In the Fields

Today marks the beginning of farming activities for the school. The students have been clearing out the land, and spreading manure around for a while now, but this is the day someone actually started plowing the fields. I could see a small group of students using the school’s pair of oxen to plow one of the easier fields while some men with a tractor, are plowing the bigger side of the fields. I estimate the area plowed today to about nine acres. The total area that needs to be plowed this year is about twenty acres. All of these acres will be sown into some of our common crops. The director’s idea was to make the students work the fields, in order for the cafeteria to be self-sufficient. But most of the students told me that it is not their plan, and that they are not willing to work that hard. According to them, if these production plans were supposed to be educational, a smaller size production, for instance three acres, was enough. Twenty acres is, they say, an exploitative move. The truth is that most of us came here not knowing what to expect. And if it involves socializing, we're happy to do it. If it involves physical labor, it's probably meant for someone else.

Some students are clearly too young to work in the fields. They can surely help fetch equipment and clean up after work, but I wouldn't recommend making production plans by considering them as labor.

I also heard that these twenty acres have been estimated based on the fact that there are over seventy students in the school. But the counterargument to that is that most of the students are thirteen years old, cannot work, and most of the work will fall in the hands of the few students who are old and strong enough. These are the ones who are complaining, and they do have a point.

Over the course of the past six months, they have been here, and they have been the ones doing all the work, and not one day did any of the younger ones proposed to relieve them of any burden. So, when they hear the promise that these new productions are educational, they become skeptical. If it was indeed educational, the workload would have been spread about equally. I also noticed that I see more people at dinner time in the cafeteria than I see people in the fields.

I was helping them clean the bushes while I was listening to their complaints and nodding my head. This is, of course, not the first time they have complained, and the leading figures of this school know what usually goes on around here, but little, if anything at all, is done about it.