Dunshane: Something you live

"It works in subtle ways, because it is actually not something you come to do, it is something you live."



Jeffrey Wasteneys has spent the last five years at Dunshane, as care staffer and gardener. And though every year he and his wife Jean-Marie consider the prospect of moving on, it has become progressively harder to draw away.

"We think about it typically in the summer time, when we get a bit of a break and we see what other options life could present, but it is terribly engaging here, and such connections with the students and people with special needs - you just don't find it anywhere else."

Originally from Washington DC, Jeffrey and his San Francisco-born wife Jean-Marie had been living in the West Coast of the United States with their children - Theo, Max and Lucinda - when a certain George W Bush was elected President.

"We thought it was a good time to 'make a quick escape' from the United States, to come over here and look at the Irish part of my background. My grandmother came from Cavan, but she emigrated and married an oilman in Pennsylvania, and spent the rest of her life in Mexico and Texas."

The Wasteneys had experience of the Steiner education system, as their children had attended a Steiner school in Washington state, and both Jeffrey and Jean-Marie had been to the Emerson College in Britain, which is a Steiner adult training centre for the arts and agriculture, and other social initiatives. So they were open to looking at something different.

"I had no previous involvement with Camphill, but I came across to their place in Aberdeen for an interview, on their invitation. I was just overwhelmed." And the rest is now the most recent five years of his own personal history.

Jeffrey makes no bones about the fact that it is hard work at Dunshane. Indeed, he describes the community life as 'extremely exhausting'.

"If it was just the gardening, it wouldn't be half as taxing, and I would say that it is the garden that has been able to hold me for the five years. Fortunately, this time of the year I'm pretty much in here all the time - it sorts of pulls me out of the community."



As probably everybody who volunteers does at some stage, Jeffrey has from time to time resisted the pull of the community and the work. "But as I've resisted, it reacts with its own special effect, because it is so very different than our typical suburban lifestyle back in the United States, or, I would think, anywhere."

And so, each year, even when they consider those 'other options', the Wasteneys find that acceptance of their current lot gets progressively stronger.

"Yeah," Jeffrey muses as he pulls at a stray weed in the garden. "Yeah ... it would be hard to leave it."

Brian Byrne.