Day 2 WWOOFing in Italy

Lessons of the Day:

1. Farmers don’t stop for rain
2. Eye protection, face masks, and gloves are for the weak of heart (yet I would still really like to have them!)

Today was wet and cold (I write as a sit in bed listening to the rain rhythmically assault the house all around me. I’m under five blankets and wearing my thermal underwear and the t-shirt, long sleeve shirt, sweater, and fleece jacket that I have not once fully removed in the three days I’ve been here. I can’t bring myself to face the cold in this unheated house. If you’re on your way to the obvious conclusion, I will assuage your curiosity: yes—this means that, even with laboring outside in the mud, I have yet to shower). For better or worse, apart from taking care of the donkeys, today the rain pushed us indoors to sand rocks. They have recently built a stone guesthouse that is fully erected, and every individual stone on the inside needs to be cleaned with wire brushes.

Lean and I were given wire brushes, an electric sander, and were set to work. Soon we realized that we were short of supplies, mainly eye and lung protection. So we improvised with sunglasses, making it too dark to actually see what we were doing, and scarves tied up over our faces, Zapatista-style. Unfortunately, we did not find the appropriate improvisation to save our hands and now have the blisters and cuts as evidence.

Day 1 WWOOFing in Italy

My first day of WWOOFing in Italy was varied and eventful. My tasks for the day:
• Cut bunny food
• Clear shrubs
• Sand stone walls of new guest house that they are building
• Filter clay out of earth with sieve
• Bring the donkeys back from a day of grazing/Feed

So far, I have Simone—permanent resident—and two other WWOOFers showing me what to do. While WWOOFing, it is common to meet other WWOOFers on your journey. In Israel I found myself WWOOFing with a varied crew: a taciturn, perhaps even bipolar man from Connecticut; a vegan, philosophy student from Bulgaria; an Israeli girl still in high school; and an English raw foodist, to name just a few. Now here, the two that I have joined are Sergio and Leah, a couple that met at the University of Vermont and now live in Copenhagen where Sergio is doing a Master’s in Anthropology. Currently, he is in Italy doing applied research, studying identity in the Campania through culture and dialect, and in order to do so he is WWOOFing in several different areas of the Campania. His family is actually from the Campania and he spent part of his life here: [a small village (outside the slightly less small village of Sarno)] outside of Naples. He hasn’t told me his whole story yet, but he grew up moving back and forth between the East Coast of the US and Italy. His Italian father met his mother in New York; to escape a future constrained to farm life he had run off to New York to stay with his mother’s seven brothers. Why had all of her brothers come together to the States? They had had to leave Italy because “they had killed some people”.

Rule #4: Dura la vita del boscaiolo.

Difficult, the life of a lumberjack.

What makes me say this? I return to Rome, where I spent my first four days in Italy, before coming to the WWOOF farm, Couch Surfing with 44 year old Rodolfo. Rodolfo was a wise man. We had many a deep conversation on a wide range of topics…in fact, in some ways I am his American alter-ego. But there was one thing about Rodolfo that I never quite understood. Daily, perhaps used as a device to transition from one topic to another or to close a thought, he would say “Dura la vita del boscaiolo”. Our conversations, of course, never fell upon the topic of lumberjacks—or lumber anything—but he continued to insist, always bringing up this lumberjack.

I didn’t think much of it; I laughed it off nonchalantly, as he persisted the truth and importance of his statement. My first day on Italy WWOOF farm number one, I understood. Our first task today was to use a mini saw to cut down giant stalks of […?] for food for the bunnies, our second to cut back thorny overgrowth with machetes. It was my job to do clean up by cutting the thorn/tree stalks close to the ground, and while explaining the task, Leah, the other WWOOFer, said to me, “try to cut them as close to the ground as possible. That way, it will take longer for them to grow back and for us to have to do this all again.” It finally hit me: the life of a lumberjack is difficult. Not only is it backbreaking labor…it never ends. It will be the same labor with the same reward day in and day out… as soon as the plants grow back we’ll be (or the next WWOOFers will be) out there doing this again. It is physically and mentally difficult. This is the life of anyone who works closely with the natural world. This is the life of the boscaiolo. How strangely inappropriate for a city boy from Rome to use this phrase as his shtick, but how appropriate for him to have said it to me fresh before my experience as, in a sense, a boscaiolo myself!

