The Shack – Day 2 “In the Tomato Fields”

What an eventful first morning. We had to get a fire started, cook our breakfast and pack our lunch. All in the complete dark! We ended up running down the street so we wouldn’t be late to meet our ride to work for 6am.Our job today was cleaning up the tomato fields, gathering the plastic that had been used to make the trellis’. Because we had to eat lunch when the other workers did, we didn’t eat until noon. I think I can say for all of us that we were ready to eat by 10am. Thank goodness for being in the tomato fields so we could munch on the few overripe tomatoes that had been left behind.We ended up working until 2:30. My hands were wrecked, my arms were sore and my legs felt like they were going to fall off. But this was only one long day for me, but to the workers it was just another day that blurred together with many other similar days. Field workers only get paid the equivalent of $10 a day. There’s a man there who has worked on the same ranch for years so he got a raise – only 10 pesos (less than one dollar). It’s crazy to think that in Canada people who do manual labour tend to get paid more but this isn’t the case here. When asked if we could imagine doing this job for a whole year we said no. Most of us said we might consider it for a summer job, but only if we were getting paid a lot more. On the other hand while people here do not enjoy the job, they are happy to simply have a job and be getting paid.We were lucky to get home early to buy groceries, collect firewood and make dinner before dark. There is not much to do in the evenings and we do not have enough wood to sit around a campfire to stay warm so it is early to bed for us after a long day of hard work in the sun.Written by Sarah, a School of Leadership Student, and Rose Friesen, School of Leadership Mexico Facilitator