TAKE-OFF:Sometimes money isn't the best way of buying things. Especially when travelling. In many places around the world people don't set too much store by that unreliable money stuff. Certainly not when it comes to important things like work.
I’ve spent the last few days working on a remote finca in Andalusía. My back is aching from heavy labouring. Chris, the finca’s owner, and Christoph, a globe-trotting Frenchman, and I pulled tonnes of logs and branches out of a dried-up river bed to be trailered up to the farm for firewood.
Each evening we opened a bottle of wine, Chris cooked a fabulous meal and we chatted until it was time to sleep. You couldn’t put an hourly rate on the work that we did.
For many cultures – and especially for traditional rural folk – work is so much part of life that there’s barely the concept of work and pay. There’s just stuff to be done. If you don’t join in with the harvest or herding stock or whatever, you’re not really joining in with life. And that means you won’t be joining in with all the other work-related fun – dances, feasting, flirting, joking.
Over the years I’ve done a fair bit of helping out around the world and been rewarded with the kind of experiences that one can’t put a price on. A few days calf-deep in water planting rice in Sri Lanka, enlivened by the odd snake swimming between my legs. A week in Burkina Faso clambering around palm trees with a machete cutting down dead fronds. Months cowboying in Argentina. Harvesting olives in Spain. Schooling horses in Iran. No money ever changed hands. If my new workmates were eating or drinking, I ate and drank. Come night-time there’d be a bed. And often dances and other fun stuff as well. It was the Irish meitheal – helping the neighbours with the harvest and having a party afterwards – but on a global scale.
Christoph counted back through 22 years of travel and jobs. Helping out in a riding school for special needs children in the UK. Tree planting in Tahiti. Baking in the Pyrenees. Building compost toilets in Paris. Lecturing on the the pitfalls of nuclear power in Japan. And much more. In all those years he calculated he’d done a total of 15 months of actual paid work. Everything else was in exchange for keep.
Chris, our host, understood this non-economy well. He’d done the same kind of things in the past; crewing boats, shearing sheep, playing music. Only a short while ago in Turkey he’d shown interest in the local way of making bread. He was ushered into a bakery and put to work kneading dough and feeding loaves into the oven. “It was marvellous,” he sighed. “For an evening I was a baker in Istanbul. How many people can say that? What an experience.”
The three of us stared into the flames of the fire we’d fuelled with our day’s work. What we all enjoyed, we realised, was working with people.
Not for them.