Working the rice field

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ve read about rice. Most of Cambodia is rice fields, Cambodians eat the stuff with every meal, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve lived in Cambodia for a year-and-a-half. I’ve been to rice fields before. Once for swimming and again for what I had thought was work. Turned out the only work was finding my way out of the field.

Only now can I finally, honestly, say that I have worked a rice field — with only 30 or so helpers!

We visited the orphanage’s fields on a recent Sunday, the only free day for school kids in this country. (Not counting the ridiculously high number of holidays.)

But this Sunday is not a day for lounging. It is a day for working.

I was invited to the fields by the Cambodian man who supervises the orphanage’s children. He gave me permission to simply watch if I didn’t want to work. I assured him I wanted to work. For just one day I wanted to engage in the sweaty, malaria-prone and back-breaking work of a Cambodian rice harvester.

The abundance of laborers ensured that the work wasn’t exactly back-breaking. But we’ll get to that later.

The day starts as all my days start: with the clang of the breakfast bell. The morning clang usually means it’s 5:40 a.m. But this morning, because it’s a Sunday, the clanging means it’s closer to 6. Maybe 5:45.

Breakfast this morning is me soup. No, not soup made out of me, but a basic ramen soup. Nothing added, nothing subtracted. Some days the soup arrives neutered of its salty broth, and in essence, soupless. But today its liquid has been preserved.

Me is the least filling of the orphanage’s rotating trio of breakfasts. Rice porridges at least have organs, fish, or eggs and beans to protein them up. Me is nothing but noodles.

Like one raised during the Great Depression, my greatest fear is going hungry. So after the me and before settling into the rice truck I buy two stale but sweet baguettes from a nearby food stall. These should fill me until lunch.

Upon arrival at the field, I receive another sweet baguette, this one fresh. You can never have too many baguettes!

Most of the day’s workers are middle school and high school students who live at or near the orphanage. Joining the kiddies are the heads of the place —the old Cambodian guy, the old French guy and the young French girl. And then there’s me.  

It’s probably between 60 and 70 degrees outside, and we’re all freezing. Of course, the kids are bundled in sweatshirts, socks and gloves, jeans and wool hats. But I am forever underestimating Cambodia’s cold and am wearing only a lightweight long-sleeved shirt, jeans and a bandana.

To get to the work, we stamp over flattened, tawny colored stalks that look like hay. During my last trip, in September, the field was soaked in water up to my mid-thighs. Today, hard ridges of dirt are the only indication of water’s previous presence.

Up ahead rises a mountain of the hay stuff. Kids are sitting up there, hanging out. I’m mostly a kid, so of course I want to sit up there, too. The other kids encourage me. So I scramble up the side and get a couple pictures.

I think this pile is just a pit stop before we get to work. But, no, the pile is the work. It’s not hay, but rice. Or soon-to be rice. Our job is to feed bundles of this rice into the threshing machine, which will extract hard kernels of almost-rice from the hay stalks. But first the threshing machine has to show up.

After maybe half an hour of posing and picture taking, the blue-piped contraption rolls in on a tractor.

We workers circle and are separated into two groups. I’m in group two, along with several of the 10th grade girls I teach every night. Group two’s first job is to wait, so I join my group mates in the truck bed, watching group one get started.

The labor looks simple enough. About 20 workers stand on top of the rice pile and throw bundles to the small man seated on the thresher. His job is to push the rice through the machine. A motorcycle helmet protects his head from the crush of the incoming bundles.

The machine’s mouth is a smallish slot, so bundles of rice quickly pile around the man. Every few minutes the workers have to stop throwing so the man won’t be buried in rice stalks.

The machine sheds the almost-rice of its surrounding straw strands and sends the kernels rolling down a metal ramp and into the burlap bags and plastic buckets held below.

Meanwhile the straw strand bits, looking like dust and dirt and fragments of grass, shoot skyward through a metal pipe. By noon these fragments have formed two massive mountains of huskings.

The workers who aren’t atop the rice pile are bagging the kernels.

“Sky sa-aaht,” one of my girl students says, pointing above us. Sa-aht means beautiful. She’s right. The sun is just beginning to filter through the patchy clouds.

Soon it’s group two's turn. Each group works 20-minute shifts. We work three or four cycles before lunch and the ride home.

The work is much easier than I expected. I stand near the mouth of the thresher and repeat the same action over and over again. Bend over, pick up a bundle of the rice, toss it on the thresher ledge.

“You interesting in rice field?” one of my 12th grade students asks after I’ve completed my first round.

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes,” I say.

“You not tired?” he asks. “I very tired.”

“No, not tired,” I say.

Lunch is at 11:30, just like at the orphanage. The food’s a regular dish, too: fried fish and sour and spicy mango shreds over rice. We even get one of the usual Sunday desserts: corn floating in a soup of sweetened condensed milk and tapioca. For drinks, there’s water or Coke dumped into a cooler of ice.

After lunch I’m ready for my usual afternoon nap. I doze in the grass until the young French girl (young, but still older than me) tells me to get out of the sun and sleep in the truck.

We ride home in the truck about an hour later, atop the bags of rice. There are only 70 bags this year, compared to last year’s 120. Too much rain. The orphanage’s director will have to buy more bags.

After all, the rice we harvested today is the rice the staff and the 50-some kids will be eating three times a day for the next year. The rice is brown, and needs a coating of soup to become edible. I’ve never much liked the taste of rice, especially the orphanage’s dry variety, but I’m betting I’ll enjoy it more this year, knowing I had a hand in its creation.