Tomatoes

Growing up I was used to seeing endless green pastures and fields of corn, soy, wheat. I even knew how to milk a cow, though the only pets we ever had were dogs.
Well, we had a goat for a few days, but it ate my mother’s prize roses and she sent it packing. I was very much in sync with harvest times back then.

Now I live in a city full of buzzing cars and screaming sirens. Even on my roof deck I don’t see the stars as I did when I was a child. There is no smell of new mown grass, or large green and yellow rectangles spreading for miles reflecting the crops that were growing. And so it was when I left Cape Charles I happened upon workers harvesting crops.

At first I saw a field with lots of old school buses and passed it by. But then, I saw the migrant workers a few yards down the road going into green fields and I had to stop. I wanted to see what harvesting looked like now.

It will come as no surprise that the workers were all Mexican. They reminded me some of the sugar cane workers in Kenya. And then I saw their faces and no one was smiling or laughing. In Kenya there is always time to laugh and joke while harvesting because there is much more equality among the farmers. They don’t import people to do their dirty work. Everyone does the dirty work.

These lean, sweat stained men, here on Cape Charles were out picking green tomatoes and piling them into baskets which went onto a truck. They were serious and strained.The truck then took the tomatoes to a processing plant where they are gassed and saved for distribution in 2-3 months. How do I know this, because I stopped to take this photo and the overseer looked at me suspiciously as if I were a reporter for a newspaper or someone from INS. I quickly flipped into my Kenyan English explaining that I wanted to take photos to send back to the workers in Kenya to see how we farm.
It did the trick, I got the photos.

Later on, as I left the fields, I began to think about farming more. How odd it would seem to an African to harvest green tomatoes and use gadgets and processes to turn them an unnatural red. I kind of felt that way too. While I can see so many advances that would help my Kenyan friends, i.e. silos, I wouldn’t want all of our advances to get over there. Most certainly I wouldn’t want to lose the flashing white smiles and laughter that their harvests bring…and I kept on driving.