Work at Culdees

INTRO

In this text I am going to write down a few reflexions from my time as a volunteer at a farm attached to the WWOOF( 1) network in the UK. I am going to try to show how wage labor can enter into volunteer work. Hopefully it will also highlight some of the differences between the two. For the people involved it might seem unfair or unjust, but I sincerely hope that they will have the opportunity to argue and question my perspectives. I am sure they will disagree on several points.

Culdees is a project developed on an old farm in the Scottish Highlands. It strives, from what I know, to be a community and a school for lifelong learning. It has been developed mainly by one person, who I will call the manager in this text. The main source of income for the project is a hostel, called the bunkhouse. The bunkhouse is what keeps the money coming in. It feeds the volunteers and makes it possible to buy necessary equipment. On my arrival there were 25 volunteers.

Apart from the hostel, you may find:

several organic vegetable gardens

two pig sties, a goat, and chickens

several on-going building projects, all done with recycled materials

facilities for different courses and educational projects

While working as a volunteer in the WWOOF system you get paid only in food and accommodation. At Culdees you had to sign a contract where you agreed to work 6 hours a day 5 times a week.

Every morning, we would gather for breakfast at eight, and then have a short meeting. The manager asked for updates on how the different work was going. She also informed us about what she thought needed to be done on the farm. It could be different kinds of cleaning work, clearing an area, building something or reaping bracken (used for insulation and as food for the animals). Once a week we were in the cooking team and prepared two meals and did some cleaning.

It reminded me a lot of the gatherings in the nursing homes were I have been working. The boss basically tells you what to do, and tries to inform herself as much as possible about what is really happening on the floor. After the morning briefing everyone set out to their work.

BAD VIBES AND PROBLEMS WITH MANAGEMENT

The first day I got to work in the garden. Me and a French girl weeded a potato patch. It was alright but a bit boring. The garden did not seem to be very well taken care of. Apart from that, none of us knew exactly what good the weeding would do. It seemed like the weeds grew up again very quickly. The point was, that we did not have an overall vision on what needed to be done and why.

The day after, when I was working with some French people cleaning the hostel, they told me that it was important to find some kind of project you could work on. Otherwise, they argued, you would end up running around working with whatever task the manager told you to. Working with a specific project, you would be in charge of your work day, and have knowledge about what needed to be done.

Another day, I was sent with the same people to erect poles for the drying of bracken. While we were working the manager suddenly turned up and told us to start insulating a wall that had not been properly done. We were supposed to do that after we had finished with the poles, but my French friend simply ignored it and went back to his project, when we had finished. I was a bit confused about what to do myself, but I realized that I would need to find my own project to work on, to make my stay at the farm as rewarding as possible.

The lame intervention in our work was something that repeated itself many times at the farm. The manager would interrupt people working with things and make them do something else. She hardly ever participated in the work herself and her instructions were bad. This resulted in slow and inefficient work. Many times, nothing was done at all. Some people became very frustrated with this situation and showed it by refusal of, and escape from work.

Many times, we would be asked for help with small things such as unloading a car or carrying something. It would have been alright if there had been a good atmosphere at the farm. Instead, many people would just ignore it for the same reason that a worker at a supermarket won´t give a hand to his boss on a day off. Other people just accepted it, did what they were told, and went on with their day.

There was also a part of the group that was more loyal. One of them had taken over some of the manager´s old tasks such as introducing new volunteers to the work and dealing with guests at the hostel. She acted a bit like a foreman. She had some privileges but had to do a lot of work all the time.

I really liked her as a person when we had time to talk and she wasn´t in her foreman position. I think she made her stay miserable by acting as if she was working in a company. She told me that she got out of a normal job because she did not like what she became there. She did accomplish things at the farm, but to what price? She was tired and stressed out most of the time.

There was also a difference between people at the farm who stayed long term and those who stayed short term. While the people who stayed long term seemed to want everything to function well, the short term people seemed to want to get the most out of their stay, which didn´t always include lots of work.

Since there were so many volunteers, the place became a bit like summer camp once in a while with parties and love affairs. But let’s get back to work. The major problem, in my view, was that the manager ran the place more like a business than an alternative community, and that she did not participate herself in the work. This made people frustrated.

THE SUNDAY CONFLICT

The frustration people felt showed up the first weekend I spent on the farm. People were hanging out on the farm resting after a week´s work. Some of us were tired after the hike we had done. We were asked if we could help out cleaning the hostel. Only a few volunteered. We were always asked in this way: ”could you please” but the real message was ” you´re supposed to do this, come on”. Those who went to work were pissed off and those who did not go to work were probably pissed off as well. We were obliged by the contract we had signed to help out with cleaning on Sundays, but nobody cared because the situation felt fucked up. There was not much enthusiasm to be gathered at this time.

The strategy most people used was to ignore the question. I think that in this case a better strategy would have been to talk openly about the frustration. We did not, after all, face the risk of being sacked. The day after, the conflict was dealt with at the morning meeting. I think that it was good to discuss it for the volunteers involved in the conflict, but I don´t think the manager understood or wanted to understand the source of the problems.

