Success!! We found an avocado farm in Granada that’s happy to take us in. It’s run by a French-Polish couple with three kids, and its the very definition of the word “rustic”: there’s no electricity, limited running water, and we sleep in little yurts.

We forged agreement speaking in Spanish on a weak phone signal with the woman of the house.  We’ll be helping the couple paint a shed and prune their trees; in exchange, they’ll serve us Mediterranean food and give us a temporary home.

We hitchhiked down to Andalucia, the southern region of Spain where Granada is located. We were able to hitch most of this distance through only one ride: a delivery truck picked us up. “You remind me so much of my daughters,” the driver said, “I couldn’t let you stand on the side of the road with your thumbs out.” He was an upstanding citizen, of Bulgarian descent, who spoke zero English but patiently spoke with us in our broken Spanish. He blared Bulgarian music during the entire ride.

Andalucia is beautiful. When we arrived we were ecstatic to learn that our new home, Granada, is  a little beach town with crystal-clear aqua Mediterranean coastline stretching to the horizon.

Palm trees fringe the coast and the lush, blooming Sierra Nevada mountains dot the horizon.

Alexandra, the French woman who lives on this avocado farm, looks like an eco-hippie, with long dark flowing hair and a face weathered from too much sunlight. Crinkles form around her mouth when she smiles, and a bright glow eminates from within. She speaks softly, forming words with a gentle French accent, and she and carries a blond baby on her hip. Two other children, a boy and girl in freshly-washed and freshly-stained clothes, hide behind her skirt. She looks exactly like the kind of woman who you´d expect to move to the Spanish Mediterranean to grow tropical fruits and raise three kids on a farm without electricity.

We´re living in a green camper van in the forests of the lush Las Alpujerras valley, completely surrounded by earth. Sweet peas and tomatoes grow wild on the ground; almond, avocado and orange trees are everywhere, and a symphony of birdcalls wakes us up each morning. Yesterday we spotted a hummingbird the size of our thumb.

We work six hours a day in exchange for food and shelter, doing varied projects like planting trees, painting a room and filling in the cracks between tiles in a swimming pool. In our time off, there´s a nice hammock we lay in. Kim´s teaching me how to spin poi, and I´m reading a book on Spanish history.

And yet I can’t help but feel mildly dissatisfied with all of this, like I’m trading 6 hours of grueling, sweaty daily labor for a mattress inside a broken-down camper and a sandwich. The work we do is long and hard. We begin at 7, before it gets too hot, but by 9 we’re sweating.

Perhaps that thought comes from the fact that, until recently, I earned a paycheck for a living, and I’m trained to think of my labor in terms of cost per hour. But tiling a swimming pool for 6 hours is worth at least $80 in value ….

I know I should enjoy what I’m doing; I should enjoy the opportunity to live with a local family on a farm. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling that I’m getting the raw end of a deal.

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