The next domino chip of life is in the cheese factory. We will collect the milk of the sheep that will be left without lamb to be gassed. Again, for people’s food. Count how many lives and how many jobs and hands there are to eat cheese, oh mother!

We’ve finished cleaning the cheese shop, today we’re done in the production room. Today it was with Antoine and Antoine, as it was with Lina in December. Today, pure cleaning; in December, painting. Today, talking about the Picardie region; in December, Berlin. Today and then, the locals have woven the community that has been designed by the WWOOF network [Global Opportunities in Organic Farms].

I couldn’t get the concept of community out of my mind when I was collecting water from the ground. In the afternoon, I went to the English dictionary: A group of people with the same interest or purpose. Yes, but no. Soon the flock and the pile of sheep came to me, because they are not the same. My concept of community has taken over from the official definition, as the pot is flooded with boiling milk.

I've been looking for a definition that would satisfy me, and from ecology comes something similar to what I was thinking. Right from the holistic stream. According to the definition that Frederic Clements formed at the beginning of the 20th century, the community is formed by the interaction between those present, they are all interdependent, and all species have a fundamental role in the composition of the community. In his opinion, the creation of the community is not random and is based on coevolution (taken from Wikipedia). At the end of that century, I jumped to the concept of holobionte that Lynn Margulis created.

So, as with many others that have been there before, along with these three people that I have mentioned, in our humble, we have formed a community, the locals and them. According to the definition of the Basque language, yes, we have common interests: farm, field, sheep, cheeses... In any case...

In any case, it doesn’t stop there between us, at all, we can also include this in the holistic stream. For example, the interdependence that exists between us: they want to learn to work in this profession in the future, and we want to show that this way of life is possible. In this small community, our role is to show our work in the best and most complete way possible, and to learn from them by doing so. Of course, we didn’t meet at random; before we got home, we talked and as a result of those first conversations we decided to live together for a while. It is beautiful to see that over the weeks we have all changed, we have learned to work together, to live together, after all – however, let no one think that there are no difficulties in this beautiful biodiversity.

They look at us strangely in many places because we take wwoofers at home, unknown. More than once they ask us how we dare, even more so when we are children.
Maybe I’m wrong, but in the silences of these conversations I often hear fear. Perhaps fear has extinguished the curiosity we once had in this society in the face of the unknown?

Don’t you think that putting the label of an unknown day on the elevator or on the bus with us is also a symptom of the state of our society? How did we scratch the fabric of the community – did they?

We'll have to re-sew before the community is completely wiped out... Oh, or what?