“One Saturday morning I hiked with Christine, Claudie, Markie, and Mawuli three kilometers up a steep rise of the plateau. Christine kept her field separate from Benjamin’s because, she said, hers would produce more since she tended it better. She gave the children and me a handful of seeds each. We all bent over and shuffled along the slope, scooping out small holes a few feet apart with one hand and tossing in a couple of seeds with the other. Christine worked with Aku on her back. It seemed easy enough at first, but after two hours my back and legs ached from crouching and my hands were filthy with mud. Standing up to stretch, I noticed that Christine had covered twice as much soil as I; even eight-year-old Markie had done more. The next day my entire body was sore from having done this fraction of the work they did week after week.
I would watch the farmers wandering back at night, ..., singing in their pleasantly gravelly voices, and wonder how many millions or billions of people were doing the same work all over the world, and had been doing it, in ways that couldn’t have been much different from this, throughout human history. It has been the lot for all but a tiny portion of humanity until very recently, and still is for the majority. Yet to that privileged minority, the work and the workers are invisible, don’t exist. I would have never given them a real thought if I hadn’t been living in their midst.”
(The Village of Waiting. George Packer, Farra, Straus and Giroux Pub, New York, 2001, pg 164)
