Israel kibbutz volunteer work: Farm fun for a Hebrew-language student

The night of my 21st birthday is spent wading through cow shit. I am working on a dairy farm by the coast on Israel's largest kibbutz. Boy is it gross. Initially, there's a certain excitement in only having a second's warning before imminent disaster, and running away in the interval before meltdown. But that novelty soon fades when you end up cleaning half-digested hay from your inner ear for the rest of the week. I have come to the kibbutz as part of a volunteer, Hebrew-language program along with about 90 other Australians, South Africans, Americans, Spanish, Colombians, Brazilians, French, Britons, Argentinians and Russians. I am inspired by the volunteers of the '70s: free-spirited types looking for an escape through communal living, leisurely fruit-picking and lots of sun.

But I am in the minority, as most of the others have come as part of the process of becoming new citizens. I quickly learn that this entails a very different mentality. Many will be serving in the army after leaving the kibbutz, and our experience is really an exercise in toughening up for that kind of life. For a uni student used to short weeks and sleep-ins, my schedule is brutal. I have a shift at the dairy, roughly four hours, which starts at 3:30am, 7am, 1pm or 7pm. Working around that shift we take four-hour Hebrew classes and also squeeze in trips to the laundry to chuck in mounds of very dirty clothing. We eat with 1000 other people in the communal dining hall and do copious homework.

It also becomes clear we aren't being treated as equals to the permanent residents, more like children incapable of deciding their own mind. To report sick in the morning is not enough – those in charge come to your room several times a day to check that you are, indeed, still sick. There is an array of jobs on offer: assembly line in the plastics factory, felling trees and weeding, farming ornamental fish in artificial ponds, or long hours in the laundry. My Argentinian roomie lands the coveted avocado fields, which turns out to be both dangerous – she sports an eyepatch after walking in to an avocado tree – and delicious, when we convert 52 spares in to a huge bowl of guacamole.

But I reckon my job takes the prize for the most unfamiliar. Luckily I miss out on the birth of what becomes known with horror as the "half-cow" (only the back half developed). But I do grow accustomed to picking up discarded placentas with my bare hands, and master the angle to hold my head when attaching milking machines to cows still dangling afterbirth at perfect face height. I admit that I am not particularly good at my job, and screw up piercing a calf's ear so badly that I am never asked to do it again.

The little calves lick me whenever they get the chance, and I hold a soft spot for them, to the extent of naming one of the newborns after myself, and dressing up as a cow at a fancy-dress party. A couple of other volunteers have the same idea, but by consensus my costume is best. I actually have a lot of fun on the kibbutz enjoying activities like that. Spare time is spent having heaps of sweaty fun with new friends on the soccer fields, enjoying bonfires at the beach, or on long walking adventures up the coastline past both Arab and Jewish towns where wild-looking horses roam up and down the dunes. Still, I only last three out of a scheduled five months there.

Back home and settled back into my domestic routine, I have almost forgotten about my life at the kibbutz until one day, watching the end of the French film Folies Bergere, I see two main characters paying a spontaneous visit to an Israeli dairy. I could have sworn I know those cows...