The Nightmare Before Valentine's Day
Greetings from Tahunanui Beach with our new friends,
This edition will be a bit different from the previous ones, a lot less pictures and a lot more words. Brace yourself.
After we sent off our last newsletter, we headed to our second farm workaway. It was not happy fun times like our first one.
First, some background on workaways / WWOOFing. The base logistics is trading 20-25 hours/week of labor for food and accommodation. What kinds of labor, food, accommodations, hours, and flexibility all differ from listing to listing. Beyond that it’s meant to be a cultural exchange.
We wanted to do this to really get a feel for local life, find inspiration in lives different from ours, and learn about topics that we are interested in: the food ecosystem for Owen and sustainability / cute animals for Ivy.
This second farm drew us in because the listing boasted a very knowledgeable, politically and environmentally conscious host who would teach us about food sustainability and operations, with many mentions of a buzzword we particularly wanted to hear: permaculture.
What is Permaculture
Permaculture is a set of systemic design principles that are mostly applied to gardening / farming. There’s three primary ethics and twelve design principles that implement them, pictured below:
With traditional farming, many inputs are brought in from the outside: all kinds of sprays to exterminate unwanted plants and animals; water, often in unsustainable amounts that slowly drain local reservoirs and cause erosion; fertilizer, many created through means that negatively affect the environment.
By applying permaculture principles, in an ideal system, no inputs should be required. Your farm / garden would be self sufficient / self sustaining and the people around you, community, and the environment all work together and are taken care of.
As an example of some of the practices, instead of trying to exterminate unwanted plants and animals, you can leverage them by welcoming birds to feed / ward off unwanted bugs and then leveraging other bugs to help create compost aka natural fertilizer. Instead of growing patches of the same crop which becomes susceptible to disease, combine them in the same patches to complement each other. For example, some plants make nitrogen consumable for others that consume it and some plants that like the heat can be planted on the outskirts and create shade for plants that like it colder.
It may sound very hippy, but we had dreams to learn about concepts that we could then try and scale beyond just a garden for the betterment of our planet. These dreams were crushed.
The Permaculture Studio
When we arrived, we were shown to our accommodations by our host, ZD (Zeddie as he liked to be referred to, his real name is Zack). This was not one of the sleepouts from the listing. We’ll let the photos do the talking.
Inside was a dusty mattress, comforters, and pillows with no sheets or pillow covers. Ivy asked when the blankets were last washed, and ZD replies “I don’t know” with a smile and tone as if it were funny that he didn’t remember. We slept in Red Rover instead.
Ivy was already not impressed with the arrangement. Owen remarked she could be more positive about this and make the best out of the situation. To him, we’d already committed to it and it was only for two weeks. Of course there were bad parts, he saw it too, but her negativity didn’t make it better. Ivy didn’t understand why we were choosing to live like this and didn’t like how Owen wanted her to happily live in terrible conditions.
That night, we had dinner and met the other volunteers. The atmosphere appeared tense. When we asked one of them how she liked it here, she answered, “well I’m leaving early, so you know.” We learned then that on top of our 5 hours/day work in the garden, we also had to make food, eat, and clean up together on a set schedule - except that “together” only includes ZD and his girlfriend for the eating portion. He did not consume alcohol, sugar, wheat, or meat with antibiotics, and did not like things he did not eat being in his presence so we could only cook with the ingredients he provided.
As we got up for our first morning, we ran into the British girl who was to leave the next day. She had tripped in the dark the night before and could not move her arm anymore. Afraid that it was broken, she had requested to be driven to the hospital, a 30 min walk away. ZD refused and told her she would be okay after a cup of tea. He believed that all injuries and illnesses can be cured with plants. He would also not allow any of the volunteers to go with her to the hospital since it’d take away from their work time. Luckily, another volunteer drove her against ZD’s wishes and promptly came back.
This put everyone in a bad mood as we all thought it was unfair that the person who should be responsible for the volunteers’ welfare on his grounds had refused to help. This escalated throughout the day as when she came back with a doctor’s note confirming she had a fracture and was not to work for 2 weeks, ZD’s first words to her were “There is someone waiting to replace you tomorrow” and told her to get to work. She refused. He told her to clean the kitchen which caused her physical pain. She was brought to tears and told him that she would not stay for lunch but would still leave tomorrow. When she came back from lunch, he told her that since she did not work that day, she could not stay here, giving her only 1 hour to leave the property and find accommodation for that night. There was also no one who came the next day to replace her.
At the end of this first work day, Ivy told Owen she was not going to stay, but he could if he wanted to. Owen was silent. He agreed that what happened with the British girl was fucked up, but to him, leaving early would reflect poorly on us. By his standards, we’d been through worse, was this really so bad that we should give up? It seemed to him Ivy was just being high maintenance. He told her that if she wasn’t even able to handle this arrangement, how could he trust that she can go through other hard things in life.
