All right, so I left behind the 300 year old house with the donkeys, and made my way to the next Workaway in the north of Germany. My mode of transport happened to be a Mercedes-Benz A-Class AMG that I found through Blah Blah Car. My driver and I were swiftly moving towards Hannover at approximately 100MPH when the black shadow of a BMW M4 passed us and was instantly gone. They must have been doing 160MPH. Fast enough to make our car shake. Welcome to the Autobahn. 

To give some context, Bla Bla Car is a shared ride app that is not available in the USA, but essentially, if someone is on their way from point A to point B they can become available and you can request a ride. If you are on their route, they can pick you up for a fee. So I got picked up by an Engineer who lived in Munich, but was on his way to visit family in Hamburg. He drove me all the way to Hannover where we parted ways. Hannover was a layover where I spent the night with some amazing Couch Surfing hosts. The next day I made my way to Osnabrück from where I would take a train to Lemförde where I was set to meet my new host family. 

It’s Always Strange Meeting Strangers 

Lemförde is a small town, and it’s such a contrast from where I just was. I remember arriving there and noting just how bare bones everything was. There wasn’t even a bathroom. I just sat on a bench by the parking lot and waited. Once more I wondered what the heck I had gotten myself into. It’s pretty unusual when you’ve only communicated with somebody you’ve never met before through a website, and you send them a message saying “Hey, I’m gonna be at this train station, at this time, on this certain day. Could you come pick me up?” What should you expect? You don’t know who it’s going to be. You don’t know what they’re going to be like. I was feeling nervous. 

After a while a gray Volkswagen van showed up with a fair skinned teenage girl with dreads at the wheel. The short haired lady in the passenger seat was giving her instructions. They both seemed pretty focused on the girl’s driving when suddenly the lady spotted me and smiled and waved. This was my host mother, Doris, and her oldest daughter, Marie. They rolled down the window to confirm that I was their new workawayer, and then they opened the door and let me in the van. We got to know each other a bit as we drove along the country road. Outside there were large farm houses separated by vast, flat fields covered in yellow flowers. After about 15 minutes we took a left turn and into a road covered in a canopy of trees that opened up into their driveway. 

My Hosts Making Me Feel Right At Home 

The Spreens house was another one of those large farm houses that I had seen on the drive. It was three stories tall and all made of red brick. The driveway was also made of brick. Attached to the house were two old barns. One made of concrete with empty rooms inside of it and one made of wood with old farm tractors parked underneath. Across the driveway was another barn with a garage door which they used for storage. The collection of buildings formed a J shape with the house being the bottom of the J. 

I remember when I got there there was a beautiful sunny sunset, and the weather was warm. We got off the van and went inside through the large wooden door. When I went inside it felt like a Disney channel movie. There was a lot of sunlight coming in through the many windows in the house. There was a floating staircase, there were toys scattered throughout, colorful decorations adorning the pale wood furniture and white walls. There were coats, and jackets, and shoes, and art that the kids had made, everywhere. Doris was a single mom of 5 and the house reflected that kind of lifestyle: A little bit of chaos, a lot of mess, and definitely a whole lot of joy. 

Doris introduced me to the other kids whom I had not met yet, and also to their dog. The kids shyly said hello, and then Doris instructed me to take off my shoes before going up the stairs to show me my room on the second floor. I remember going up the stairs, through a small living area, and into a hallway off to the side, through the last door and into my room. When Doris opened the door I saw a slanted ceiling with two ceiling windows on it, my bed off to the side and a desk at the far end. On the desk there were chocolates and gummy candies and a bottle of sparkling water. Doris explained everything to me: “Here’s some chocolates, and here’s the Wi-Fi, and here’s your bed. We are happy that you are here with us.” 

I felt so loved by that gesture. There was no need for all of the gifts. Heck, the last place I stayed was a chicken coop! This family really made me feel, not just at home, but very much part of their family. The room felt mine. The ceiling windows opened upwards and let me stand into the opening, almost creating a kind of balcony. I spent many evenings looking at beautiful sunsets and one night looking at the full moon up there. That first night for dinner we all got together around the dinner table and had pizza. After dinner we played board games and I thought I might actually be in a Disney channel movie!

My Favorite German Teacher

Of course, the reason I was here was to do some work, and my first task was to build a fence around a small garden off to the side of the house. Doris had gotten some small picket fence sections from somewhere, and all I had to do was to erect them around the garden. To do this, though, we needed to drill into a concrete section on one side of the garden. We had to do about three or four posts into the concrete, and the rest were in the dirt. This, of course meant that we had to go to the hardware store, get some long drill bits, some metal brackets, screws, some wood posts, nails and the whole shebang. Drilling those holes took a while, and I remember that at a rate of 4-5 ish hours per day it took me two days to finish the fence. 

While I was building that fence, the youngest of the five kids, Paola, would come around to check on me. She was seven years old at the time. She had bobby, brunette hair, she often wore pink, and she wore glasses. She spoke no English, and she was not shy. She would come around and ask me what I was doing, and why I was doing it the way I was doing it, and she would tell me stories, and she would ask me what certain tools were. I on the other hand could barely speak German at the time. I didn’t know what any of the tools were called, nor did I know how to explain what I was doing. So what would start as a conversation would quickly turn into a game of charades, and I loved it, because I learned so much through her. 

My favorite was one time when she came over and she asked me what I was doing. I tried explaining to her that I was trying to pull out one of the posts because I measured wrong and I needed to move it down. However, that is a complex sentence. Plus, I didn’t know the word for pull or for push at the time. So I was trying to get her to guide me through it by pointing at things or by doing a motion and asking “Was ist das?”. 

