Kiwi Green

So I have just arrived home from a little over a week living with a family in Matakana, working in their organic gardens.  WWOOF, standing for “Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms”, or “Willing Workers on Organic Farms”, is an organization that pairs travelers visiting different countries with small farms, where they work for a set number of hours each day, and in exchange they receive free food, housing, and experience the culture of the country first-hand.  I have been wanting to try WWOOFing for quite a while because of my interest in sustainability, and I finally got the opportunity now that classed have ended for the semester.  Somehow, due to the scheduling of my exams, I had a week and a half without any classes.  This was perfect timing to escape the hustle and bustle of Auckland for a while and go experience the real New Zealand by staying with a Kiwi family and working in their organic gardens. 

On Tuesday the 7^th, I went to see Alena, Janka and Tara’s Pacific dance show.  They all took a Pacific Music and Dance class this semester and worked really hard to learn all the cool dances.  The show was amazing, with elaborate costumes and beautiful singing and dancing.  It was a lot of fun to watch and made me want to get up and dance with them!  Right after the show, I grabbed my bags from the apartment and bused in to Warkworth in the evening to meet my new family for the next week. 

The Woollers are a vivacious family of five.  Tia, the “mum”, is a Montessori pre-school teacher and runs a preschool from their property in Matakana.  Mark is and artist and an excellent gardener.  He is an amazingly talented painter, and his fantastic paintings can be viewed here: http://www.markwooller.com/.  The kids are Cullen, 17; Bree, 14; and Carrie, 12.  There was also a dog- Miga, two cats- Early and Smudge, chickens, a beehive, and of course the beautiful gardens.  The family made me feel right at home, with my own cozy room and delicious home-cooked (and conveniently vegetarian) meals.  Oh the food- so much of it was either from their gardens or organic from their local market.  They made their own bread and muesli and the meals were all hearty and delicious.  I was definitely spoiled when it came to food!

I spent a lot of my first two days working in the gardens, weeding and pruning.  It felt so good to work with my hands and be outside surrounded by trees and quiet.  I worked long hours until my back hurt- I was enjoying it all too much to stop!  At the end of the day I would go help clean up the pre-school.   The small school was so adorable and really very well organized, so it wasn’t much work to tidy it up and vacuum at the end of the day.  Unfortunately, Tia had to go to Sydney for a conference for the majority of the time I was in Matakana.  Before she left, she took me in to Warkworth where I got to explore the town a little while she ran some errands.  I had fun looking in the bookshops and galleries and got a cup of coffee at a cute little café called “Ginger”.  In one of the galleries, I met a nice woman from Canada who had moved to the area to retire and had taken up photography.  It was fun talking to her for a while about the town and what it was like moving from North America to New Zealand.  On Thursday, I went to Pilates with Bree in the evening.  It was a small class that reminded me of the Yoga class I go to with Mom when I’m home in Tallahassee and it felt good to stretch out my sore muscles from working in the garden all day.

On Friday it rained all day, so I found things to do inside, like organizing cabinets and cutting up apple slices to put in their fruit drier.  In the evening, Mark had a talk at a gallery in Auckland, so I ended up making dinner for the kids.  It was fun making up a pasta recipe and talking with the kids at dinner.  Carrie is quite the character, and came up with a long list of things I should try throwing out my apartment window in New York, including marshmallows, water balloons, a dollar bill on fishing line that you pull up whenever someone reaches for it, and yellow food coloring when it is snowing.  We watched New Zealand’s Next Top Model in the evening, a weekly tradition for all the girls in the family.  When New Zealand’s Next Top Model isn’t on, they watch Glee.

On Saturday morning, Mark ,Bree, Carrie and I went to the Matakana Village Farmers Market.  Matakana is a tiny town, but the market draws visitors all the way from Auckland every Saturday.  I felt like I was stepping back in time as I walked through the beautiful wooden shop stalls where they were selling all kinds of fruits and vegetables, honey, vinegars and olive oils, fish, nuts, wines, and chocolates.  The market is surrounded by a lovely little shopping center with lots of different types of shops and a beautiful cinema.  The cinema is independently owned and each theatre was elaborately decorated and completely different from the next.  One theatre had long colorful sheets billowing from the ceiling.  Another had an elaborate chandelier.  My favorite theatre had a ceiling completely covered by tens of thousands of paper roses, each individually put there by hand, with models of the native birds Tui and Fantail along the aisles.  We got coffees at the local café called “Love Shack”, and went to a movie in the called “Queen of the Sun”- a documentary about honeybees.  It was a fascinating film and really made me want to start keeping bees.  After the market, we returned to the house, where we baked shortbread cookies with the cat-shaped cookie cutter that Bree found at the market.  We elaborately decorated each cookie with icing and sprinkles.  It was great spending time with the girls- they are so smart and fun to be around.  Bree bakes shortbread cookies that are sold at the café in the cinema, and Cullen works there as a barista on the weekends.  We took some of the shortbread there in the evening, and Cullen, Bree and I were able to go see “Super 8” in the cinema for free.  It was a really cute film, a good balance of action, humor, heart, and absurdity.  Two movies in one day- sounds like I was working real hard… 

