The Tea Plantation
To get to the plantation where our Tea Tour took place, one strolled down to the end of a short dirt lane off the hotel grounds, past a magnificent Nandi flame tree and some nanny goats tied in someone's backyard.
Simon, a Kenyan man dressed nattily in tie and vest, was our guide. He waded right into the glossy yellow-green bushes to show us how the tea-pickers could move around among the plants, and answered our questions as he stood there suspended from the waist up in the tea-crop. Vicky, a woman in our group who once worked for the British tea company Unilever was informative too.
All around us, the tea fields rolled away on gentle slopes. Small grey cinder-block houses belonging to tea-pickers. dotted the fields here and there.
Tea is a part of my everyday life back home. I probably drink it twice a day, every day, and I have since I was a young child. I was curious to learn about something which is so common to me and yet something I know very little about. For instance, before today I could not have shown you what a tea-bush looked like even if I tripped over one. Now I have seen thousands of them.
Other things I learned about tea?
Well, it is a very fast-growing crop and new leaves can be harvested every month or so year-round. It grows ideally in sloping fields like the one we were standing in and is planted very close together. The workers pick the leaves and toss them over their shoulders to land in a sack carried on their back.
But the most memorable thing I learned this evening was that for the price I paid for this little half-hour tour(200 shillings or about $3), a man or woman working in this field would need to work a very long day indeed, tossing fifty to sixty kilos of leaves into that bag on their back at a wage of four shillings a kilo. It is an unhappy thought that bothers me.
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