Argentina.

William warned me the men wouldn’t be very chatty in the morning, so I resolved not to be overly friendly and inquisitive. This was a good decision; ‘buenos dias, Amedeo, encantado’. After standing around for a few minutes, a thin, serious man arrived and stood across from us. He waited in silence for a minute or so before starting the briefing for the day. He was not a man of many words. ‘William conmigo, Patrick e los chicos con Enzo’. And again, to me ‘Emilio, con Patrick’. ‘Amedeo, I protested’, but only to hear back ‘si, Emilio’. Perhaps I will settle for Amadeo on the farm.

We hopped onto the trailer which Brian drove into the middle of a cattle field with a large red tractor. Patrick, Santiago, and I were bumbling along the field, our legs dangling off a trailer packed with large trunks, metal wire, and an assortment of bits and pieces somewhere between rubbish and materials. Our first job was to remove old fencing that had fallen to pieces near a muddy patch of the field. ‘There used to be a water tower here, they bore a hole’ explained Patrick while pointing at the swampy area we sidestepped.

As with most unpaid activities, one always feels there isn’t enough work to go around for all the volunteers. Enzo and Brian went to work with their wire cutters, reserved as they had been when we first met. Patrick, the most experienced of us three, grabbed a spade and got to work digging holes around the posts that needed removing. I picked up some old wiring and threw it into the trailer upon Enzo’s approval. Keen to make myself useful, I started to help him with whatever he had at hand then. Feeling something off about my right foot, I looked down to notice it firmly planted in a green mound of cow dung. ‘Mierda’, I muttered. Enzo replied ‘Bienvenido a Argentina’. I was pleased to have earned my first sentence out of him. I think this will be very good. So I wiped my shoe as I could along the grassy shrubs and pressed on, trying to be useful where possible.

When the area was cleared of old fencing, we drove to something like a skip, except it was missing the actual skip, and dumped all the rubbish from the trailer. Here too, I walked the line between bugging the men for instructions, taking initiative and doing something, and standing and watching. Too much of any wouldn’t be good.

Onward we went across the estancia, eating dust at the back of the trailer for about 10 minutes. I quickly learnt why Patrick sat facing backward. At the next stop, we were again tasked with removing fencing. This time however, it was still in fine condition. It surrounded enormous sacks of grain, to prevent the cattle that had been grazing nearby from getting at it. With the cattle gone, it was only and impediment to the machines that would soon come and collect it. Here is where Brian taught me to rewind a spool or wire. He also taught me how to dig a hole. There is much that isn’t obvious about watching and learning. One musn’t simply look. One has to look with purpose, and then some. When it came time to doing, most of my technique was already on. First break up the ground with the spade, holding it lengthways. Then grab the bar at the end of it, and use its length as leverage to lift the loose dirt. Only then do your hands both come down to the head of the spade, so you can carefully lift the dirt out and onto a pile. ‘No hacerlo en diagonal’ he explains. One must dig down vertically. A few minutes later this became more obvious. Patrick came by to look at my first hole. The sides had sloped in such a way that it had become increasingly difficult to remove dirt from the bottom of the narrowing hole. With another small adjustment to my technique, I finished digging and heaved the heavy post out of the earth. ‘My first post’, I exclaimed as I gave it a kiss. Patrick laughed."