The Problem [And the Solution]

From Dublin I took the #22 bus out to the tiny town of Tulsk, where I had arranged with my host to be picked up. With a late start and a traffic jam behind a tractor in Longford, the bus pulled up in Tulsk fifteen minutes late, and I settled myself against the wall of the butcher's next to the bus stop. When half an hour had passed, I decided that my host must have thought I had missed the first bus, and was coming in on another, so I wandered over to the visitor's center to see if I could borrow their phone. The staff of the center were very kind ("No joy?" one of the men asked me each time I hung up the phone, and offered to watch my things when I ran back over to the bus stop). There was no word from the host, and after two hours of unsuccessful attempts to reach her, the butcher and his wife began calling around the area to find out where the farm was located. At last, they found someone who knew her neighbors, and the butcher offered me a lift over. He was suspicious that the locals didn't know her, and that we couldn't reach her, and while I had been ready to attribute the situation to miscommunication and bad cell service, I started to worry as well. We found the house, and the butcher suggested that he wait while I determined whether or not this was a place I wanted to stay. The host wasn't around, but four other volunteers were inside, and they all met me at the door. We talked for a while, and the volunteers said that while they felt safe, the farm wasn't what they had been led to expect, and that all of them were looking for other places to stay. As was pointed out to me in the following days, people come into WWOOFing with different mindsets and cultural expectations vary -- perhaps this host really needed a few days trial -- but I felt (and still feel, really) that the opinions of four different volunteers was enough to know that this was somewhere I wouldn't feel comfortable. I returned to the car. As the butcher said (it seems awkward to keep calling him this, but I will in respect for his privacy), I had no Plan B, and no phone. It was careless. He gave me his contact information, offered me a place to stay in an emergency, and dropped me off at the nearest phone store in Roscommon. Somewhat panicked (but not "devastated" as one of the pub owners asked me out of concern), I began calling up potential farms that listed their phone numbers on the WWOOF website. On my second try, a host near the southeastern town of Kilkenny took pity on me and offered me a place for a week, doing "light work" weeding and helping out around her guesthouse.

            After hopping from café to café using WiFi in Roscommon, I sat down at a bus stop in the rain to wait for my afternoon bus to Dublin (the first leg of my trip to Kilkenny). I read while I waited, and after a while one man appeared, and then a second, who started talking to us both in a thick, tricky Irish accent. He had slept under the cover of the bus stop the night before. He talked about his time in New York, the difficulty of holding onto a place to live in Roscommon, and rattled off a list of the schools he had attended. How did I like Ireland? he asked me. I told him I liked it. Seemed there were a lot of friendly people here. He said, "Well they don't treat me well, and I'm Irish."