By John Ambuli
Tea plucking is one of the toughest jobs on the farm. It requires a lot of physical fitness. The job requires only people who are perfect in health; anyone with any kinds of health problems does not have a chance of touching the leaf. The geographic conditions that the trees require in order for them to grow well are those that are hard for most human beings to withstand.
Tea plucking requires a lot of muscle and talent .One should be able to with stand the wet and cold climate of the highlands regions where tea does well in Kenya .In These areas most of the year is rainy, the kind of rain that lasts up to one and a half hours to two hours and where by all this time, the tea pluckers have no chances of leaving the field to go and shelter first, that is until the rain stops. It doesn’t happen like that in these places, once you step in to the fields and are between the bushes, there is no permission for you to get out until the time for closing work comes. That is how it was in those olden days when our parents were the cream of the tea pluckers in these tea estates.
In the tea estates, there was enough tea bushes to last all the employees a life time, meaning that they spent all their life time between the tea bushes or they spent at least a bigger percentage of their times between the bushes, plucking the leaf. Once you are employed and start working, you hardly touch anything different in your life apart from plucking the leaf. So, that way, this goes on to the list of hard jobs on the farm.
The rules and regulations that governed life on the tea estates were strict and were in favor of the tea bushes and not the man behind it. If you miss work abruptly without noticing the staff in charge, you have only one chance if you do it a second time, you are expelled from the service of the company and there is chances or room for an appeal or perhaps if you hard a wise union shop steward !
So, generally speaking ,only those who were best suited for the job ,managed to survive up to retirement .Those who could withstand working in the rain ,keeping the time of reporting to work, good relationships with your neighbors in the camps ,those who could pluck enough leaf to provide for enough money at the end of the month ,those who could withstand the cold temperature in the mornings and when it rained and so on. Our parents were among the best because they managed to survive all this and retired among cheers from the company staff and workmates.
That was that, we were taken to school, lived a good western life and got civilized etc. due to the tea bushes in the Kenyan highlands i Kericho. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this!
The tea estates were labor intensive and provided a lot of job opportunities for the then under educated or completely uneducated populations of this country immediately after the independence of this country from colonialism. Most of the work in those places was done by hand up to the processing of the leaf in the factories. It required a lot of people to produce the tea.
So, now comes the twenty first century technology, it can produces what twenty thousand men can produce in just a little time and with a lot of ease!! The Technology, which is tractor drawn has replaced the pluckers in one day and without notice. If Teas was a major employer in this country, then everyone can guess for themselves what has happened to this country in terms of what the benefits of the tea estates were to this country.
We are an agricultural economy .We depended on the tea on a large part of the lives of the people who are involved in the industry, that is the low class people who earned a life from these jobs .So, when their work is left for the robots, then you can guess what life in the villages has looked like.
Those were the economic benefits of tea plucking jobs to this country. There are the side effects too. People got hurt because of spending a lot of time on those jobs. Others got permanent harm and others even died .They strained their bodies beyond the limits just to avoid losing their jobs and many more other side effects.
The twenty first century is here with us and man has advanced very much scientifically and in all other spheres of life. The engineers have invented the technology that will save man from suffering in those harsh climate conditions while harvesting the tea leaves for fear of it getting spoiled in the field due to over maturing. The technology is tractor drawn and it plucks the tea well just as the tea experts might have wanted it to be plucked.
The research and testing of the technology is said to have been completed and that we are waiting for arrival of the first consignment of the three hundred units of this technology On to the companies’ premises .These will bring to an end the hand plucking which will be expected to stop immediately.IT will be the end of suffering and torture that our great grandparents went through in the tea fields plucking tea. No more straining of body tissue ,no more premature deaths due to dwelling for long hours in those harsh weather conditions for long periods of time and no more of everything that used to happen to man on the fields .The tractor can do it all in the place of human beings !
Though it might be hard to decide whether to have the machines to do the job instead of humans or not, but the job is tough and very demanding and the technology is a good alternative. The Technology is a savior!!
Those who are good at the Green leaf harvesting might want to stick to their jobs and they might find it hard to decide whether to embrace the technology or not but that is the truth!
There are the plantation workers unions and the rest of the types of the unions and they will have to decide whether to embrace the technology or not. We haven’t heard from them yet and we are waiting for their word. We expect them to put the pluckers together and decide as one body whether to embrace it or not. We are waiting for their word.
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