WWOOF Italy Rule #3: Don’t strain too hard if all of your Italian lessons don’t seem to have quite prepared you.

Learning Italian, in Italy, is quite difficult, actually. In fact, going to some parts of Italy—especially the rural areas where WWOOF farms are to be found—to learn Italian can be like going to France to learn Portuguese. Why? According to my fellow WWOOFer Sergio, linguists recognize nine languages in Italy. Mussolini called them “dialects” of Italian in order to unite the country and the concept has stuck, but in reality modern-day Italian is one of nine languages that developed from Latin, chosen as the national language in large part thanks to Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. That is to say, the others did not evolve from Italian, but evolved from Latin on a different trajectory than modern Italian. That is to say, the Tuscan dialect is to the Neapolitan dialect more or less as Portuguese is to the Neapolitan dialect.

Within those nine separate languages of Italy, then, are hundreds of different dialects. Phew! So perhaps I can take a little of the blame off my shoulders for not having learned more than I did while living 10 months in the Cilento: I was studying one written language and hearing another spoken language, entirely. It makes equal sense that in this mountain village with identity strongly tied to land, culture, and language, I understand significantly less than I did, for example, in Rome.

WWOOF Italy Rule #2: Make friends as quickly and as frequently as you can.

Luckily, by this point on the ride to the first Italy WWOOF, I had already begun a congenial friendship with the bus driver, so he decided we were in this together. He doesn’t stop driving his bus until we’ve found my farm. So there we are, Alex and Franco, the two adventurers in a giant bus on a road that was surely first intended for nothing wider than two lanes of donkeys. For every passerby, Franco rolled down his window/opened the door and shouted to ask if they knew Tempa del Fico. After a few tries and several unintelligible answers (more on dialects of Italy later), we found the winner. He not only told us where the farm was, he offered me a ride! His name was Gean Paulo, a 28 year old who drives a hearse (he does a lot of driving, in fact; tomorrow he was to go down the mountain to the town from which I had come with the closest hospital to collect a body for a funeral). I was fortunate to have found such generous spirits (which you will find are the rule and not the exception in Italy), as it was already dark and in total it was at least a twenty minute car ride in empty, isolated country. Once we thought we had made it, the sign marking the farm was on the wrong side of the road, we turned down an unmarked dirt path, his hearse became stuck in the mud, and we unknowingly interrupted the path of a man and his cows who were going home for the night. A full 12 hours after I had originally set out in the morning, I had made it safely to my first Italy WWOOF farm.

WWOOF Italy Rule #1: Don’t worry too much about logistics.

I’ve arrived to my first WWOOFing farm, Tempa del Fico. After a few necessary buffer days in Rome to recover from jetlag (…that was my reason for needing a few days in Rome!) I left the house of my Couch Surfing host for an eventful day of car, metro, train, train, bus, bus, and herse.

Train Rome-->Vallo della Lucania: 3 ½ hours.

After some confusion—my host had given me inaccurate bus times and his cell phone wasn’t getting enough service to receive my calls—I finally made it to the correct bus for the 1 ½ hour ride up thin winding mountain roads and through tiny towns to the town of Rofrano, where the farm was presumed to be. Still not having reached my host by phone, though, there was no way for him to know to come meet me. But in a town of less than 2,000 and where, as one bus driver told me, “everybody knows everybody,” how difficult could it be to find him? Luckily, Rofrano was the last stop on the route. One of the exiting passengers assured us that she knew Tempa del Fico: you know, way up that one road, off in that one place, off in that one direction…in a nutshell, she told us ‘I have no idea where it is, but it’s way beyond walking distance.’