DAY 14 - My back hurts.

Because we planned to go see the volcanoes tomorrow, we had to complete all our hours for this week today which meant a pretty intense day. We were told that another work trader would be arriving today, a woman in her forties with the very unfortunate nickname ‘Kak’ (for all you South-African and German readers out there), so Judy was very stressed and everything had to be prepared.

I was assigned kitchen duty and ended up washing up for six hours, the only break being watering the greenhouse in between. Because of all the interesting potions and concoctions Judy and Jai Dev seem to cook all the time they have billions upon zillions of empty jars of some sort, and I felt like I had to wash every single one of them while around me, everyone was having a hard time setting up Nikolai’s new treadmill and carrying a very freaky-looking ‘vibration-energy’ machine around the kitchen. Around midday I was told the news that Kak had arrived and left again, having commitments elsewhere, which I think none of us was very sad about, quite happy with our current little group dynamic. Towards the later part of the afternoon, Jai Dev took on a habit of coming into the kitchen at random intervals wearing his towel and headphones and engaging me in spiritual conversations, speaking of angels, going into his past lives and identifying my special power as being that of ‘localizing’. At some point Sarah came to help me so we ended up having a nice little discussion group on spiritual matters sitting in a circle on the floor until Kyle came back and offered to drive us to the coast nearby which we still hadn’t seen. The coast was extremely rocky and beautiful with the entire shoreline made up of giant black jagged lava stone and the water being electric blue against the darkened sky. (I would have drawn it but the moment was just too perfect not to enjoy and I felt like I could never capture it in its sublime beauty) When it got a bit rainy and dark we went back and spent the evening in the kitchen as usual, only with Kyle and Sarah messing around with Sarah's camera trying to light-paint. We also got an email from Joy saying that unfortunately she couldn’t take us to the volcanoes after all, so what we’ll do tomorrow is still a mystery.