On Sunday morning I went to walk Miga on Omaha beach with Mark.  The beach was so beautiful and it was such a relaxing way to start the day.  Miga had a blast socializing with all the other dogs on the beach.  She is such a well-behaved little chocolate labrador.  She barks when strangers approach the house, but she is really a sweetheart.  She quickly discovered that I am a pushover and learned to run up to me whenever I came home and flip over on her back for belly rubs.  I bonded with the two cats as well. In the evenings I liked to sit in front of the Stanley oven and read with one of the cats curled up warm on my lap. My last night at the house, Smudge even found a way to push my bedroom door open and sleep in my room.  I was so surprised to wake up in the middle of the night with Smudge sitting on my chest, purring like a motorboat with her nose in my face. The rest of Sunday, I did some more gardening, and in the evening, the kids and I all played a Harry Potter version of Clue, which Carrie had created.  Did you know that Clue is called Cluedo in New Zealand? Weird.

That night we got a call from Theresa, the co-owner of the pre-school.  At the last minute, the substitute teachers arranged to replace Tia were unable to work on Monday and Tuesday.  It is against the law for there to only be one adult at the pre-school, so I became a teacher for two days!  It was quite an adventure being a pre-school teacher.  I had no idea was to expect.  It ended up being a really fun- if exhausting experience.  I had to constantly be alert, making sure the kids were doing the activities they were supposed to and not misbehaving.  There were about 20 kids the first day and maybe 27 or so the next day, so it was very, very busy.  It was so much fun watching the kids learn.  I especially liked helping them with the spelling games, where some of the older kids would write out a sentence with blocks and then copy it down.  I would help them sound out each word so they could make their best guess. 

The children had such bright, vivacious personalities.  There was one girl who was the natural leader of the bunch, a happy-go-lucky girl who could spout out facts about Sumatran Tigers and Coccidian and Mycobacterium.  There was a little girl who insisted on always sitting on my lap and wanted to show me how she did every activity.  She also liked to take of her pants and go running around outside half-naked.  There was a little boy who told me that one of the girls was his girlfriend and made a card for her.  He even asked the little girl’s mother if he could marry her- which reminded me a lot of pre-school Nathan. 

I loved watching the games that the kids would make up on the playground.  Sometimes they were flying unicorns, dragons or racehorses.  Other times the were godwit birds, making nests out of rocks and grass which they would patiently sit on, waiting for their “eggs” the hatch and then fly from Alaska to New Zealand.  I always had to break it up if some of the boys decided they wanted to play “baddies”, where they would run around chasing the other kids with sticks, pretending they were guns.  “Why don’t you play ‘goodies’?” I would say. 

Some parts of the day were hard, especially if there were three kids crying on the playground from three different directions, or when two of the boys decided to refuse to come inside for story time, or when one rambunctious little girl decided it was a good idea to cut her own hair- but it was still a very rewarding experience and I was so glad I got to try it out.  I was so tired when the day was over, but still managed to fit in a little gardening before coming in for a delicious dinner and then hanging out with the family in the evening. 

Tia came home at nearly three in the morning on Tuesday, somehow magically avoiding the hundreds of flight cancellations between Australia and New Zealand due to the ash clouds that blew all the way over here from South America.  It was definitely nice to have her back and I was sad I wouldn’t get to spend more time with her. 

Today, I finished up a little gardening in the morning, packed up my stuff into the car, and then went to Goat Island Marine Reserve.  Mark had an appointment nearby, so he dropped me off at the reserve before his appointment and then picked me up afterwards.  At the marine reserve, I enjoyed climbed along the rocky beach, peeking into tide pools and taking heaps of pictures.  I was so glad to get to explore the reserve for a little.  It was on my list of things to do in New Zealand but had not made it over yet.  There was a lot of cool fish, crabs, snails, limpets, barnacles, cliffs and waterfalls all along my walk.  Goat Island Marine Reserve is monitored by Leigh Marine Lab, the marine biology lab associated with the University of Auckland.  I’d love to go and have a look at the labs there sometime. We then went and picked up Carrie from school.  Carrie had an orthodontist appointment in Auckland, so Mark dropped me off at my apartment on the way.

Now, here I am back in Auckland.  It has been such a memorable week.  What a wonderful, loving, open, giving family!  They were so fun and affectionate and got along so well.  I really felt close to them all by the end of my stay-like I was the “big sister” of the family.  I loved playing games with Carrie, hanging out talking about clothes and boys with Bree, and staying up late talking about everything from politics to TV shows with Cullen.  During my breaks for tea during the day, I liked talking about art with Mark and about his adventures living in California, or biking around Europe.  It was so sad saying goodbye to everyone today.  I will definitely always remember my WWOOF experience with them fondly and will have to come visit when I come back to New Zealand someday.  Who knows? - Maybe they will come see me in Florida or New York someday as well!