88 days diaries: Cheating
You never know what actually happens to your food. It happens everywhere; lying and cheating and messing around. A cherry farm is no different. The cherry season has ended, but the cheating continues. The cherries all go through a quality check, but if it didn’t pass, there was always a…
88 days diaries: There’s no escaping Gumeracha
I survived my last day. In the morning I had the shed to myself. There was nobody. It was quiet. At 8AM I already had two customers, brothers. They wanted 8 boxes of second grade. I just didn’t have 8 boxes. The boys were not in a rush, so as…
88 days diaries: When the end is near
The end of my 88 days was quickly approaching. I didn’t want to stay much longer, but how do you talk about this with a stubborn, unpredictable farmer? When the others said they wanted to leave in a week, they were sent away straight away. I wanted to do the…
88 days diaries: Loooong days
I made 14,5 work hours in one day. Everyone had the morning off, but not me. My day started at 8AM, which is late compared to my recent 5.30AM starts. However, at 7.30AM the farmer was already knocking on my door. There were some second grade cherries that needed grading.…
88 days diaries: Totally unrelated random bits of farm life
Radio: “We’re talking about psychopaths in the workplace.” Farm hand: “O, they’re talking about the boss.” When the crows are coming in, the cherries are ripe. Someone came in to ask for second hand cherries instead of second grade. The first time a customer asked for ‘a couple of kilos’,…
88 days diaries: From bad to worse to worth it
The atmosphere is grim. It feels like I work at a cattle station, only the people are the cattle. After working on the farm for 8 weeks the farmer ‘likes’ me a bit more than the others, so I have some privileges. I am ashamed to see how the other…
88 days diaries: The cherry carrousel
The cherry season is starting. I am not alone anymore. Two Taiwanese girls and an American boy have joined me in the house. It is so much fun to have people around, even though we all have to wait to use the shower now. It is refreshing to have people…
88 days diaries: Shock and tears
During my travels I’ve met lots of different people. I’ve come across some situations where I felt like I was being pushed around. Somehow people think they can treat you like shit because you are a traveller. I find it hard to deal with this, but sometimes you’ve got to…
88 days diaries: Back to the waterworks
The cherry season was fast approaching, but there was one important thing to finish out in the fields: irrigation. This time I worked with a French backpacker called Ivan. Every day we got a quad bike and a repair kit and were send to work on different areas in the…
88 days diaries: You take the baby
Whenever my boss didn’t want to have anything to do with me, he put me in the capable hands of the lead farm hand. I was ditched like an unwanted or incompetent child. I loved being ditched. The farm hand was a relaxed, kind and patient man, although I’ve no…