Self-sufficiency?

So much work to get to this state of chaos (which I like quite a bit).

I enjoy going on the permies.com forums and learning what people are doing to become self-sufficient. Absurd things, like eating turnips and kohlrabhi for months on end. Comparing calories and figuring out how to eek out a few more calories from their plot. Storing enough food for a year for when the SHTF. Sometimes it's lovely and down-to-earth and I learn a ton, other times I'm confronted with eating animal bits I'd rather not think about and planning as though scarcity and a Hobbesian life was our default option (though permaculture is all about abundance). I love these posts about trying to eat as much as possible from the homestead, even as they seem, at least for people living through Canadian winters, incredibly restrained and difficult. Sometimes, as one living without Amazon Prime here in South Africa, I want to tell them they can get anything anytime anywhere, as long as they're in, like, North America. The tension between available convenience and self-imposed restraint is really challenging to navigate, especially when you're navigating it with your kids alongside you.

This year we had some peaches, some apricots, some strawberries, and some different kinds of squash. Maybe a few tomatoes (time will tell how many). It's not exactly time to cut our ties with stores. Starting a farm that's focused on fruit production is the ultimate in delayed gratification, in faith. All that stuff. I have read approximately 2 trillion words about growing stuff, and have been trying a fair bit with my hands dirty and all that. Yet there's a huge amount of luck involved. The amount of patience needed for just one pomegranate is fairly breathtaking. Even when we have a great climate for pomegranates.

I'm nothing if not predictable: if you read concrete gardener a lot, you'll probably be able to just channel the rest and not waste time reading it:

Anyway, so if you're still with me there's this other thing I sometimes do. Not much, because now I have three kids and a farm and try not to leave the house ever. But I sometimes, rarely, go to academic conferences and meetings. Sometimes even writing retreats. A lot of the time we're talking about heady things like making the world a better place and bridging health inequity (and if we're going wild health inequity becomes a proxy for general inequity, because general inequity is health inequity) between rich and poor. It's awesome.

There's always lots of food at these conferences. And I am always the #1 fan of the food. because a) it's a meal I didn't have to prepare b) it often contains meat, which I want to be extra grateful for c) it's free and often quite abundant d) it's typically something nicer than my day-to-day meals. Yes, my day-to-day meals have a certain rustic charm.... they are often healthier and don't taste as factory-ey (though sometimes conferences are all fresh and local, too). Sometimes people don't like the food. I guess I'm setting up imaginary people, because it's not like I'm going to conferences with a bunch of jerks. These are really great people. But sometimes the food is not up to their standards. And sometimes it's totally up to their standards and (particularly with women) there comes this whole discussion of how much weight they're going to have to lose after the conference is finished.

And I guess I want to say: even the crappiest food, far removed from anything, mainly made in a factory, involved people and work and even soil. It sucks when it involved people who weren't valued, when the land wasn't valued, when the animals we're eating weren't valued. But there is this ease that comes alongside judging food that seems to overlook how incredibly difficult farming can be-- especially when we're demanding food that's organic and happy and valued and has terroir and all that. It's a lot to ask unless there are a lot of us growing stuff. When juxtaposed with the homesteaders on permies.com who are trying to eek another 100 calories out of their plot, it's a powerful contrast. So I'm totally grateful when I'm given plentiful calories. And I'm so grateful to be trying to make better quality calories; working without pesticides or fungicides on peri-urban land (in our case, sand) is pretty challenging.

Self-sufficiency is a powerful idea to pursue not because you end up making everything yourself. That's a long way off for me and my family. But the idea remains powerful-- whether in the form of electricity or wood for fires or food or water or compost-- because it forces us back to basics. To knowing all that stuff takes a ton of work and the best we can do is to value all that work, that energy.

Going back to our conferences: we often discuss getting people basic services, adequate food. I guess our lives are the flip side of that: figuring out how to value the services and food that we enjoy appropriately (and to cut the services and food that are excessive to the average person). We talk about access to tertiary education; and our lives represent the inverse of that too: when you have all the formal education in the world, can you provide the basics of what you need to live? Do you know what your body needs, or how to find water? In our case, the answer is a resounding "no"!

Korea, Christmas, and being back home

We went to Korea with a 7 week old Hana. We came back with a 10 week old Hana. The boys did great. Eug and I did well, though we were tired at the end. Seven people in a Korean apartment in winter is cramped. Received a lot of advice from strangers (particularly in Korean, from old ladies.... Eug stopped needing to translate. Me: she just said our kids will die of cold? Eug: yup.). Noah kept saying stuff like "oh this is a toilet without hay!!" or "where are all the flies"?? Life in Korea is pretty much the opposite of our lives here in Cape Town.

