‘Tis the season, and between now and the end of November we have to harvest olives from the 800 trees on our property. I started my harvesting career Monday when 60-some teenage girls came with their school to help pick for the day. Karin and I were in charge, and for about two hours we had a hard working crew. It was around 10 a.m. when we wondered if we should hydrate the free labor.
“I don’t want to distract them,” said Karin.
“But they’re probably thirsty,” I said. So we brought out the juice and that was it. From that point on almost nothing got done. The girls started eating their lunch, wandered off through the grove, sat under trees and talked and chased each other with olive rakes through the rows of trees. The one thing they didn’t do much of was pick olives, but they were nice girls nonetheless, and big fans of the camera:
The hospital and office staff was out later in the week for a more thorough and labor-intensive day.
Clever trick: to filter the leaves and dirt from the olives, they throw platefuls of leaf/olive/dirt mix down a long net. The olives are the heaviest, so they end up at the end of the net, with the debris dropping earlier on.
And it wouldn’t be Palestine if it didn’t involve music, nargila, and massive amounts of meat. The afterparty:
