It is always best to start with what we liked about a place. The land is beautiful and the outskirts of the city are within easy walking distance (I wouldn’t trust the pair of bikes provided; one throws its chain when idling, [redacted],) and there are a few small shops there for hygiene and food when they’re needed. The hosts help with your taxi in from the omnibus terminal, and they provide the food. You control your hours and days to work, have relatively little oversight, and get a lot of time alone, if that’s what you’re looking for in a stay. Santi, one of the staff, loves to be your go-to guy and can always be relied upon to help you meet your needs or solve problems. The chef, Luciana, is wonderful, although we didn’t have much contact with her. And the man who does most of the manual labour, Alberto, is just the same. All three treat you with warmth and kindness, and seem to enjoy speaking Spanish with you. They are the chief sources of the “intercultural exchange” part of the stay.
That being said, there were also some significant downsides to this stay. It has been about six years since these hosts’ last review, and we think that their profile didn’t really match the reality of this stay, so we feel that it is important for us to contribute.
MANAGEMENT: We have no problem with WorkAway hosts who are remote or who prefer a more aloof style of interaction. However, these hosts waited until the day before we arrived to tell us that they were living in Punta Del Este, on the other side of Uruguay, and that we would answer to their property manager. We did not appreciate that lack of transparency, and we felt as though we had been tricked. Helen, the manager, we saw for a few minutes every couple of days. Mauro and Jessica didn’t interview us before we arrived, and we don’t think that they read our profile. Once we arrived, the way that they communicated with us seemed often to be condescending or passive-aggressive, both in regard to our use of language and in regard to our work. We have normally gotten along very well with both hosts and employers, yet no amount of amicability or deference or directness elicited a warmer or more positive response from these hosts. The rate and thoroughness of responses from both the hosts and Helen were usually quite low.
LANGUAGE: We are new Spanish speakers who both speak and hear slowly. Despite how proud we are of how far we have come with our Spanish skills, we do still often rely on our translator apps. Since we arrived in this country, everyone else – from other hosts to shop clerks – have understood this fact, and have spoken to us in simple language as one does with a foreigner. But we were there for a month and Helen never slowed down, never used simpler vocabulary, and never took a conversation line by line to make sure that we understood. She rarely used her translator or made space for us to use ours, and didn’t seem to care if we understood what she was saying. Then, she’d move on in a whirlwind and leave us completely lost. Every few days, Mauro and Jesica would text us to remind us that we needed to be speaking in Spanish with their staff, when we had been solely interacting with their people in Spanish since our arrival, and this made us wonder if we were being falsely painted in a bad light by our manager.
OUR WORK: Volunteers don’t work in the restaurant or hotel, in cleaning or guest reception, as the WorkAway profile seems to indicate. Our first and longest task at this stay was to revarnish the benches in the restaurant. We stripped and revarnished 27 benches in three weeks, which was very enjoyable work. Our chief complain is that we do not feel that we were given sufficient tools and materials for the job. We were given one nearly spent remover tool, one small can and one bottle of remover fluid, and a handful of sanding pads. Whenever we asked for more, we were given very little, only enough to last a few days, and then our hosts repeatedly expressed frustration with us for failing to give them a full week’s notice that we needed more supplies. Although our hosts received videos of our process and would often thank us for our good work, perhaps there was something lost between how they wanted the job done and how we completed it. We couldn’t ever be sure. This job required some skill training, and while we did it to the best of our ability, our training came from the previous volunteers and not from our hosts themselves.
We did a lot of beautification work around the property itself, and we took care of our hosts’ pets. Of note, the male dog was mean. He was never dangerous to us directly, but he was very aggressive with the other dog. That was distressing enough to be around, but one of our weekly tasks was to brush him. He did not like being brushed and would always run away. Our hosts simply told us to grab him by the neck and make him stay still – they encouraged strangers to manhandle their large, mean dog for extended periods of time. We could only do so until he started to nip at us, and then we had to let him go for our own safety. We felt very uncomfortable with this arrangement, and with what felt to us like a lack of support.
OUR CONTRACT: Every WorkAway is different in terms of what hosts expect, and what they give in compensation for work completed. At this WorkAway, we were told that our food would be provided without conditions. Our hosts, the manager, and the previous volunteers all told us to ask for whatever we wanted, and to be as detailed as possible in our list. Helen was in charge of bringing us what we needed. Although we subsist on pantry staples, Helen would often bring us a fraction of what we needed, or would outright deny us simple things like black pepper or marmalade. One week, she didn’t even take our list, so we bought our own food and completed our work regardless.
OUR SPACE: Volunteers have a bunk room, a bathroom, and they share a living/kitchen space with the hotel guests. Although these hosts advertise as friendly to digital nomads, the Wi-Fi usually doesn’t reach into the bedroom. The bunk room smelled badly of unwashed animals, and it took four weeks to air it out. There appears to be a minor sewage leak behind the toilet. The bathroom was left filthy for our arrival, and we were never equipped with the tools to clean it although we requested them. The hot water went out more than a week before we left, and there was no fix attempted. But most of all, there was an active surveillance camera hung in the corner of the kitchen. There are cameras around the restaurant in the front of the property, but there are no others around the hotel, the trails, the rental house, or the tool storages – the only camera in the rear part of the property was in our living space. We felt watched, like all of our downtime was under observation.
SUMMARY: Some hosts really want intercultural exchange, while others are more interested in a contractual exchange of labour – we have had and have enjoyed both. But this one felt like we weren’t even wanted. Despite the good work and good hours, we felt unwelcome, unsupported, and poorly managed. We did not like how were treated here, either as guests, as workers, or as foreigners. We hope that our review can help others to make a more informed decision before planning their trip around this stay, and that our review can also be constructive for these hosts.