I wondered if, like the plateau between income and happiness (that is, after your basic needs are met more money doesn't make you happier), there's a plateau in the relationship between electricity use and happiness. With unlimited electricity, there's little to hem us in and consider what's really necessary. I know I would never have thought about 4 LEDs (in our sunroom) versus 1 (our verandah light) unless confronted with the prospect of draining our solar batteries and ruining their battery life. But using the 1 LED doesn't negatively affect our happiness. Nor does not owning a fridge (though giving up our freezer would). Anyway, I guess that's a plug for ridiculously circumscribed solar, even though it's not very cost effective or efficient.

Before we left, the boys were swimming like crazy: 

ready to swim...

Hana was mainly like this in Korea:

At one level, she barely noticed we were on a different continent. On another, there were a couple of days when we first arrived, and when we traveled, where she was clearly overwhelmed. We realised that airplane and all that followed represented her first experience of electric lighting. Not because we're complete luddites, but because the sun sets late in Cape Town in summer, and while we'll occasionally stay up by candlelight, we usually only have the verandah light to comfort the boys, and we don't have any lights upstairs.

The kids got Magnatiles from their grandmother. They're pretty cool.

It was cold so we were indoors a lot. We got new watercolour pencils:

And it snowed:

Children's museum. One of the more affordable places to visit..but a pretty long walk from the bus station... and the boys were really sad because the play structure had a height limit., even though it was remarkably safe.

The kids loved eating at restaurants and getting to choose stuff from their grandma's abundant fridge. It's like we had some kind of identity transplant.

Eug's brother James plays on the iPad a lot, so the kids got introduced to Angry Birds. I tried not to freak out because I'm not controlling. Right. Noah ended up making an Angry Birds encyclopedia so he could remember all the kinds of Angry Birds. Then, we made a lifesize slingshot when we got home. 

On the bus headed to the airport...

And then, Christmas morning...

An update on how things are growing on the farm, soon!

Masi, education & a long general update.

The protests in Masiphumelele are over for now. I'm not yet friends with anyone living in Masi, so I'm reticent to blog about the protests themselves. The mood on our street was survivalist, to the point of others discussing weaponry (some blunt kitchen knives, in our case, 1000 rounds of ammo and a few grenades, in others) But I'm not really friends with those on our street yet (though we're getting to know people!), either, so I can't really even speak with authority on the more middle-class reaction to the protests- I guess I can only speak for my own reading of things. I'd be inclined to think that the police were reactive (and violent and incendiary) in the beginning, and much more pro-active and thoughtful (and less violent) later in the protests. Using somewhat heady language, it seems it is the responsibility of the oppressor (the police, the state), rather than the oppressed, to act with care and restraint. At some point the overall tone of news shifted towards less incendiary, racist language. We are fine and I hope I'll soon be able to write about our neighbourhood with much more knowledge and understanding.

By coincidence, around the time when half our street left for the week due to the protests, and those of us who remained were told by the joint task force to get ready for evacuation, we gave our fridge to someone from Masi. This was my only real interaction with a neighbour from Masi during the protest. It was striking that there we were, in this heightened state, doing absurd things like hiding our car and getting a go-bag together with stuff we'd need if we had to run to the nearby mountain (yeah, with a 2 week old and 2 weeks post-partum-- I don't fancy my chances in a real emergency...). Meanwhile, our neighbour from Masi was mainly just frustrated rather than fearful, because she wouldn't be able to get to work the following morning. Her house and everything she owned had burned a couple of weeks previously (maybe connected to the protests, maybe just a reality of overcrowded and fire unsafe townships-- they don't really know yet). I reflected on the ways that our society generally, and recent reporting on Masi in particular, had created pretty fearful portrayals of "violent mobs", which bred racially-infused fear rather than understanding.

The protests in Masi coincided with unprecedented student protests nationwide over university fee increases. Even though I've spent most of my life at various learning institutions, I'm not sure of their role in social change or my role in them... if I were to cherry-pick my role I'd be interested in figuring out how we could be more down-to-earth about responding and speaking truth to local problems. Providing knowledge to all is a central part of that. I was inspired to be more thoughtful on this blog about who I am saying our evolving lifestyle might work for.

