A Day's Work, part 1

My very first job working at Shalom no Mori (Shalom Forest) for the Komoriyas was to scrub the dishes after dinner, a few hours after arriving. I did not wash the dishes. I started to wash the dishes, using soap, when I was informed that they do not use soap on their dishes. Just scrubbing and "nature", as they put it. Without much of an option, I went along. I assumed everything would be okay since they are all alive and apparently well. I, too, am still alive. This is good. Regardless, I will continue my usual regimen of washing dishes using soap. I think a good experiment could be modeled after this sort of a situation. Maybe when I retire, or have little people that I'm supposed to be immersing in the scientific method and other education hooplah.

Okay, anyway, the real work started in the morning. Every morning I would wake up around 6:30 and climb down the ladder from the loft to the main room of Yamaneko lodge. First, I would make coffee "by hand". This was more work than the usual method, although far more enjoyable. If there were no coffee beans roasted already, I would hand roast raw coffee beans. Hiro-san taught me the method. To do this you just heat up raw beans (which are very cheap, apparently) in a skillet or pan on the stovetop.

Roasting coffee beans

First use high heat, mixing constantly, and then after about 8-10 minutes when most beans are dark brown, you lower the heat and wait until all are evenly dark. Then you cool them. After roasting, I would grind the beans using an old-fashioned hand-crank coffee grinder.

Coffee grinder

It works very slowly- takes about five minutes of vigorous grinding to make around 3/4 cup of ground coffee.

Voila!

While I was grinding the coffee, water boiled in a kettle on the stovetop. Once the water was boiling I would set up the thermos, top it off with the ceramic filter holder and re-usable hemp filter, which was filled with ground coffee, and I would pour in the boiling water from the kettle. This went in small intervals since the coffee ground expands and foams up from the water, taking about five minutes.

Pouring water

Then we drank the coffee- you all know how that goes. I enjoyed making coffee this way, and hope to do it again in the future. It sort of wakes you up before you even have the coffee, and the more drawn out process forces you to realize what you are doing. "What am I doing? I would ask myself. I am making coffee". Better, I think, than setting the timer for the caffeine dispenser.

After the coffee was made, I would vacuum the first floor of Yamaneko lodge (every day). It was a wooden floor with its fair share of spilt coffee, peanuts, feet, food, oils etc. rubbed into it. I do not know why I was supposed to do this. No detergent on the dishes, but vacuuming the wooden floor of the cabin daily. Okay. It wasn't time consuming or bothersome in the least- just paradoxical.

After the first morning of coffee-making and vacuuming, I helped Hiro-san clean out the compost toilet, which was full of shit. I was excited to get a bit of experience with a composting toilet, which are used in basically all sustainable living operations, and to jump right into work- really getting my hands dirty. Really. I was given some cotton gloves, which are pretty useless against wet feces. Oh well! Afterward, I could always scrub my hands (with soap!). I wish I had some photos of us bagging crap, but I didn't want to get shit all over my camera, to say the least.

Here's how the composting toilet works. It's a big plastic toilet, sort of like something you might expect to see on an airplane. The toilet rests a bit high up (when enthroned your butt is at bar stool height) to make room for the poop reservoir at the bottom. You take a poop, setting your used TP to the side in a small can, which is later burned. You pour a cup of ashes over your poop. You do not pee in the toilet- you pee outside. This can be difficult to keep separated at times. Once a day, you rotate a little lever counter-clockwise, which mixes up all the poop and ash, helping maintain a nice dry load and thus no smell. The outhouse the toilet was in did not smell one bit. When you want to empty the toilet, you rotate the lever clockwise, depositing a load of poop into the poop drawer, which you then pull out and dump into a bag. The bag sits around for a while.

After a while, Hiro-san and I drove the shit bags up the mountain to dump on a hillside. This was very exciting- on the ride up Hiro-san told me the history of Shalom Forest and his family (more on that later), and for the first time I got to see the bulk of the forest that I had not known existed. We drove very near to the top of one of his mountain tops after passing kilometers of beautiful woods and mountain stream, overlooks etc, and unloaded the crap. This was surprisingly fun. Hiro-san mentioned to me that they put human feces in perfume sometimes because it gets women going. Right, Hiro.