My First WWOOFing Adventure; Part Two

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My First WWOOFing Adventure; Part Two

October 27th

The Second Day

I did a lot more sanding and painting today. A couple of Mori men stopped by for a little while in the morning to work on some pluming in the back yard. We all took a break for a cup of tea together. The Mori men assured me they didn’t eat humans. I said, “Good, I don’t either.”
(I’m starting to pick up more of the cultural and social discrepancy between the Mori descendants and the European dependence. It’s an interesting cultural dynamic. Maybe sort of like the Native Americans and the European Americans, but I don’t think that’s quite it either. It’s hard to play anthropologist with such a limited population to base my ideas off of. But what I gather from the fore mentioned comment is that the Mori people were once thought of as cannibalistic and therefore jokingly assure the white people that they are not interested in eating them.)

Eric and the two men started talking about a locally kept secret of a “hot waterfall”. I know there is a lot of geothermal activity around here and some famous hot springs. And apparently a hot waterfall too! To get to this place you have to squeeze through a gorge that very few people know about and the tourists never hear about it. (Except for me! I wonder if they knew I was listening at this point.) Well it’s not like I could find it if I wanted to anyway. But I was fascinated and really curious! Wouldn’t that be cool? Going off on an adventure to find a great locally kept secret! I asked Eric about it later and he said it would be really far away and difficult to get to. Go figure. I guess I won’t be trekking off to find that tomorrow afternoon.

The same group of kids from yesterday showed up again today, but this time there was more of them and they seemed to have gotten younger. I heard gravel crackling behind me as I was painting and there was the gang of tykes on trikes! They were spitting up dust behind them as they cursed into the driveway. I thought this has got to be what Hell’s Angels looked like in diapers. One was even rocking a pink devil horn headband and a tutu. No shirt or shoes. Just the devil horns and tutu. The kids desperately wanted to help me paint so I gave the one with the most highly developed fine motor skills a brush and the rest of them other tools to clink around on. They asked me several times where I was from after the older one established I was not born in New Zealand because I talked funny. They also had some trouble with my name so I told them it was like “Margret” but in Norwegian. The older one had a teacher named Margret so they decided on calling me that. After Eric made all 5 of them go back home I saw them again playing out across the street as I headed out for my afternoon exploratory walk. The older one came up to me and told me about how she’d told her mum all about me. It made me wonder how a 7 year old would describe an ambiguously named foreigner from two different places, who had paint all over her cloths and spent the last hour or so answering questions asked by toddlers while actively preventing massive paint spillage catastrophes.

We also acquired a new WWOOFer today! He’s a young German fellow, bright eyed and freshly graduated from the Waldorf School he spent his entire school-aged life in. He’s here on an open ended ticket and plans to stick around New Zealand for the next 9 months. He’s WWOOFing and staying in hostels and upon being asked when he plans to move on from this current location he said he wasn’t sure and thinks he’ll just hitchhike somewhere at the end of the week. Wow, just when I thought I was being a little brave and adventurous!

Eric’s delighted that Pascal (the German kid) went to this Waldorf School. (actually the first official Waldorf school ever, and Pascal is of the third generation in his family to attend it) the Waldorf School is heavily based in the philosophies of Rudolf Steiner who is a philosopher that has hugely impacted Eric’s life. Eric’s quite the philosophy buff and references Steiner often.

Another guest of the evening was Chris. I’d been hearing about him since before I even got here. He’s a librarian at the local high school and just bought a place in the neighborhood. Eric and him play guitar together and joke about starting up a band. (I hope they do!) This evening as we sat around the living room, Chris and Eric playing guitar, we discussed education, poverty, and cultural differences between Mori and White New Zealanders. (Kansas friends, it was like our ‘Tea Time’ but international style!) It was quite an intellectual and well articulated conversation and I suddenly realized that this experience was exactly what I had described when trying to express what my ideal learning environment would be! So maybe this isn’t so much a semester off as it is a semester on. This is when being a “Road Scalar from the School of Life” really teaches you best. If only I could get academia to recognize this as worthy of a diploma!

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