Imagine a vacation where you work on a farm or in somebody else’s garden in a place you’ve always dreamt about going to?
That’s what Raisa Hoverun, an ESL teacher who lives in Italy has been doing in Canada for the past two summers.
Hoverun is doing what thousands of people the world over do, known as “woofing.”
Woofing is the familiar term for someone who goes to work on an organic farm through an international organization, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF.
In the Humboldt area, there are at least four rural farms that are host farms on the WWOOF’s Canadian website, www.wwoof.ca.
Volunteers (“woofers”) receive room and board in exchange for the work they do.
“A lot of farms are struggling to get themselves going and this is a solution that works for both parties,” said Hoverun, who started volunteering for the first time last summer in Ontario.
This year, she came all the way to Saskatchewan, just because she liked the name.
Also, because of her Ukrainian roots – she noticed that there were many Ukranian names in the area.
Hoverun said the people in Ontario she worked for last year couldn’t understand why she wanted to go to Saskatchewan, but she says she’s learning to follow her intuitions.
She has been working at Ravenheart, an equine learning-assisted farm near Fulda run by Carol Marriott, and at Marie Saretsky’s new garden just outside Burr.
Saretsky’s garden is a fairly new addition to the WWOOF listings. She had heard about it from a friend who is a Woof host and also from one of her neighbours, Jerome Rath, who raises chickens and has been on the organization’s Canadian website for a few years.
If she hadn’t had the volunteers who came this spring to work on her garden, it wouldn’t have happened, Saretsky said. But she found that receiving woofers was more than just about the labour.
“You think it’s about the physical work,” mused Saretsky, “but it ends up being way more of a spiritual exchange. People who do this are usually on a personal journey.”
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