Eventually we got to the part where I motioned to pulling out the post from the ground. There was some back and forth and trying to figure out what I meant, and whether the word she was saying was what I needed. At some point she grabbed a small wooden pull cart toy nearby and looked at me sternly. She pulled the cart while making eye contact with me, and as she did she said the word “ziehen”, which means to pull. To emphasize, she did it once more. That was all I needed for that word to be forever embedded in my mind. That little girl was the best German teacher I ever had. 

Demolishing the Barn one Hammer Blow at a Time

After I finished the fence Doris introduced me to my next task. She walked me over to the barn attached to the house, the one made of concrete, and told me that I was to demolish part of it. That barn had been there since the 1920s, and it had not been used since the 50s. She wanted to remodel it and use it to create more living space for when the kids got older. There were a bunch of tools and boxes and old equipment everywhere, there was rubble and pieces of wood from back when all of this was a farm, and there were pig pens full of 50 year old dung. My task, then, was to clear all of that up using only my hands, a shovel, a sledge hammer, and a wheelbarrow.

Well, first I had to empty out the crap from the pig pens. Apparently the dung could be sold as fertilizer, so I shoveled about two tons of the stuff and put it in a pile in the second barn. Then there was some furniture that needed to be moved to create a walkway. Then came the fun part. For two weeks I got to shamelessly and with pure abandon hit and slam and jab and wrench an entire half of a barn. After breakfast I would put on my work clothes and walk to the barn and just start swinging. When I built up a pile of rubble I would load it onto the wheelbarrow and take it outside to fill a hole which was left from an unfinished construction project. This is what I did for four hours a day. 

I’ll never forget that first time Doris left me to demolish the barn and she went to do her day job. After a few hours she came back very enthusiastically and with her German accent said “O-K YOU HARDWORKING BOY!” Then she said it was time for a break. I was hesitant to go in the house given that I was covered in dust and sweat, but she insisted that we go inside. I took off my work boots and we turned left towards the kitchen and then she introduced me to their chest freezer full of ice cream! We each grabbed a popsicle and happily ate our treats together. 

This was the rhythm of my workdays for the rest of the time I was there. While I was demolishing and loading and emptying the wheel barrow, Doris would come and work in the other rooms in the barn. She would paint the rooms or she would make plans as to where more demolition or construction would happen. Then we would go and get ice cream. I genuinely loved every second of it.  

Fun Times With My Host Family

The work I did was fun and all, but even better was all the fun stuff we did outside of work. One day without warning they told me they were taking a daytrip to Porta Westfalica, which in Latin means “Gate to Westphalia”, and they invited me to come. Of course I said yes! Porta Westfalica was just a town which was of significance because of the deeds of Emperor William. There is a monument to the man, which we climbed. It’s also interesting because there are two hills which do create a sort of geographical gate. Some of the kids came with. I didn’t understand much, but I thoroughly enjoyed spending the day with the family. Also, we stopped to get spaghetti ice cream on the way back home. 

We also went bouldering a few times with Marie and some of her friends. Another time, on a nice day, we went swimming at the lake, and another time we went and visited a nearby town where there had been an art coalition that created all these interactive sculptures and structures throughout the town which were very cool. All of this sounds like pretty standard stuff. Almost the kind of things one would expect to do with a host family. Except we did so much more!

Like the time they took me to Hamburg! The family had tickets to go watch a play, which happened to take place in Hamburg, about two hours away. The whole family was going, so they took me with them. We got to the city and had lunch and we walked around for a little bit, but while they went and saw the theatrical version of Mary Poppins I got to explore the city. It was Easter so I got to pop in to a Catholic mass service in a cathedral. I took a bunch of pictures of exotic cars and I got to see a lot of the old harbor area. When they got out of the play we went to have seafood, and I ordered an octopus sandwich, and after dinner we came back home. 

Should I tell you about the Renaissance fair that we went to? Just behind the Spreens house there were some woods and it just so happened to be that a Ren Fair was happening. I was living out of a backpack, so I had no way to dress up, but Marie went dressed as a maiden wearing a three layer dress made of linen. I had never been to a Renaissance fair before, so it was really cool to see the cosplayers and the cool workshops and the medieval entertainers from Sweden and, especially, the lady playing the tambourine being followed by giant geese. 

We also went to Hanover to meet up with some family friends of theirs. I had been there just a week and a half before when I was on my way to their house, so it was cool to explore the city while being accompanied by the whole family. We went to an outdoor mall to do some shopping. It was raining the whole day, but that didn’t spoil the fun. We went and got dinner at some German restaurant and afterwards we went to an escape room. We did manage to escape, and it was just so fun to use my German to solve the puzzles!

My Favorite Workaway

I wish I had time to go into detail about all the game nights, and the cool British neighbors they had, and the pizza nights that they hosted, the long boarding, the bike riding, the dinosaur footprints we saw, and all the ice cream that we ate. This family was so cool and fun that even going to the store with them was a joy! Playing games with the kids was a ton of fun. Hanging out with Doris was a ton of fun. I truly felt loved by this family. 

My last day was just the same as my first. Marie and Doris took me back to the little train station in Lemförde. We hugged and said good bye, and from there I made my way to Cologne, and eventually to the legendary Nurburgring race track. I was really nervous to start, but I left feeling loved and encouraged. Being involved in more than just the work made this experience truly memorable, and to date it’s been my favorite workaway experience.

• P. S. This family was so great that in 2020, when I was back in Germany getting ready for my job in Liechtenstein, I made the time to go visit them for a weekend. 

I hope this story is encouraging to you. If you know somebody that you think this might be encouraging to as well, go ahead and share it with them!