Not unlike our small town in
Maine, the villages in this region have no shortage of interesting characters.
Everyone in this immediate area knows the singing
tractor driver because you can hear him coming from a kilometer away. Part
operatic tenor, part agriculturist, his voice is strong and convincing—and
quite good. In another time and place he might have had professional singing career.
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As in much of the developing
world, the nature of work and workers has undergone major transformations in
multiple ways.
Not long ago in rural Maine, the
kids Downeast raked the blueberries in July and August, and the ones in
northern Maine gathered the potatoes in September. For Aroostook County's potato harvest, the schools were closed for
break shortly after having opened at the end of summer, just a few weeks before. This ensured a ready workforce
for the all-important harvest. Today, by and large, this work and related tasks
has fallen on the broad shoulders of Central Americans. And with it a certain sociocultural legacy has fallen by the wayside.
Likewise, here in Greece farm labor
was once the sole domain of villagers and their children, and their efforts
were part of the cultural apparatus of this rural, largely agricultural land.
In recent years, however, this work has shifted to foreign, migrant laborers. The most
reliable and hardest working laborers, by all accounts, are now the
Bangladeshis. They appear for the olive harvest, a rite of autumn that consumes
the region of Messenia. By one estimate, there are more than 5 million olive
trees in Messenia—from Kalamata in the north to Finikounda in the south, from
Gialova on the Ionion Sea to Petalidi on the Gulf of Messenia. That's a lot of olives to gather.
By all accounts and through my
own personal observation, the Bangladeshis are soft-spoken, honest, and
hard-working souls. They appear in large numbers in October, when the olive harvest
begins after the first fall rains have commenced. They work like donkeys--given that there are no horses--for ten or
twelve hours each day, in blistering heat, and with few breaks.
Some days ago I noticed three
Bangladeshis sitting in the shade on a stone wall beside a field, taking a five-minute
break for lunch.
One young man pulled out a bag
with six slices of square, white bread. Another had a single tomato. From a
distance I watched them eat. Each worker got two slices of bread, of questionable
nutritional value, and then the single tomato was passed down the sitting wall,
with each worker taking no more than one small bite and then handing off the dripping
fruit to the next in line. The tomato moved in both directions twice. They
nibbled their bread, drank water out of a common cooler, and in short order were
back in the field with hoes, scraping the dry earth under a potent sun.
We don’t really know how fortunate
we are in the West without looking east. Or south. These folks arrived on foot in a perilous overland journey, a
ninety-day walk from the subcontinent, spending thousands of dollars to be led by guides through Iran, into Turkey, and then to
Greece—the eastern edge of Europe—hoping for a better life. Most of them send
90 percent of their meager earnings back to Bangladesh, where theie wives and
children, who they haven’t seen in years, still reside.
All of this makes me count my
blessings.
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