From Factory Slave to Free!

As I stood hour after hour on the left of a graffiti-covered conveyor belt, I drafted many versions of this post trying to work out how to convey to a reader the feeling of total boredom and overwhelming mental fatigue that consumes a factory slave. If you’ve never done a factory job, you just don’t understand.

There is nothing to do except come up with strategies to make time pass. I worked my way through a couple methods. First you must have an ipod. Without an ipod you might as well just drown yourself in the apple cleaning pool. Then you must turn the music up very very loud. Usually I highly disapprove of listening to music above a necessary volume and am always telling Sophia and Joe to turn their ipods down. However, when music is your only escape time passes a lot more pleasantly if it is all you can concentrate on. You forget that you have been placing apples into box after box and just starting hoping that no one guesses that the smile on your face is being maintained by songs from a certain German Eurotrance band.

Boxes of Apples

I came up with various countdowns to help me through the hours. My favorite was to work out my packing average of whatever fruit we were currently on, work out how much time we had left and then calculate approximately how many boxes I had left to pack. To give you an idea of how many apples you might get through in a day, I’ll provide an example.

When packing green apples, you put them in pairs, stems facing each other, three pairs on the bottom and three pairs on the top in plastic containers. There were four of these plastic containers in each cardboard box and when you finished all four you moved the box down to a lower conveyor belt that took the box away to be checked over, stacked on wooden pallets by other workers and then driven away by forklift to the gigantic cold storage rooms. On average, I packed three of these boxes every five minutes. Working for 81/2 hours a day from 6:30am to 4pm, this meant packing approximately 14,688 apples. ..I didn’t try counting down individual apples.

Bad Apples

Anyway, I could complain on and on about how boring it was,  but that would be a little unfair as some of my fellow workers have been working in the factory for almost three months straight and I only faced 2 weeks. And to be completely honest, after one day I had already begun to plan my escape. It happened that a volunteer from New Zealand came back from traveling my first day in the factory and moved back into his room, across the hall from ours. We made friends and he mentioned that he worked in Apple Packing, but his job was to help fix the big wooden containers that the apple pickers put the apples into in the orchards. By divine intervention (or luck) his boss was going to be out the next day and he offered to ask our boss if I could help him. The next day was so much fun.

In the morning, a forklift driver brings six or seven big wooden containers and puts them in the workshop. We have to diagnose their problems, such as broken panels, missing rivets, unstable feet and then fix them. I got to use drills, rivet guns, electric hammers, sledge hammers and even learned to weld!! My enthusiasm for this job was so extreme it actually caused a debate among the factory staff over whether I was a lesbian or not. But sexual orientation had nothing to do with it. After trying apple packing, anything remotely challenging to my mind was greatly appreciated.

I didn’t work with containers all the time. Sometimes they would need workers back at the conveyor belts and sometimes they would need me back in the plastics factory, Elcam, to clean. Elcam was largely enjoyable. After working with blood, guts and animal feces in Ecuador, it wasn’t such a leap to deal with human mess and waste, especially in gloves. The most trying thing about the job was how much you sweat when you really sweep or mop a floor and just putting up with the demeaning looks certain girls at the factory loved to give me as I held a bathroom door open for them (without thanks) or mopped up their spilt coffee.

Elcam Cleaning Girls

All in all, the last weeks at the Kibbutz were very enjoyable. Ariana and I had established a routine of walking/jogging around the perimeter of the Kibbutz (2.8km) twice almost every day before dinner and the good food and friends kept us in high spirits, no matter how hard or boring the work was.

Walking around the Kibbutz

Ariana and I left the Kibbutz on Friday morning and made our first sightseeing tour yesterday. We spent a couple hours on Masada, exploring the amazing ruins and contemplating the story of suicidal resistance before heading to a Bedouin tent overlooking the Israeli-Jordan border (the Dead Sea) for pita, hummus and labane. Our last stop was a float in the water at the Kalia beaches on the northern corner of the dead sea (technically in the West Bank) and to cover ourselves from head to toe in the mineral-rich mud from the sea bed.

Masada

The most ridiculous event of the day happened as we were making our way to the showers. A group of elderly American tourists stopped us as we skipped up the steps like swamp monsters and asked, if you can believe it, where we had got the mud from. Ariana and I looked at each other in shock and then, realizing that they were actually not joking, replied that we just got it in the sea! Afterwards we realized had probably missed a good money making opportunity and should have offered to sell it to them for 50NIS per pound.

Mud Monsters

Today is our last day enjoying the unbelievable hospitality of my grandparents and when I finish this post, Ariana and I will make our way to a hostel in the Old City of Jerusalem. We will be spending the beginning of the week in Jerusalem before exploring Tel Aviv, meeting up with Sophia and few other friends from the Kibbutz and heading down to Egypt. I can’t tell you how lucky I feel.

Herzliya Flowers