Oh the chaos

Loooooordy. Where to even start. It went like this:

Claire and I landed in Maui, and were received by a very eccentric woman named Dr. Dawn Boucher. I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly be a doctor of, but apparently it’s chemistry. You wouldn’t have guessed by looking at her. Dr. Dawn Boucher explained that she was a good friend of the owner and partial manager of the farms. She drove us in her flat bed truck to the long awaited Maui Dragon Fruit Farm. Turns out we could’ve waited longer. The place was a complete mess. The descriptions the owner had given us on the phone, and via email were a far cry from the actual situation. We had been told to bring a tent and that we would set up in the secluded workers camp. The camp was a ravine dug into the hillside, with trash and rusted farm gear strewn everywhere. The ‘raised wooden platform’ that was provided to put the tent on was a pile of broken and jagged ply wood, not big enough for our tent. The outdoor shower was open backed and caked in dirt and trash, with the open side facing another man’s tent. The community kitchen was a three-sided shack with mold everywhere, dust coating the shelved food, trash lining the outside and an army of chilled flies buzzing casually around the inside of the fridge. Open a bag of lunchmeat, and you can guarantee that there was a little critter in it. In her emails, the owner had said that there was a community living room with couches and a computer. It was actually a tin roofed shack with some broken wicker furniture and enough dirt to plant some dragon fruit. And the cats. The woman who picked us up from the airport said she had made a mistake by bringing cats to the farm. Didn’t really know what she meant till I got there. She brought a few unfixed cats, and consequently there were now around 15 cats, running loose all over the farm. Our first night in, I woke up in the middle of the night to a ripping noise and realized a cat was clawing its way up the side of our tent to sleep on top.

The next illustration is regarding the people on the farm. As we were driving Dawn explained to us that we were the only women and by far the youngest people on the farm. The manager was a 45 year old man named J.D. who Dawn said “was an alcoholic but a good worker”. A few days later when all the workers would go down to the beach together, he would get so wasted off of boxed wine that we’d have to go find him in the sand to bring him back to the farm and he would proceed to collapse on Claire in the process of getting into the car. Then there was Brandon, who was “a nice kid, but I swear he’s on drugs”. The other two were relatively normal young guys, Aaron and Louis. So Claire and I came in, two 18-year-old girls fresh outta high school, and pitched our tent in the heap and feared the prospect of showering.

The next few days were more than challenging. Living in a tent is fun when you’re camping for a few days with family or friends, but daunting for the prospect of six weeks in 90 degree weather and intense humidity. Dragon fruits are cactus like plants that are arranged to grow up large concrete poles, work in the fields one day and your legs will look like you were in a cat fight. Claire and I got in the habit of showering together for safety and so one person could keep a look out. We struggled to stay hydrated and un sunburnt. Lahaina, the town we were close to, is on the dry side of the island and so rain is very scarce. Naturally, it rained the first three days. We had water pooling under our tent and some seeping through. The first night we arrived, we had showered after dark in the cold water and gotten into bed, clean and not get sticky from sweat in our tent. We were halfway through an embarrassing chick flick comfort movie when the three guys (excluding J.D. our drunken friend) stumbled up outside our tent and said “Laaaadies, are you reaaadayy?”

Claire and I didn’t respond, just looked at each other. They carried on, “new WWOOFers you know, its time. We pollinate with new WWOOFers”. At this point Claire came to life and asked them what on earth they were talking about. They told us to put on long pants and follow them into the field. Turns out with Dragon fruit, the flowers only open at night and so you have to go out every night at nine and walk through all the fields, shaking the shit out of the flowers so that they will pollinate. Who knew?