THE DELIGHTS OF BUILDING A TIPI

A few days after the conflict a car turned up with two rather old men. One was a tipi building hippie, and the other was an adventures guy who had given the first one a lift. The tipi hippie was obviously on the farm to build a tipi, since a previous attempt to build a tipi had failed (the manager wanted one to have yoga sessions in it). His name was Paul. When I first saw him I thought he would be a person who talked a lot but who did not do very much. I was wrong.

The first day, he just strolled around the place and looked for a good spot to place the tipi. Apparently, this required a lot of knowledge and experience. He later told to me that he wanted a dry place, where no one would be disturbed. The second day some of us were sent to help him erect the tipi. There was quite a lot to it but it was all a game to Paul. He would call us kids and refer to building the tipi as a game. ”Let´s play a little bit with this”, he would say.

We advanced very slowly. Paul took a lot of breaks to think and reflect. He would always tell stories and anecdotes or give his opinions and reflexions about different issues. Sometimes it seemed very woolly, but most of the times I would get the point.

We were not allowed to work all the time with Paul, since the manager would always send us off on other tasks, but I went as much as I could. I learned a lot during the four days we were erecting the tipi. One might think that a tipi is just like a tent. But, if you want a nice stable, comfortable and warm tipi there is a lot to do. We did not even finish in the four days we worked.

As I said, working with Paul was something entirely different from the other work at the farm. You would not stand still and wonder why the hell you were doing something, nor would you repeat the same action over and over again. Work was not separated from life in the same way as it normally is. Instead it was integrated.

We would do a little bit here and a little bit there, and then we would have a break. We would discuss and think carefully about certain stages of the building. Then go for a walk to cut down branches for the construction, and then we would light a fire and have a break again. In the beginning it felt strange and I thought that Paul said a lot of hippie nonsense, but after a while I started to like it very much.

While, capital strives to separate each moments of work and make it more efficient to create more surplus, this kind of work seemed to be a lot more sustainable, both for us as human beings but also for mother earth. I might sound like an anarcho-primitivist, someone who believes we should become hunters and gatherers again. I am not, but as a human being I really enjoyed they way Paul worked (or played), full of learning and free from stress.

TAKING CONTROL OF OUR WORKDAY

When the tipi was erected, I went back to work in the garden. As I have already mentioned we had not had any good instructions about how to take care of it. There were lots to do, but we did not know where to begin and how to order the work.

There was a man at the farm who knew quite a lot about sustainable gardening. Unfortunately, he was kept busy with other tasks. When you asked him for advice about something concerning the garden, he would tell you a lot, but it was hard to understand exactly what to do with the information. So I and one of the new volunteers talked to him and to the foreman. Together we went out to the garden to see what needed to be done. We managed to get a decent lesson on how to take care of the garden and how to organize the work . The foreman was very enthusiastic and provided good help, but she finished the session by telling us, ”Bare in mind that if the manager tells you to help out with something else you will have to do it”. It was quite typical for her.

I did not have too many days left on my stay but we had good fun working in the garden. A few other volunteers joined us. When we were socializing and talking while working, everything was more fun, and we felt that we were in control of our workday. We could make decisions on what needed to be done and rotate the work in order to make it more diverse. It was also easier to avoid work that we did not like. Hopefully, the volunteers who stayed at the farm involved new ones in the garden, or at least gave them the possibility to do so.

THE GOOD PARTS OF WORKING AT THE FARM AND A BRIEF CONCLUSION

It may sound as if I had quite a bad experience working at the farm. However, I did not. I really enjoyed the weeks there.

Work would normally involve quite a lot of thinking and we had lots of breaks. In addition, there were lots of really nice people at the farm. We did all kinds of fun things together, and as always it was fun to hang out with people from different parts of the world.

Food was also very good. In my day to day life I normally rush and I seldom have time to sit down and eat properly cooked meal in good company. When I came back to civilization I also realized how individualized “normal” life is. It is like we are always busy dealing with small individual tasks that need to be done, such as filling out forms or paying bills. At the farm, most problems were solved collectively. I really liked that.

Concerning the manager, she was quite nice when she was not managing, and I had some good discussions with her(something I would definitely avoid in real life, management is our enemy) in situations that did not have to do with work. She had lots of experience, and after all, she welcomed a lot of people to the farm, some of whom had nowhere else to go.

However, I have focused on the problems we as volunteers faced, and how we tried to solve them. I am not trying to promote another way of managing a volunteer place. That is not up to me. The only thing I want to do is encourage people at volunteer work not to become victims of management. Do what want! Have fun! Its a great opportunity to try different forms of resistance and to learn skills that are hard to acquire on your own. Don´t work your ass of with monotonous pointless work. See it as a playground!

La caja de sorpresas

1Willing workers on organic farms, www.wwoof.co.uk