Help from HelpX

The bus conversion work we’ve recently shown off on the blog wasn’t done alone.  For the past four weeks, we’ve had the help of two young strapping strangers we found through an organization called Help Exchange.

We’d first heard of HelpX from our overlander friends, Phil and Angie.  They occasionally use this organization as a way to travel inexpensively and foster connections with local people while putting in a bit of honest work.  The organization is essentially a website that links volunteers with projects around the world – from farms, lodges and hostels, sailing boats, ranches, and homestays.  Volunteers help with the projects in exchange for food and accommodation while gaining practical experience and cultural knowledge.  Everybody wins.

So when Bruno and I embarked on our bus conversion project and realized we were sort of in over our heads, I suggested we try HelpX.  Those of you who know Bruno know that he isn’t the most sociable person, and he was initially against the idea of having others share our home and meals, but he came around to the idea once we actually started the work inside the bus!

I wasn’t sure if we would find any volunteers through the site, but I posted a free host listing, reached out to a few handy-sounding volunteers, and began to get a ton more interest than expected!

In the end, we welcomed two volunteers to our Tucson home.  Our first was Will.

Meet Will

Will contacted us from Cleveland a few days before he was due to take a 48-hour Greyhound bus to Tucson.  From his profile, we gleamed that he loved animals, reading, yoga, and nature, so he seemed like he would fit in well here!  He knew how to work with tools and had basic carpentry skills – in other words, the timing and the profile seemed to fit the bill!

Will has been traveling for almost two years across the United States as a total vagabond.  He hitchhikes, sometimes sleeps on park benches, and does as much Couchsurfing and HelpXing as possible.  Everything he owns is in his backpack, and that is the major part of the lifestyle’s appeal.  He likes not owning much, as consumption of things weighs heavily on him.  When I asked him what he does with sentimental things, he told me that he writes about the item in his journal so he never forgets it then gets rid of the item itself.

As I got to know Will throughout the course of a week, I learned that spirituality fascinates him.  Most of the HelpX experiences in which he’s partaken have been at monasteries and temples.  He comes from a non-religious family in the Bible belt town of Kansas City, so he is both on a quest to understand people’s motivations for seeking religion and to perhaps find a spiritual community that truly speaks to him.  He has yet to find one, but I don’t doubt he will keep looking.

Apart from a few chats and one late-night conversation, Will mostly kept to himself in the bedroom provided.  He often had his headphones on or a book in his hand, and the man could S-L-E-E-P!  He didn’t seem as much into the traveling aspect of his vagabond lifestyle as much as the simple, free part of it, and apart from a couple bike rides to meet a fellow vagabond in town, he didn’t venture out into Tucson at all.

He didn’t seem terribly interested in working, though, either.  It was clear from day one that Will had overestimated his own construction abilities.  He didn’t really even know how to cut a piece of wood.  The tasks we had planned for him – namely, to build furniture – were far too challenging, and Bruno had to spend a lot of time explaining things to him, showing him tricks, and supervising him.  The bed frame we asked him to make ended up being made almost entirely by Bruno, and even the tiny IKEA bedside tables he put together were a challenge.

It seemed to us that Will was mostly interested in helping us – or, probably, being a HelpX volunteer at all – because it was a way to live for free.  Eventually, despite his laidback and solitary nature, Will’s freeloading attitude got the best of me, and I told him we wouldn’t have space for him for longer than the original promised week.  We had another volunteer arriving.  Will didn’t bat an eyelash, and within a day had another HelpX gig organized for himself a few blocks away.  His ultimate spring plan was to hitchhike toward California and up the coast toward Oregon, spending as little money as possible.  I wonder where he is now.

Meet Ryan

I had reached out to Ryan the night I’d posted my HelpX ad, and he was very eager to come.  He had just purchased a van himself that he wanted to convert into a little house-on-wheels, so he came hoping to learn as much as possible about bus conversion work.  He had little practical experience, but his reviews from other hosts were so glowing and he was so persistent that I couldn’t turn him down.

Ryan was laid off about five years from a manufacturing job at Kawasaki and it helped him realize he wanted more than just an exhausting job that helped some guy get rich.  He likes doing meaningful work that helps people.  Ryan has been doing HelpX on and off for many years, including in Florida and Hawaii.  He came to us from a five-month gig near San Diego working with a couple dozen rescue dogs at a ranch.  His reviews said he had an amazing work ethic, and we saw that from the first day.  He put in several hours more than requested, claiming to want to finish a particular job or learn more for his own benefit.  I actually had to remind him to take time off!

