A not-so-happy intern experience
Yesterday we welcomed two travelers here for one of our brief internships, and today they abruptly left. One of them, so the other one told me, was suffering from fatigue and anxiety, in part due to the lack of privacy here. They recognized that the place and the experience were just as they had been described, and kindly owned the responsibility for their choice to leave. I have to think nudity (along with close quarters and our use of insect screening where one might expect walls) had much to do with it. We did not know just when they were coming, and when they arrived I was working naked in the barn, which might have been too abrupt a fulfillment of our "casual about nudity" style.
I take our lifestyle here lightly and joyously, and really don't like to think we are upsetting or challenging people. I'm kind of stunned. This is the first time anything like this has happened in all our years of involvement in the farmstay program.
Sorry to hear about that. People sometimes venture too far out of their comfort zone. I have done it myself, not about nudity but in volunteer work. But if they were just arrived from the mainland or further, they might really have been overcome with fatigue. I remember my first trip to Hawai'i I was pretty zonked for a few days. Nice that they owned their choice tho. That is the response we hope for from those uncomfortable with nudity.
The one I was talking to did acknowledge that the other was out of their comfort zone - using the same word you used - and fatigued going into the last week of what had been three months of travel. I asked if there were anything we should change about our communications and approach, and the one I was talking to said no. They were emphatic in saying "this is about us, not about you." My gut is still working on accepting that.
We've just now had a promising last-minute inquiry, so we'll be pressing forward with the program, hoping for the best.
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