I have a recurring dream in which I discover that places I know well, like the halls I lived in at university, have extra rooms or entire sections which I have somehow never discovered. Commonly this involves a basement level which links together separate real world places via a some kind of communal subterranean hanging-out zone.
This dream presumably derives from the disappointing gap between the kind of world you expect to inherit as a child, full of magical wardrobes and mythical beings living in trees, and the modern world we grow up to experience, with its insistent focus on practicality, efficiency and sensible interior design. I never really recovered from the childhood-ending cataclysm of finally ruling out the possibility that it might be real, all the magic, mystery and adventure promised to me by adults and by books.
But the place where M and I have landed up now, and for the last 6 days, goes some way towards restoring a sense that the world has magical and unexpected things hidden within it. The name is straight out of a beaurocratic tract: The solidarity school foundation. But this place is as far from being a beaurocracy as its possible for a human society to be. It's chaotic, messy, and anarchistic, in the proper sense of that word.
We signed up to volunteer here as part of Workaway, a labour-for-accommodation trading system, where you most often live with an enlightened and handsome young family, helping with English lessons or harvesting their olives, as your hosts require. But this place is something completely different.
Set up around 20 years ago, it is a sprawling residential complex for anyone who needs a place to exist outside of regular society: women fleeing abusive relationships, immigrants without the papers to stay in Europe, people with psychological reasons for not being able to survive in the outside world. It's built around 10 large houses, and a huge underground kitchen and dining hall but the slow journey of discovering the countless large rooms, spaces and piles of agglomerated stuff has been a waking experience of those dreams I'm always having.
There is an overstuffed library, a "computer room", a thriving garden, a bakery, a metal workshop, a concert hall and a "gym", as well as countless nooks and crannies for volunteers and residents to spend free time in the endless sun which shines every day without fail on the whole of Andalucia. The foundation is a maze of walkways and interconnecting rooms, populated constantly by people either busy working to improve the site, hanging around smoking cigarettes, or shuffling quietly about in the manner of the disturbed or mentally distressed. Into this chaotic mix of oddballs come volunteers, largely from the richer parts of nothern Europe, mainly Germany, the UK and France, to learn Spanish, lead yoga and meditation classes and generally try not to get too much in the way.
It's an extroverts dream (and by extension, presumably, an introvert's nightmare.) Every morning at 8am, the entire cast of residents and volunteers assembles in the huge basement dining hall for a breakfast of coffee and bread with tomatoes and olive oil, before dispersing again for the day's tasks. This communal breakfast seems to me like the perfect way to start the day. You're under absolutely no obligation to make any conversation: the lack of language skills helps with that, but also the vibe among many of the residents is one of comtemplation and coffee stirring, rather than of thinking up small talk. But you're surrounded by people of all ages, from thoughtful older people, to zany many-cultured children of all backgrounds and languages.
Many of the people you breakfast with, you've also worked with throughout the previous days, or encountered in some context or other and therefore have some tiny thread of connection which is enough to warrant a special "Buenos dias" of your very own. An example of this is Yolanda, the enormous middle aged resident who runs the all-important shoe and clothing store. On the first day she got me towels from the store, and this has created a microthread between us which still warrants a separate smile and greeting each day we see each other. And the longer you're here, the more of these tiny invisible threads you create between people until, I imagine, each entry into the breakfast hall is a flurry of hellos and smiles with everyone you know. (This is including only those people you haven't yet had an argument with: this place is presumably as riddled with interpersonal friction as any collective living arrangement, but we don't yet have access to the kind of Spanish that would allow us into this world.) Breakfast is over within about 20 minutes, and it's time for the day's washing up team (on a rota) to swing into action, while the kids go off to either school or the nursery, and the adults get to work.
There are around 100 people living here I'm told, with about 30 children of all ages. Some people live here permanently with their whole families, including a Hungarian/South African family with three kids, whose children I'm told have never been to school. The dad told me that they had been hitch-hiking around with two kids strapped to them, but that the arrival of the third meant they'd had to "settle down" and buy a van. The family spends the summer volunteering at music festivals, so "the kids' education is sorted". When pressed for an explanation, he told me that the oldest child makes jewellery from bits and bobs they find along the way and sells it at the festival, which is "a better education than he ever got in school". She apparently made a good amount of money at this year's festival. Which she then proceeded to spend entirely on sweets. Fair enough. They seem like an incredibly happy, well-adjusted family but the lack of a home is a real challenge to my conception of life as lived by anybody, let alone the life of a young, nuclear family.
But thinking about their lifestyle a bit later on, it occured to me that this family *does* in fact have a home. It's a home they take with them wherever they go. And it's not their trusty van. The family is the family's home, and they seem to be able to be perfectly comfortable and cosy and sheltered within the walls of the family, regardless of the physical place they happen to be. Contrary to readers' expectations, these are not some reeking, toothless band of rogues. They are as clean, polite, helpful and outward-facing as any family of five and they're a joy to behold in action. I'm impressed.