To Ivy, having only a dusty shed and tent, weeding in the sun all day, and dealing with ZD’s attitude and demands were not worth anything she could learn here. She was angry that Owen thought because this place was a bad trade-off to her, then she must be high maintenance, automatically correlating the two. In fact, Owen thinking she couldn’t go through hard times offended her because her resilience was a quality she was proud of. We had $$$$ in the bank, had a choice to leave, and we didn’t need to tolerate any of this.
In the end we decided to stick it out for a week because we liked the other volunteers so much - and because we hadn’t had (non-Airbnb-host) friends for a long time.
ZD continued to show that he did not care for his volunteers and his incredible sexism. The remaining volunteers were a French couple, Alice and Maxime, and a Korean girl, Jieun. The three women were given tasks to weed (his whole garden is weeds) while the men were given “technical” tasks like putting screws in doors, taping netting to a chicken coop, cutting rope, etc. Luckily, Ivy is not one to get bullied by grumpy, sexist old men. After two days of weeding for the girls, Alice suggested at breakfast that the guys should help weed since weeding was not only a task for women. After breakfast, as we went to get our working gloves and boots, Maxime also mentioned that perhaps he can weed today instead of Alice since she had been weeding for the last two days.
When tasks were given, Owen and Maxime were still told to work on building a new compost heap while the women were to weed. Ivy had had enough. “How about today, the men weed. Jieun and I will stay here with the compost and Owen and Maxime can go weed.” ZD barked back “I don’t care as long as some people come with me now.” He quickly instructed how the compost heap was to be made and left.
When he came back, his reaction was “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS”, pulling the side off the heap Ivy made. It supposedly differed from what he wanted, but everyone else understood otherwise. After confirming instructions with ZD’s condescending impatience and raised voice, Ivy and Jieun remade the heap against one post (that didn’t stand upright as well as when Ivy had made it against two posts). When Ivy asked what was better about his way, he had no answer. Later, this heap was to be taken down and redone again as he forgot to add something to the bottom and a venting system.
He also instructed us to press down the compost when Jieun had learned from a previous farm (and Ivy later learned on Google) that compost was not to be pressed down as the composting process requires oxygen. This guy had no process in mind and was also spreading to us fake news on composting and his other beliefs.
The Road to Freedom
At this point, ZD had shown many points of bad management / bad workplace culture:
We never continued the same task (other than weeding, which was endless) so we never saw the impact of our work
He rarely looked at results, so we had no KPIs to know if we were doing well
He never led by example
He did not respect his volunteers who work for no pay, terrible accommodation, and healthy but very little food AND we didn't learn much or get inspired. He was taking advantage of the wwoofing community.
He promotes sexism in the workplace
We had low morale that was ignored and unaddressed
Jieun’s analysis was that this was a permaculture indeed. Only the people care part of it is only for ZD. The volunteers are part of the environment that keeps it sustainable. A place where ZD does little work, but meals are placed in front of him; gardened, prepared, and later cleaned by volunteers.
We first changed our end date to one week instead of two. But after ZD was rude and impatient with Ivy and Ivy crying every single day we had been here during our escalating disagreements, we left after 3 work days. We convinced the others to leave early as well, so that is why we are here by the beach!
We celebrated Chinese / Korean New Year together with an extended international feast that ran from dinner to breakfast -- bulgogi, rice cakes, egg & tomato, hotteok (Korean pancakes), crêpes (French pancakes), and Chinese scallion pancakes.
Our Relationship
This week was incredibly difficult not because of the work or dealing with ZD, but because of how we responded to each other. Our views differed on the situation and instead of understanding and supporting each other to make it better, we grew more distant and our negative feelings amplified each other’s to make it worse.
After it was all over we talked through it and made amends. Simply by letting Ivy know Owen agreed on the negative points she had pointed out instead of dismissing them by telling her to be more positive, she already felt better. Owen realized it was a crucial first step to align that we were in fact feeling the same things.
Owen also realized his judgment of her maintenance level was based on his own standards and his own perception (bailing vs sticking with commitments). Because she felt differently, he was judging her from his own views. From thinking about it from how she looked at the situation (choosing to suffer for bad trade-offs), he agreed he too would find it unbearable.
After spending so much time together, Owen had taken for granted that we have the same mental models on everything when that’s not always the case. Like the group photo at the top of this newsletter, just because a perspective looks good to him doesn't mean it works for her. Meanwhile, Ivy had always had a “love me or leave me” kind of confidence, never feeling like she had to justify who she was. Turns out, explaining where you come from helps build empathy.
Now that we’ve changed course, with our extra week we’re taking a detour to see some extra nature we originally planned on skipping. Instead of cramming all the farm stuff into this edition, we’ll talk about the paradise that was the first farm next time! Hope things are going better for our readers!
Onwards,
Ivy & Owen