Wwonderful wworld of WWOOFers

This garden was one of the reasons I bought the house. It is sheltered and tropical, with a banana tree, fruit trees, and lovely native plants. From the sheltered warmth of it, I can hear the birds in the trees and the pulse of the sea, and I can see only one house—mine. It is near perfect. Two months ago, I went into this place of bliss and solace to take a good look --and I nearly burst into tears.

It was overgrown and out of control. The weeds were winning. The woodpile in the middle of the yard had killed the grass around it; the rest of the grass was knee high. I looked and saw endless hours of toil—hours that I do not have to give. I considered a bulldozer to simply begin again, but we no longer have money for large equipment. Instead, I went inside and filled out an application to be a WWOOFer host.

WWOOFer stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms, and it is an international organisation. The deal is that if you’re a person with a garden or a farm and a guest room, you can sign up as a host. Travellers who are signed up as WWOOFers look up listings in the places they want to visit, and they contact the hosts and find a time to stay. WWOOFers get room and board from the hosts and in exchange they work for 4 or 5 hours a day. This seemed like the perfect solution to my problem.

So I filled out the form (answering questions like “What percentage of your food is organic?” and “What is your organic philosophy?”) and sent it in. Six weeks later, we got the news—we were in. Two days after that, the first email arrived: could Jean-Baptiste, a French law student, stay with us the first week in August. Yes he could.

And the time passed and JB arrived, a beautiful young French man with an ebullient smile. For this week, he is part of our family, eating meals with us, sleeping in our house, helping in the garden, playing with the dog. The first morning as I got the kids out the door to send them to school on my way to the train, I said to Naomi, “We have just left a stranger in our house with all of our things. We might come home to find everything gone!”

“He’s not a stranger, Mom. We had dinner with him last night!” she reminded me.

“We had dinner with a stranger last night,” I reminded her. And we turned to each other and said, “I guess that’s just the WWOOFer way!” When we came home, the only thing missing from our house was the woodpile in the middle of the yard. And the dog, who was getting a run on the beach.

In the days since his arrival, JB has stopped being a stranger. He has shown us his house on GoogleEarth and talked about his growing up. He is lovely and polite, never sitting at dinner until I sit. He is silly and playful, lugging big logs with the children to try to build a bridge across the impossibly-fast moving stream. He is doggedly determined, moving the woodpile and then chipping away at the enormous one that looks very much like the rubbish heap it is. He looks around wide-eyed at the constant and rapid chatter of the children as we have our dinnertime conversation. He is quick to smile along with the classic French shrug and pffff. When I ask about how things are doing—how was his walk, how is the work, how was dinner, he always says “Perfect.”

On Monday he’ll be off, flying home to France in the middle of the week. And the world will seem just a little bit smaller and a little bit friendlier with a friend in France. And the paths are covered with new shells and woodpile is moved. My garden might return to a place of bliss and solace after all. Vive la difference!