The week before Lunar New Year, I decided to leave Seoul to WWOOF at a goat farm tucked in Yeongwol Valley. WWOOF stands for “Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms” and is an international network for cultural and educational exchange. When the program first started in 1970s England, it was “Working Weekends on Organic Farms,” a way for city folks to reconnect with the land.
For a membership fee of $50, you gain access to a directory of the country’s organic farms in Korean and English. In exchange for room and board, you offer your labor for a few days, weeks or even months.
I chose this goat farm for one week based on its photographs and the promise of three home-cooked meals a day. Its profile featured adorable goats and mud houses made of "hwangto," or yellow earth, that resembled the hobbit homes from “The Lord of the Rings.” It turned out the farmer had built these houses, working off aesthetic instinct and muscle memory.
I arrived during the most biting days of winter, just as six baby goats had been born three weeks earlier. In the cutting cold, some frolicked while others shivered. One baby goat, an only child that frequently wandered away from her worried mother, bore scars of the season; her ears were frostbitten, staying floppy and bent instead of pointed like the others’. Another kid had lost her mom to difficult labor. To keep her alive, the farmer and his wife bottle-fed her or covered the eyes of the other nursing goats so she could steal a meal, wagging her tail as she suckled. I spent the majority of my time cuddling her or watching her as she dozed off next to the wood-burning stoves.
Over instant coffee, I learned from the farmer that WWOOF is how the world comes to Yeongwol Valley. This farm attracted travelers mainly from France, who came with existing knowledge of goats, cheese-making and the luxury of a gap year. The WWOOFer who stayed the longest was a Hong Konger who stayed about three months. With the help of many WWOOFers, he had constructed the five eco-houses, replete with traditional doors and stoves. His property was so remarkable it had been featured on every major Korean broadcast station, including EBS, KBS, MBC. Americans like me were rare. When I asked what he thought of my compatriots, he answered: “They don’t work hard.” I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at his bluntness.
The farmer and his wife wore their many talents lightly. To them, the preservation of traditional Korean ways, agriculture and architecture wasn’t frozen in a museum — it was living here roughly, matter-of-factly. Knowing I was interested in "namul," or edible greens, the farmer’s wife produced a parade of delicious wild vegetables with a casual and knowing ease. She introduced me to pickled Siberian onion leaves — "myeongi jangajji" and "nungaeseungma," a mountain namul that’s special to Gangwon Province, or as the botanists call it, Aruncus dioicus. The farmer didn’t know that in English, the plant is called “goat’s beard,” a fitting name for the spray of white flowers.
Day by day, there were new treasures in the kitchen: at breakfast, a warm mug of goat’s milk. One afternoon, a golden-hued tea brewed from a special flower that only blooms at night and closes by day. Rice that they grew and threshed, soy sauce she brewed, eggs from their white silkie chickens — birds with striking black skin and snowy feathers. We snacked on foraged gingko seeds and chestnuts roasted in a wood-burning stove fueled by pine that he had chopped himself.
At the dining table, I studied both their hands, thickened and knobby with decades of chopping, building and tilling. Mine were hands so obviously accustomed to the lighter labor of tapping keyboard keys and pushing a pencil.
To build a home and make a home takes immense skill and labor. While I thought his ability to construct homes, benches and tables from wood as exceptional, he explained with some distant sadness: “In the past, most of us were farmers. We got as far as an elementary school education. Even if we wanted to continue learning, we couldn’t afford middle school tuition. Craftsmen like me are considered lower class. I work off memory. The homes made of mud are like what I lived in as a child. You learned by copying and by doing.”
His wife shared a similar story. She had grown up in the countryside, lived and worked in Seoul where they met and swore she would never return because of how hard the work was, yet here she was. “I’d seen my mom do all this, but I never learned to make meju (dried fermented soy beans) or gochugaru (red pepper powder). In Seoul, I didn’t do it or know how. It was only after Seoul. Once we moved here, the village grannies taught me. It’s not hard, you know,” she promised. “It’s not hard.”
Source: Korea Times News
