Days 2 and 3: Dirty hands and gratitude

Hello,

I was simply too tired to write last night. I'm also too tired tonight, but know I could use some time to reflect.

Day two was spent on the farm. It was a full day. An early start of hot brown rice cereal and then the owner of the farm (one of them), met us to give us a tour and lead us in weeding onions (for about 2.5 hours). And by weeding I mean on our knees or crouching down pulling at a huge variety of greens with our bare hands. We worked in pairs but kept tight as a group so we were able to keep morale high by talking and laughing together. Got me thinking a lot about the issue of how hard a time farmers have trying to get locals to do this kind of labour and how they now rely on temporary foreign workers. It is hard work, but there are ways to make it meaningfully and fun.

The work left me very dirty - my hands stained with greens and browns. But that was just the beginning. After lunch, we had a bike maintenance workshop - which got my hands all greasy. :-) Oh my, I learned so much! The main thing being how to fix a flat tire. Awesome. Feels so good to start to learn this stuff. Takes away the intimidation and need to rely on others - rather empowering actually.

And finally - just when I thought there couldn't be another way to dirty my hands, I helped to make thank you cards (with glue and scrap paper and random grass from the farm) for our evening speakers. Who were so amazing! One was from Oxfam, another speaker had a diverse background including working with the organization Food Secure Canada (I had met her before in my Kingston food activism days) and the third speaker was another owner of the farm where we're staying

Such a fun full day! So much more I could say about it. But getting so tired, since today we actually did some biking - I did about 52 km to a mushroom farm! Will have to tell you all about this amazing, pretty large- scale operation tomorrow. Saw their hard work in windowless rooms, cutting mushrooms by hand, earning less than minimum wage (cause they are paid by how much they pick). So as I ate my mushroom risotto I felt pretty grateful for all their hard work.

Good night!



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August 4, 2010 - An Update

I'm so pleased that people have been reading the blog and it's even created some dialogue!  Just the other week I found out that the fellow at the mushroom operation who gave us the tour has been reading my posts and has had some comments, which have been passed along to me from the folks at the Otesha office.  Dialogue on these issues is important, so here is what he had to say (particularly with regards to the last paragraph in the post above): 

"After reading your site, I decided to subscribe to the blog to follow along with the rest of the locations the group was going to see & in doing so I came across perhaps some confusion when reading Holly's blog. She referred to our employees working in large windowless rooms, which is correct because in order for the product to grow that is the environment that is required. However her comment that they make less than minimum wage is inaccurate as all of the harvesters go through a 3 month training period before switching over to piece work where they get paid for how many pounds they harvest. The majority of the harvesters make well over minimum wage and are encouraged to take breaks as often as they like. I feel as though maybe there was a misunderstanding when I was talking with the group and wanted to clarify this. It was a lot of fun giving the tour as this group asked many intelligent questions & I hope that Otesha may use Continental as a location for future tours."

I do hope Otesha continues to go to the mushroom operation as it was fascinating, and I thank the mushroom operation guide for these comments.