Ryan has stayed with us for over three weeks, so I’ve gotten to know him a bit.  Like Will, he’s quiet and solitary, but that suits Bruno and I just fine since we’re pretty exhausted at the moment.  Also like Will, he isn’t at all into discovering the towns in which he finds himself.  He takes walks from time to time, but only because he likes being in motion.  He doesn’t HelpX for the travel, that’s for sure.  He does it because he disagrees with American politics, law, and society in general, and so has consciously chosen to remove himself from it.  He is happy to survive without having to pay taxes, social security, etc.  He has a deep mistrust of law enforcement and passionately discusses conspiracy theories.

After Will, Ryan was a wonderful house guest.  He cleaned up after himself, kept his room tidy, conversed politely, did the dishes.  He was also a much more motivated and dedicated worker, and Bruno could tell his brain was wired for handy work.

Nonetheless, he did work very slow.  This he admitted readily and was the reason he chose to work more hours than required.  It took him almost two weeks to put up the frames for our shower and toilet walls and to panel them with cedar planks.  Part of this is that our bus walls aren’t straight (so each panel has to be measured individually) but part was that he was so meticulous.

Unfortunately, by the beginning of the third week it became clear that Ryan was burnt out.  His work became slower and sloppier and he often left unfinished tasks outside, as though he’d walked off in frustration.  He divulged to me that he’d always been very hard on himself, that he was frustrated with his current performance, and that he was silently beating himself up.  Our encouragement and praise wouldn’t change that – it was his issue.

Ryan started several tasks for us – the compost toilet, the dining room benches, the bed frame siding.  But Bruno often ended up taking over.  Despite the fact that he was an extremely hard-working person, he still didn’t really have the skills to build something without help.  Yesterday, after having built one dining room bench without too much trouble, he messed up the second one and gave up in frustration.  He decided to leave a few days earlier than planned, and is renting a car tomorrow morning to visit the Grand Canyon before his train back to San Diego the following day to start his own van conversion (or maybe sell the van, he says).  I feel badly that this bench failure will be his final taste of our bus conversion experience.

Our Thoughts on the Help

On our profile, Bruno and I had described our project and asked for the help of handy people.  We weren’t seeking experts, but rather jack-of-all-trades people.  In exchange for a private room and bathroom and three healthy home-cooked vegan meals, we asked for at least 25 hours of work, mostly carpentry.  This was our offer.

Both volunteers upheld their ends of the bargain, but neither was as successful as we’d hoped.  This is our own fault and is mostly related to unfair expectation and misunderstanding of the organization itself.  Almost all of the volunteers on HelpX are young, unskilled workers.  The idea of the website, I think, is to provide learning opportunities for the volunteers more than highly skilled work for the hosts.  HelpX seems best-suited for projects that require no special skills or involve easy, repetitive tasks or manual labour.  Farming, for example – but definitely not a highly specialized project like a bus conversion.

The other reason we weren’t as successful with our HelpX volunteers as I’d hoped is that I didn’t complete as thorough of a screening as I should have.  Both Will and Ryan ended up here because of good timing more than any other factor.  I didn’t speak to any of them on the phone or reach out to their references.  I naively took the skills they’d listed on their profiles as truths and underestimated the amount of prior skill our project required.

We’re probably not the ideal hosts.  We don’t have the energy to really teach skills, and we’re too exhausted to provide much cultural exchange.  By day five, I had had enough of sharing my home and just wanted Bruno back to myself, especially for meal time.  I sort of got over that during the course of the four weeks, but you can still see that we’re far from innocent in this failed experiment.

Actually, it’s too harsh to say that the experiment failed.  The 100 hours of work we received from Will and Ryan helped us make a bed frame, bedside tables, bathroom and shower walls, toilet and dining room benches.  Yes, Bruno did a good chunk of those things, but every hour that he was able to do something else was an hour faster that we can get back on the road!  For that – and especially for their effort and patience with our wacky project – we can truly thank them both!

On top of that, it has been thoroughly educational and fascinating to get to know Will and Ryan, to learn about their perspectives on life, to see how they’ve chosen to exist in the world, and to understand how HelpX plays a role in the curating of their lives.

For all those reasons, we’re going to keep looking for HelpX volunteers!  We’ve decided to rent a home near Ensenada, Baja California Mexico until the end of April, and there’s an extra bedroom there, too.  That bedroom is calling the name of another volunteer, I think.  I’ll just make sure to do more thorough screenings this time in order to [hopefully] find a volunteer that is a better match for us.

And also, one day I’d like to be a HelpX volunteer myself!

But I will never volunteer for a bus conversion, that’s for sure.