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.
