Day 1 WWOOFing in Italy

My first day of WWOOFing in Italy was varied and eventful. My tasks for the day:
• Cut bunny food
• Clear shrubs
• Sand stone walls of new guest house that they are building
• Filter clay out of earth with sieve
• Bring the donkeys back from a day of grazing/Feed

So far, I have Simone—permanent resident—and two other WWOOFers showing me what to do. While WWOOFing, it is common to meet other WWOOFers on your journey. In Israel I found myself WWOOFing with a varied crew: a taciturn, perhaps even bipolar man from Connecticut; a vegan, philosophy student from Bulgaria; an Israeli girl still in high school; and an English raw foodist, to name just a few. Now here, the two that I have joined are Sergio and Leah, a couple that met at the University of Vermont and now live in Copenhagen where Sergio is doing a Master’s in Anthropology. Currently, he is in Italy doing applied research, studying identity in the Campania through culture and dialect, and in order to do so he is WWOOFing in several different areas of the Campania. His family is actually from the Campania and he spent part of his life here: [a small village (outside the slightly less small village of Sarno)] outside of Naples. He hasn’t told me his whole story yet, but he grew up moving back and forth between the East Coast of the US and Italy. His Italian father met his mother in New York; to escape a future constrained to farm life he had run off to New York to stay with his mother’s seven brothers. Why had all of her brothers come together to the States? They had had to leave Italy because “they had killed some people”.