Out and about

Usually, the olives are harvested in October. This year, everybody started late due to Ramadan and the mandatory Eid following it. After the Eid, we had more than a week of heavy storms and rain showers. So, it was only last week that most of us started.

Harvesting olives is, as you can expect in Syria, a manual job. Enough free workers at hand in almost every family. No fancy tools, such as ladders to work on the big trees. An old empty barrel will do for the lower extremities and the highest hanging olives are collected by climbing the tree.

Climbing trees is a piece of cake for the locals. They prefer to do it on bare feet. After having observed their acrobacy for a few days, I tried it myself and I succeeded. Much slower than the others and with a pair of old comfortable Nikes. I immediately gained respect from all present.

And there were present, as it was Friday (weekend for the Muslims). On the days off, everybody joins in. The children are brought along and gather to play with each other the whole day, except for the babies that are put on a blanket.

The mothers with young children cannot work in peace. As they have at least 3 or 4, they are regularly interrupted by crying children that need to be attended to.

The most favourite activity of the youngsters is making fires. You can be sure that when they are not crying and making fun that they are running around looking for twigs to burn.

And there are heaps of it. While the women are collecting the olives, the men are cutting away branches to give some breathing space for the remaining ones. Modern inventions, such as a handsaw and scissors, are available.. Only one of each for the entire group. And then, it the children come in handy. They go and find these tools whenever Dad or an uncle is yelling for it.

The children also carry around the water and go and find some whenever the bottles are emptied quickly on a sunny day, and we had some sunny hot days during the last week.

One of the fires that they keep burning is used to cook potatoes, tomatoes and onions which taste 10 times better than when at home.

At sunset the olives are transported by tractor together with the tools and the human resources.

Yesterday, we picked the last olives at noon and today they were taken to the olive factory to have the local gold extracted from them. Tomorrow we will have a new supply for the coming year.

While waiting for it, we are using the last drops of last year’s production to heal our soaring hands.