HARVEST TIME

At the time of this writing in late May and early June it is harvest time for wheat. Last week two of our mothers had to return to their homes to harvest. Yesterday, however, I was leaving our home in XinMi at about 3 PM and driving along, I began to watch the peasants busy in the fields harvesting. Here in XinMi they still harvest with a hand sickle and they bundle sheaves by hand and load them onto wagons. Everything is done by hand.


Other peasants could be seen winnowing the wheat by tossing it into the air with shovels and forks to separate the grain from the chaff. Always it is then spread out everywhere to dry and then sacked by hand. I have seen streets, driveways, and parking areas - all covered with drying grain during harvest season. I pondered as we drove along and as I watched the scenes of the laborers.

It came to me how much I took my morning bread for granted. I pay about 60 cents for small loaf of whole-grain bread, never considering the hard work it took to prepare the soil, plant, weed, care for the wheat and now the many hands laboring in the hot sun to harvest the wheat. It will yet have to be ground into flour before being made into bread.

After all this hard labor, only a small allotment of the harvest will be given to the peasants that they in turn can sell little by little to buy some flour, oil or rice throughout the year. The peasant life here is so hard. They eat poor food and little of it but they work so hard. They have little pleasures and live in barren homes most without any heat during the cold winters. Mostly they only know labor, dirty hard labor, with a daily diet of watery rice soup or some may be more blessed to have some steamed bread.