Rice Harvest

Last weekend my family harvested their rice plots and they invited me to join. Now, I must confess up front that when I say join, I mean I watched, took pictures and then rode my bike home when I got hot. I maybe stayed an hour. The part of the harvesting process I "participated" in was the threshing. A day or so before I showed up, they had already hand cut the stalks of rice. My cousin had invited me to help assuring me that there were no snakes. I told him I would be willing to try as long as there weren’t snakes. He said no snakes, but there were leaches and they hurt when they bite you. I was going to give it a go, but he went ahead and did it without me and told me the next day that he had already cut the rice. I was pretty tore-up about it (here you read loads of sarcasm). Actually, had he invited me to go that morning I probably would have. However, I’m sure he realized how much more work it would have been to invite me and show me how to do it. It’s definitely hard work. You have this hand tool -not sure the technical term, but my vocabulary would describe it as a skinny machete that looks like a hook(?)-and you are bending over cutting the rice stalks down. Now, as I’m sure you’ve ascertained from this blog, it’s freaking hot here. While it’s "cold" season (don’t believe it folks- it’s not cold) the rice fields seem to absorb the heat and hold it in. So when you’re in the field and there is a cool breeze you’re still hot because you can feel the heat from the rice escaping the stalks. Then, the sun comes out and it’s really hot. Being a rice farmer is hard work, which is almost the sole reason why I’ve decided to like rice.
This was the first year my family (that is my aunt and uncle, I’m not sure my parents grow rice- or at least I’ve not been invited to the field yet) used a machine to thresh the rice. It took them all morning to run it through the machine, can you imagine doing it by hand- I can’t?!? Harvesting rice takes a lot of people. As you can see from the pictures there are a lot of people involved. It was not only my dad, aunt, uncle and cousins, but neighbors and friends. Everyone helps everyone. Even with a machine it’s a lot of work- and that’s just the threshing!