A Room with a View

[From Saturday]

Well.  That was exciting.

But first, some background.  I am currently in Sicily, in a small town called San Giuseppe Jato, just outside of Palermo.  I’m working with Libera Terra, learning how they use land and sustainable farming as a tool in the struggle against the Mafia.  There was a law passed relatively recently in Italy which requires all land confiscated by the government from Mafia members, if not needed for government purposes (fire stations, government offices, and the like), to be used for the public good: things like parks, volunteer group headquarters, drug rehabilitation programs, and cooperatives.  The Libera Terra cooperatives are one such program, using the land for organic agriculture to produce pasta, wine, olive oil, preserves, and a whole lot more (all sold under the Libera Terra logo throughout Italy, and I think also abroad).  At the same time, and just as importantly, the process also provides jobs in areas where reliable work is difficult to find, and rehabilitates land that has often been completely abandoned since it was confiscated, making it productive and attractive again.  Libera Terra literally means “Free Earth” (free in the sense of “liberated”) and the idea is that these farms (and the brave, stubborn, hard-working members of the cooperatives who run them) go beyond simply taking away resources from the Mafia: they contribute in a positive, concrete way to the communities around them.  They are powerful, working examples of an alternative economy to that dominated by the Mafia.

I’ll be spending a month here: the first half in the Libera Terra office doing research on the program and its history, the second half in the fields getting my hands dirty and getting to know the people who work and volunteer there.  I’m sharing an apartment with two other Italian-speaking American students: Ned, who’s writing his thesis on Libera Terra, and Joel, who will be arriving shortly to do we’re not quite sure what—photography, and maybe some journalism?  We’re up on a third floor (that’s actually the fourth floor, by American numbering), in this enormous, endearing, not-quite-fully renovated, rambling apartment with balconies on both ends and a spectacular panorama.  Here is the view from our front balcony (click to enlarge):

You will understand why we’ve been eating outside on the balcony whenever possible.
And here is my room:

And the view out my window:

But I was going to tell you about today.  Today was laundry day (by hand, as we don’t have a washing machine but do have a nice assortment of sinks on the balcony).  I washed my clothes in the morning, rigged up a clothesline out on the back balcony, and then went for a walk in the afternoon.  As I got back to the apartment building, I got a call from Ned, who had managed to lock himself out on the back balcony while hanging out his laundry (wind blew the door shut).  This meant I was also locked out, as I’d left the key with him.  We only have one set of keys at the moment, so we’ve taken to leaving them in the lock on the inside of the door, and the last person out takes the keys too.  I rang the bell for our downstairs neighbors (Salvatore’s brother and family), to see if they had a copy of the key.  They didn’t, but could at least let me in the front door of the building.

Meanwhile, Ned called Micciché, who was on his way to Palermo, but turned around to come rescue us.  So there we were: Ned sitting out on the back balcony with the laundry, me sitting in the stairwell outside our front door.  I attempted to pick the lock with my hairclip, which would have been cool if it worked, but, alas, didn’t.  My international student ID card, a 5-euro-cent coin and a pen were equally unsuccessful.  So I sat on the landing and listened to Ned trying to get the balcony door open using various tools and advice passed up to him from the balcony below.  This seemed to involve a lot of banging.  I found out afterwards that he was using a rubber mallet to wedge a block of wood between the two doors enough to get his hand inside—but the door handle turned out to be jammed, and the block of wood managed to put enough pressure on the door in such a way that the glass cracked.  At that point he consulted with Miciché (still driving back from Palermo), who told him (to Ned’s delight) to go ahead and just break the glass to get in.  Ned relayed this via the balcony to Domenica (the daughter of the family below), who went back through their apartment and called up the stairwell to warn me, so that I wouldn’t be alarmed by the sound of glass breaking.  So that’s what we did, and Domenica and her mother, whose name I don’t know yet, came upstairs (in true Italian mother fashion) to make sure we knew how to clean up glass shards without injuring ourselves.

So that was the adventure for the day.  On Monday we’re going to get a second set of keys made.