Two years on from our last HelpX adventure (it’s similar to WOOFing but with less rules), I was reading theworldonmynecklace.com‘s account of being enslaved on a dope farm in Canada, and (as I read how they escaped), I had a thought of my own. HelpX experiences must all vary hugely as it’s almost entirely dependent on the relationship and expectations between the helpers and their hosts. If you have very low expectations and everything is average – it’ll probably be positive; if you have high expectations, it probably won’t. If (like us), your expectations vary, then so will your experiences. Keeping it vague (some of these places still do HelpX), we’ve HelpX’d 6 times; sometimes we had access to a vehicle, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we were expected to work pretty much full time (though still less than the host) and sometimes we worked more like half the time. The hosts that asked for 4-6 hours per day, or 8 hours on alternate days, seemed happiest with us. Those that wanted work from dawn to dusk never seemed satisfied. Any negotiation on that always seemed to end with both parties feeling dissatisfied. But here’s what I really learned: BYO.
Only two of the places we HelpX’d were really places you could leave by public transport or by hitchhiking. They were two of our favourites, so it never occurred to us at the time. The others were remote enough that leaving was fairly difficult without help from the hosts. It isn’t as suspicious as it sounds, I think a lot of HelpX places are fairly remote, it’s one of the reasons they’re HelpX places. If we had had a car at any of these though, we would have felt a lot happier at first – as we would have felt we could leave in the event of a breakdown in the relationship, and we’d have been able to explore the area – sometimes we had nothing to do and nowhere to go on our one day off.
A couple of these places also had no internet access, which is crucial when arranging your onward travel or job hunting. In one case, we were lucky, I was able to get some train tickets booked online by climbing up a tree to get reception. On another, I could use the seek website if I was outside.
My overall experience of HelpXing is positive. 5 months, 6 hosts – only the occasional problem. It wouldn’t have been feasible to have had our own car, but perhaps if we had communicated more in depth with the host, we’d have known that we should either get one, or not go to that particular place. Ironically, we felt that we took a chance going to our first host (we didn’t know if we would like it or even be competent), and our second (we weren’t sure it was a good idea to do it again), but when we actually had a problem, we’d gone into it thinking it would be great and we knew what we were doing. Our expectations were high and that probably didn’t help.
So, if you’re reading this and looking at some HelpX possibilities, here’s some suggestions:
- If you don’t have your own transport, are you near enough to a road you could hitch hike on? If not, perhaps consider agreeing a provisional end date with the hosts. Open ended arrangements have become awkward for us when either we’ve wanted to leave, or the host has needed the space for family or more HelpXers that were pre arranged.
- Agree (at least roughly) the hours and type of work in advance – if you don’t want to do what they ask, don’t go. Bear in mind that the location and the type of work may mean flexibility is more likely than set days off, and that your host may work 60-80 hours a week, and feel that a contribution of a mere 40+ hours from you is small.
- If they have internet access, find out if you’ll be able to use it – if not, try to provide yourself with mobile internet – you’ll probably feel you need it when you want to leave or even research your next move.
- Don’t think of it as work, think of it as being part of the family and the business for the time that you’re there. If you’re learning to do something new, or enjoying yourself, or have excess energy, use it – it will probably be appreciated and everything will be better for it. If the host is keeping you at arms length and treats you like a worker, it’s probably not a place to stay long anyway.
- Some hosts have had bad experiences in the past and struggle with trust and flexibility. We experienced a very clear case of this. The best thing to do with these hosts is to do a good job, show them that there are great people out there willing to work, and leave them wishing you’d stayed longer. One of their reasons for not being trusting is likely to be a vulnerability they have – so don’t exploit that at all!
Hopefully this helps someone – hopefully nobody can recognise themselves in here (unless it’s a good thing) – and hopefully people will continue to have great times working at farms and hostels and looking after children, gardens, boats and pets in the future. Here’s some of my favourite memories from HelpXing that I managed to photograph (and that don’t give away the location!):
ducksoftheworld 