Manual Labor
One of the things that always reminds me that I'm in the Philippines is the amount of physical labor workers go through here.
Our gardener is here for 9 hours every Tuesday. I don't believe I've ever heard him use a single power tool. Lawn has to be mowed? He might use a push mower, but he might clip it all by hand with a pair of grass trimmers.
When you live in a country where unemployment is more than 10 percent, labor is cheap, which is probably why so many businesses employ security guards to open doors for their customers, and why so much of the labor is done by hand.
We watched this kid, along with three or four others his age and several more who probably in their mid-teens, at Aninuan last weekend as they first floated two dozen bamboo poles from one end of the beach to the other, and then drag them all up onto the beach. It wasn't back-breaking work by any means, especially since there were so many of them, but I couldn't help thinking that, in America, we would have loaded the poles into a pickup truck and driven from one end of the beach to the other. No way most Americans, myself included, would have gone to the effort these kids had to go through to move the poles from one end to the other.
2 comments:
Greg forgot to mention that the kids were having a great time: doing flips off the bamboo into the water, having macho contests to see which of the little kids could drag the biggest pole and doing face plants into the sand.
That's true...they were mugging for the camera quite a bit, too, though not in any of the photos that I took.
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