Workaway, 2011

Maybe it was 12 or 15 years ago, but in any case it feels like a lifetime ago that I came to the Gers for the first time. I had always been crazy about foie gras, animal husbandry, gardening, French wine and history in remote places so literally rolled the dice on an Internet search and this region appeared. I signed up on WorkAway, a platform for volunteers to find people with a variety of projects that need to be done. The one that came up that spoke to me most was with a family who moved down from the UK and bought a cow pasture that they let become organic over several years to turn into a Black Pig de Bigorre farm. This family has an incredible story to tell which is on a podcast here: The Gers is More, look for the conversation with Louisa Hallewall. It was a little slice of heaven for me, everything I could only have dreamed of before the actual experience. I arrived with two other American girls, both fresh out of Ag school in Georgia who were outstanding workers that made me proud of the states. They were all skills and some enthusiasm, I was all enthusiasm and some skills.

I was set up to sleep in the stone pig pen that was adjacent to last stall which had a huge mamma pig who had just given both to several sweet little babies. Our primary tasks were the garden, the pigs and then there was the silo project.. more on this to come. My comfort zone was in the garden, and it was huge. Lousia knew everything and I loved asking all the dumb-city-girl questions. One day while pulling weeds, I looked up and noticed a bunch of pigs grazing close by and munching their way through a zucchini patch. "Are they supposed to be here?" I asked, and this sounded the alarm that the pigs had escaped from the fenced-in the acorn forest. All of us quickly scrambled up to fix the fence. It was a matter of walking the perimeters to discover the wooden pegs that went down and sealing them all back into the ground within the wire fencing. We did it quickly and with urgency. Once the fence was secured back we needed to shepherd the pigs back inside, which felt chaotic with our yelling "soooo-huey" and waving maniacally but we were all raised on enough cowboy movies to be pretty good at it, and I know we did not lose a single one.

Lousia also took us to the abatteur, or the place that pigs are processed into saucisson. where we got to experience the entire process, from beginning to middle to end. It was fascinating, and from one pig there were hundreds of varieties of cuts and sausage prepared. She could literally feed the entire village. Following this visit on the next Monday, we went to the market in Mirande to help sell the sausage. It was more like to carry stuff in and stuff out, my French was not good enough to actually speak to the clients, but it was my first time in the Bastide village at this magnificent market with local vendors, most of whom were neighbors selling everything from brebis cheese to lavender, Armagnac and foie gras and this was the very special and memorable beginning of my love affair with the Gers.