Aside from these non-schooled kids, who roam about the Foundation freely finding people to help, everyone has to work from 10am to 2.30pm. Each resident has a task or an area which they are in charge of, up to the measure of their abilities. A few people are not up to anything much more than shuffling and mumbling, and that is therefore their task, for which they are equally rewarded with food and shelter as the hardest-working residents. But the vast majority of people here spend their time in doing the business of living, and in making small improvements to the place or the running of it as they see fit. Everywhere you look there of signs of somebody's project to either make things run more smoothly or to make them look more beautiful. For example, the foundation is dotted throughout with mosiacs made of little shards of coloured stone or glass, with inspirational phrases in Spanish and English. It's really quite affecting.
The volunteers then are given anything and everything to do from beating rugs, replastering crumbling buildings or cleaning windows, to gardening, sweeping and looking after the community's babies in the nursery. (This is what I'm supposed to be doing right now, but the adult:child ratio is currently 1 to 1 so I'm slacking off to write this. Later: I'm now sitting on a tiny plastic chair, about 25cm in height, writing this while two of the babies sleep quietly in their cots. Easy work!)
At two-thirty, it'll be time for lunch and the morning's activity grinds to a sudden halt. The whole crowd assembles again, this time covered variously in plaster, flour, soil or baby powder, and hold hands around the table to say thanks to the people who cooked and brought the food, and the day's major stomach-stuffing begins in earnest. Again here, the focus is on greeting and eating far more than it is on small talk, and this suits me absolutely fine. When you know that there is nothing more expected of you than to smile, say hello, then shut up and eat, it's a lot easier to be friendly to a much greater group of people than if you're expected to actually have a conversation with everyone you greet, as you might be in the UK. All the food is donated by supermakets spooked by an approaching sell-by date, but the alchemy of the kitchen volunteers in turning this out-of-date miscellany into a wholesome and tasty lunch never fails to amaze. You have to be quick to get food, as it's brought to the table on huge towering platters and it's up to you to make sure you get as much as you want/can. Yesterday I sat with a frail and friendly old man who whispered to me that he's diabetic and that's why his plateful was so meagre. He told his doctor that he doesn't want insulin injections, so he just manages his condition with a careful diet. Like many people here, he seemed perfectly happy to talk to me and tell me about himself, despite the absolute baseline level of my Spanish. Patience seems to be in-built when living with an often-changing crowd of people of various backgrounds and abilities.
When I compare the existence of sometimes marginalised people like this old diabetic man, in the foundation and out in normal society, it seems insane that people in his position are usually left to wither away on their own. Here he lives right in the centre of a family of 100 and is fed and watered the same as anyone else, despite his presumably limited ability to do much physical labour.
This whole thing is run with panache and an insane amount of laissez faire by a vivacious elderly Spanish man and his much younger and equally energetic Italian wife. They are the parents and the bosses of everyone here, but they do just enough organisation to make the place work, and no more. They are more the ideas and inspiration guys than the setters of timetables. Judging by some of the reviews left by previous volunteers on the Workaway site, this seems to have been a problem for several of y predecessors. People complained of disorder, of redoing other people's shoddy work, or of having their own work shoddily redone without their permission. They also complained about the lack of structured social work to help the residents go back out into the world. But M and I are taking things with a smile and a pinch of salt. The real necessities are one hundred percent catered for here, and everything else is at least partly an exercise in just having something not too useless to do. If our morning's work is undone in the afternoon by some unthinking other, it's just a reminder that it's not the outcome but the process that should be work's reward.
The opinion of the "management" on the subject of the social work that goes on here is that this is very specifically *not* a government-funded half-way house or treatment centre. In these places, we were told, residents lose the ability to look after themselves as they are often quite literally not allowed to cook for themselves or do their own washing. They become institutionalised and dependent on the system. But here, there are many residents for whom this is a completely valid medium or even long-term way of life. They are completely autonomous, free to attend the group meals or not to, and are encouraged by a genuine sense of solidarity to do as much work as they can in the four and a half hours allotted to labour from Monday to Friday.
M and I are happy with the fact that we have somewhere cosy to live, are well fed, watered and caffeinated, and have the autonomy to dream up and execute projects of our own, in the spirit of making the place more beautiful, more homely or more functional to live in. This afternoon, we tidied our little dorm, and made a shelf so the top bunk occupants can put their glasses and books etc. within reach. It was a nice, easy project, but we still got to do some learning, because a few of the people in our casa are real engineering geniuses, and we've been shown a thing or to about how to use a drill.
Next week, we're hoping to get out to a plot of land which the foundation has got its hands on, and which a group of 3 young Gambian men are planning to turn into a permaculture Eden, and possibly also to live on the site. This is exciting for us because we get to do some manual work in and among the earth, and the possibility is open of us trying out some building techniques M has been researching. A long-term project like this of our own, accompanied and assisted by the Gambians, who are a fun (and English-speaking!) crowd, could see us being happy and fulfilled here for a while yet. The only hard part is imagining the return to rain-soaked, lonely London life!
