Wasted Away Again in Westerkappelnville

If there were any justice in the world, any genuine respect for the true and the beautiful, we would surely have had our own reality TV show by now. The form of reality we’ve been presented with over the last four weeks in Westerkappeln has been a rare and intense variety indeed.

Never mind the fact that the work here in Westerkappeln has been somewhat harder and longer than average, exceeding the five hours times five days a week typically expected from Workaway volunteers. We aren’t afraid of a little hard work, and we generally try to put in a few extra hours to pull the extra weight of our children who are also being fed and housed.

The fact is, when you see a mother scrambling about the house trying to juggle two 9-month-olds and two two-year-olds, it’s nearly impossible not to be dazzled and inspired to get busy. From the first day we arrived, I immediately noticed the agility with which she used her feet to pick up baby clothes, pacifiers and washcloths from off the floor. How else can you get anything done when you already have an infant in each arm and two more clamoring for attention?

Any parent who’s ever put a baby to sleep knows just what an ordeal bedtime can be. Now imagine trying to put four babies to bed at once, trying to get everyone quiet enough so that the rest of them get to sleep, because if one wakes up and starts crying, it’s not long before the other three are woken by the noise. And so the cycle continues, ad nauseam, with mom running back and forth between two bedrooms mollifying whiner after whiner for hours at a time till finally everyone expires from utter exhaustion.

It was recently brought to our attention that the decision have us stay here and do the work exchange was not one made with complete consensus between mom and dad, which is to say that dad was not entirely sold on the concept. And where, after all, does dad fit into this noisy and overpopulated picture anyway? Not an unreasonable question, as a matter of fact, and if dad were able to so much as change a lightbulb, they might have been fine without us.

But as it happens, dad tends to be missing in action a great deal of the time. Why he hasn’t found himself a job with a schedule more conducive to a father of four remains something of a mystery, but for now he works in the bakery from 2 am to 10 am, which means he has to go to bed awfully early, so that, so far as we’ve observed, he does not participate in dinner, clean-up or bedtime with the rest of the family. And when the household rises and breakfast is served, dad is already away at work.

In the rare moments when he is both home and awake, he can typically be found hogging up all the bandwidth on the wifi, making it nearly impossible for me to update the city of residence on my Facebook profile. Otherwise, he’ll be seen lurking in the hallway, trolling up and down the stairs, searching for a room where he can get some shut-eye. Just to clarify, a home with four children under the age of three, plus our own two kids, is a loud home. A very loud home. Sometimes I take a walk across the cornfield after lunch, and from nearly a kilometer away, I can still hear the sound of children crying.

What’s really amazing, among sleepless mothers, screaming ninnies, and absent fathers, is our newest recruit, hailing all the way from Lisbon, Portugal. Pedro’s bedroom is neatly situated at the bottom of the ladder leading up to our loft, and just across the hall from the parents’ bedroom, where two to four babies sleep at night—the part of the night they aren’t up crying anyway. Watching a woman manage four infants at a time, like I said, is pretty unbelievable, but what’s even harder to believe is that Pedro can sleep in till 10 am. He doesn’t even use earplugs. And I can assure you, the early morning screaming here is incessant.

Be that as it may, it’s nice to have someone else over the age of six to talk with. Or so I thought. By day five Pedro seemed to have disappeared without a trace, not an entirely inappropriate reaction for a 22 year old, under the circumstances. And the circumstances, such as they are, have not improved in the last week. With dozens of pacifiers strewn about the floor, rolling in dog hair and dust bunnies, and being shared interchangeably between the four rug-muffins, it’s no surprise that germs will move quickly through this house.

But this week’s epidemic has not been easy to watch. It started with a fever in one of the girls. Soon her twin sister had the bug and their eyes began festering with mucus. Another day and one of the younger boys had caught the bug, and his twin brother too, so that all were infected by this strange ocular infection. And then the barfing began.

Needless to say, we are pretty eager to keep our children free from the kind of infection that causes copious amounts of pus to ooze from the eyeballs, and as it happens we are already scheduled to leave on Wednesday. We are looking forward to an amazing road trip from here to Dresden, for an important wedding, and then down to Austria for our next assignment. We will always cherish the memories of our month here in northern Westphalia, and I’d be more than happy to come back in a few years to check up on the little ones, but in the meantime we must all remain vigilant.