What Is This Serving?
One doesn’t mind being a team player, but you don’t want to feel you’re the whole team.
‘I can’t quite see what this is serving,’ observed Victor the American volunteer, as we worked together in the Jaguar Project nursery. He was putting Saccha Inchi nuts in a pot, I was biting them open. ‘It doesn’t seem that scientific, or hygienic.’
Not that scientific, or hygienic… The Jaguar Project is what the world might look like, if it were destroyed by World War 3, then rebuilt by hippies. A big shack, up in the Colombian mountains, it does have dream-catchers, but nowhere to wash your hands, when you’ve been to the compost toilet.
It does have a kitchen, where the animals live. It’s very picturesque, but has no walls and no fridge; the convention is to leave the cooked food out for a couple of days in the tropical heat in case anyone else wants some; and if, say, you’re cutting open a tomato, you often find a large number of the local ant community have moved in, and resent your presence.
All this partly explains the spectacular drop-out rate.
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