Working Overtime

Yesterday evening I felt sorry for the women PACE participants. We were all sitting together in the classroom where they had just finished having a community meeting. Their fatigue was apparent. They sat slouched back over the desks that were behind the benches. Their faces drooped. They spoke in intense short bursts and then stopped abruptly as though they were too tired to continue. I tried to imagine what their days had been like.

 

Women do the lion's share of the work here. They run double duty, just like women in the United States have traditionally, but without modern conveniences like dishwashers, cars, bikes, stoves, microwaves, etc. Many women do not have husbands at home, which makes their jobs even more difficult with an average of about six mouths to feed. I've never shadowed a woman all day, but from what I know, they usually start their days around 5:00, after having been woken up several times during the night by their infant. They prepare breakfast for their family and clean. If you walk around early enough here, at every house you pass you will see a woman sweeping the dirt yards that surround their houses. At first it seems strange seeing people sweep dirt, but you have to admit that when they finish it is a clean looking dirt yard.

 

By 6:30 they are out in the fields cultivating, breaking up dirt and creating ridges and furrows out of it, or weeding the grass and weeds that grow everywhere and compete with their crops. Passing fields, you see groups of people swinging gigantic hoes. It's amazing to compare farming here to farming in Iowa, where I grew up. It takes one person about ten days of constant work to prepare a one lima plot (50 meters by 50 meters), which would probably take Iowan farmers all of about five minutes to prepare with their huge tractors.

 

They cultivate until sometime around noon, when they come back to prepare a meal for their families, if they can afford to eat lunch. Around this time of year, many families choose whether they want to each breakfast or lunch, not both.

 

The women in my workshop had done all this and maybe more before they arrived at 1:00 in the afternoon to interview a promising and available extension worker. They had decided that as part of their project they wanted to hire a well-trained agricultural extension worker to give free workshops to people in throughout Zone F. After one hour of discussion, they hired the extension worker, Jonas, for twenty five dollars a month to give two workshops a week in the community for the next three months. He will be teaching people everything they need to know as the cultivation season progresses. He'll be starting on Sunday. I am planning on going to a few of his workshops to learn a little bit about cultivation, myself. I'm a bit ashamed at how little I know about farming, having grown up in Iowa.

 

Immediately after the making all the arrangements with the extension worker, they started a community meeting. Zone F is comprised of nine different villages, spread out over several square miles. Two days before they had invited five people from each village to this meeting to introduce their project to them and have them bring the news back to the rest of the people in their villages. I don't think the women had expected the meeting to last so long. The attendees were receptive but had quite a few questions and concerns. How much would they be charged for each bag of fertilizer and seeds? Would everyone in the community be able to receive the loans, or a limited number of people? If the number was limited, how many and how would they be chosen? When would they be able to get the inputs? I was in the classroom next door working with the men, so I couldn't attend the meeting. Charles, my translator who videotaped part of the meeting, told me that everything went relatively well, but that the intense barrage of questions and concerns had tired the women out.

 

The meeting wound up around 5:00, at which point they had been working for past twelve hours and not eaten for the past eleven hours. I had considered asking them to stay for another hour to work on the budget until I walked into the room where they were waiting to give me a report on everything that had happened that day and I saw the evidence of their heavy fatigue. I'm not much of a motivational speaker, but I tried my best to give them my best pep talk - reminding them how much they had accomplished in the past five days since they started implementing the project. I asked them to think of any challenges or difficulties as lessons that would enable things to run more smoothly next year.

 

They have been working so hard the past week, creating time in their full schedules by skipping meals, sleeping less, and eliminating any moments of time they may have had to relax before - all during the most physically demanding period of the year. They are givers.