I've tended to take the Mustachian view-- which is from the perspective of a very first-world U.S. (white) guy-- that we have way more life options than we think, and that if you're reading this, you probably do, too. That we are rich if we are vaguely middle-class. I feel so strongly, in this age of global warming, that we need to be a generation that produces rather than consumes. But figuring out what that means is super difficult given that my baseline consumption bar is set pretty high: I am speaking from a place of many-layered privilege, and my perspective is shaped by this. I am mainly hoping that writing about our [privileged] choices will make them slightly less weird for the next person who has a bucket toilet, or a rather limited solar power system, or whatever else we try next. Because downward mobility on the part of the privileged is an important part of social change.

On to the much more current survival challenge:  keeping our family of five sane, fed, and sortof cleanish. Hana is a wonderful little human. She smiles. I love newborns. I love that you just have to sit and feed them, and together figure out life. The hard part is the sheer physical toll of having another baby and needing to take care of the other ones, to keep the house clean, to cook, to not let trees die. For Eug, about 3 days after a new baby is born, he starts to get antsy because he hasn't worked on his projects. The great thing about having a third child is that one can recognize patterns and no longer judge (hopefully). For me, antsiness starts about 3 weeks in so I've already dived back into trying to prove my post-doc worth while realising how silly I'm being.

We thought if we didn't have anything except this table, the kitchen/living room would look clean. Apparently I'm too lazy/tired to clear the table before taking a photo

Eug recently spent a day on this table. Our dear neighbours JP and Alina gave it to us when they left for Seattle, so Eug shortened the legs, sanded, painted and varnished it so it could work as our dining table. It's wonderful (thank you JP and Alina). We've mainly eaten meals sitting on the floor, and we realised that we should in this house to save space on chairs. We were going a little crazy trying to eat with our strange assortment of chairs, so this project definitely promoted immediate sanity. Eug is hoping to build some seating that doubles as storage in this space, which will also be a backrest when we're eating. He's using waste wood from around our property, which makes it a much longer project than it would be otherwise.

As I mentioned earlier, we gave up on making the fridge useful, and decided it was silly to keep a working fridge as a glorified box for food. Also,  Because our freezer goes off at night, the top of the freezer is a lot like a fridge, so we're using the freezer as both a fridge and a freezer. It works pretty well, and also freed up some space. We're looking at whether a solar freezer or a wind turbine would be a better option for the long term... Or maybe we should just get a dairy cow... or a goat..

We're doing a lot of scheduling and goal-setting to stay sane. Scheduling food, scheduling work, scheduling special time for Noah and Eli, making super low-bar goals to be happy about reaching (keeping kids secure: mmmeh sortof, not running out of food midweek: TBD). The goals seem a little absurd. Nevertheless, when we list "Eug and Jo getting sleep" as a goal, it somehow gets more attention, and it's more apparent if that goal is at odds with another aspiration, like, working 8 hours a day. We're starting with each of us working 1-2 hours a day and building up from there.

Extra picture because Eug never gets photographed...

In the general realm of focusing on our kids' development given that they're not at school or daycare: I'm taking the kids to a neighbour's pool (thank you awesome neighbour!) to practice their swimming, and supplement their lessons. One of our goals for this year was teaching the kids to not drown when in water. And the year is fast ending... They love their swimming lessons so our first attempt at getting formal help teaching our kids stuff is going remarkably well. It helps that it's a physical goal, and that it's a pretty lightly held goal. It's totally not essential to our kids' growth and development, or the happiness of our family, that the goal is achieved this year. For our bike goal, the kids are just riding in circles in our empty reservoir. We won't fill the reservoir until they're good swimmers and the fencing around it has grown in nicely. We're also trying to follow our kids' interests as much as we can since we're home a lot. This book is awesome at suggesting specific steps to facilitate learning without taking over.

It's interesting that the things that are easy to set concrete goals for are not the most important things: character, caring about other people. You can't really make goals about those in the same way. It's something that we work on together (on ourselves first). We're learning about character and kindness by learning how to live with one another and express ourselves in ways that aren't hurtful. Which, when I'm sleep-deprived, is not exactly easy.

It's hard in the middle-of-the-night exhaustion, but if I look back rather than focusing overly on my tiredness, I'm amazed at how far our kids have come already, and that we have three healthy kids despite the fact that I mainly ate chocolate during pregnancy. In the moments when I'm struggling, it helps to focus on how few tantrums we have nowadays, or how helpful and kind the boys can be. And less on how annoying it is when Eli decides he is a mouse and won't stop squeaking. In all their absurdity, these are good days.