basically large buckets with lids on. One performs ones business and one then covers said business with a layer of saw dust. We had to empty the contents of the buckets into the massive shit pile at the back of the farm and wash the buckets out. To be fair not the worst thing I have ever done in my life.

Day 4:

Too lazy to get up for yoga.

Decided to go to the evening session of temple. I spent most of my time chanting and learnt a bit about the religion. Unfortunately though I can’t get a particular chant out of my head as it is quite catchy and I found myself chanting it wherever I went. I even chanted it to a shop keeper in the town to his surprise. Brainwashed much??

Highlight: The theatre workshop in the afternoon. The village has a small stage in a field where a horse is tethered. This poor horse was treated to an alarmingly bad display of theatrics. One of the devotees in his past life used to work in the theatre and he led a session in which we all had to create several characters. This pretty much involved charging around the stage shouting and screaming and walking funny like. It was highly amusing.

Lowlight: Painting the path stones white. Roo and I volunteered to do this because we thought it sounded like fun. But in fact it wasn’t. We spent several hours with backs bent, painting the 12000 stones in the village white. We did amuse ourselves greatly though by painting our faces with white path stone warpaint and threatening to make white some of the peacocks and the lettuces.

Day 5:

Escaped to the town again today and had more ice cream.

Highlight: Lunch. It was a magical vegetarian concoction of rice and black eyed peas with a heavenly potato and vegetable curry type affair. I say curry type affair because it seemed to taste of curry but I know this to be not true as spices inflame passion apparently and this is a no-no. According to the religion, there are 3 qualities in the world and in people: goodness, passion and ignorance. Obviously you want to stamp out the passion and ignorance in yourself and cultivate the goodness. And going along with this, foods are divided into the same categories. Spices, garlic and onion etc. inflame passion which supposedly leads to doinking and the like. Mushrooms are ignorant. This is because they grow in dirty places. I know this to be true as I saw mushrooms growing in the shit pit.

Lowlight: Cleaned the shitters. Not sure how I landed this job again.

Day 6:

Woke up with a dodgy stomach. According to one of the devotees 94% of the volunteers get sick on account of the large quantities of minerals found in the water! And not in fact because we handle faeces on a regular basis and only have the use of vinegar as a disinfectant. Spent a lot of the day in bed feeling sorry for myself. But still managed to be well enough by the afternoon to eat cake. There was this fabulous devotee called Alejandro who produced the most scrumptious baked goods in his teeny weeny little “bakery”.  I told him on a number of occasions that I loved him, most notably after he made donuts with chocolate on top and with chocolate INSIDE them as well. He thought I was insane. I had envisaged myself living off the land for a week and being healthful and giving my body the goodness it has been sorely lacking. But instead I flooded it with chocolate covered items.

Highlight: CHOCOLATE CAKE

Lowlight: Having to run out of yoga in the morning to find the nearest bucket.

Day 7:

Highlight: MORE CAKE

Lowlight: What a surprise! Cleaning out the shitters AGAIN. Emma, Roo and I felt it was only right to clean them as we had contributed a substantial amount to them the previous day.

On Day 8 I left the village to go back to Lima to catch me a bus to Cusco.

In summary. I am glad I went to the village. Not sure I will be devoting myself to the cause any time soon but I really admire the people who have. It isn’t a charming life – business in buckets, cold showers for the rest of their days and giving up certain things to centre their lives around their god, but they seem genuinely happy with their lot. The devotees were all lovely and I also met some really cool people volunteering – almost none of whom I wanted to punch in the face.

I have to mention here the hilarious email I got from my brother yesterday telling me that he thought my idea of a “holiday” was crap: volunteering cleaning toilets, embarking on 22 hour bus trips and “going to school again” which I am assuming refers to learning Spanish. He thinks that if I volunteered less, travelled on fewer buses and didn’t go to school then I would have more time to shave my legs and exercise more. Although strangely he does kind of applaud my lack of grooming, if only on the grounds that it makes me look so unattractive that I am apparently not fit to be kidnapped, which is his gravest concern about my trip. And in response, I agree I should be eating less chocolate and possibly shaving more but I don’t think this trip really classes as a holiday. I am not doing this to work on my tan, RICHARD. I wanted to travel to see the world obviously but also to work on some of my deficiencies: namely my impatience and my lack of self-confidence. And to gain some perspective, become more aware and hopefully decide what I want to be when I grow up. So put that in your pipe. Jokes. Love you.

Peace and love and potatoes, People!