Going to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches

For those of you who would like a 2 minutes synopsis of how I spent last Tuesday, click here.

If, however, you want the full, ninja-free version of how I spent my Tuesday, read below.

On Monday, I left the big city of Tbilisi on a mini-bus headed for Gurjaani, in eastern Georgia's agricultural region. I was told that it was most famous for its wine, but I quickly learned that the orchards were the place to be.

In Gurjaani, I couchsurfed with Alex, a fellow Texan from Dallas who had taken a semester off from the University of Texas with his girlfriend to go teach English in rural Georgia. Alex and his girlfriend were staying with a host family in Gurjaani, a situation that at once proved its superiority to living alone.

I got there in the dead heat of the afternoon. The whole family had gone out to the orchards to pick peaches and nectarines - only Alex had stayed behind waiting for me to arrive. I got swindled out of 60 cents by the taxi driver who took me to his village and dropped me off at the wrong place. But I was able to find Alex simply by going up to people and saying "American" in a questioning tone. They ALL knew who Alex the American was.

Alex gave me the tour of Gurjaani (it didn't take long) and then we dug into a watermelon from the garden. Later that night, after everyone got home from the orchards, we grilled pork over a fire in the backyard and the ladies made grilled eggplant with walnut sauce. Delicious.

Within minutes of arriving in Gurjaani, I felt more at ease. The country life has such a good feel to it. Plenty of space to wander around, the people are nicer and, I believe, the country life exposes more of a nation's true character than the cosmopolitan cities. Plus, where there is agriculture, there is work to do. After four months of travelling, I needed some good, hard work to cleanse my soul. And that's exactly what I got.

Riding to the orchard early in the morning

Tuesday morning, the household woke up at 430 am to load banana boxes from Ecuador and Panama into the mini-bus and grab a hunk of bread for breakfast. The banana boxes were a cheap solution to packing peaches and nectarines. Alex and I fashioned benches out of the boxes loaded in the back and rode out with the family for about an hour to their orchard. As the sun came up over the valley, it was rush hour on the little half paved soviet-era road that led to the orchard. Lines of old ladas and military trucks rumbled down the road. Just about everyone stopped at a little spring to fill their water bottles.

We were out in the orchard picking peaches by 6am and worked pretty much non-stop until 11am. Alex and I, the newbies, spent most of our time lugging buckets of peaches from the orchard to the little shack that covered them in shade. Alex's host dad, Sandro, owned the orchard and was in charge of the operation. In addition to his father, mother, Alex and I working in the orchard, he hired five other orchard owners whose crop had been destroyed this year for whatever reason. They were mostly women and their experienced hands acted like locusts when they all descended on a tree for picking. I spent some time picking, but it was obvious that they were far more efficient than me, so I spent most of my time hauling buckets of fruit.

At 11am, everybody came in from the orchard and started packing the peaches into the banana boxes mentioned above: smallest and greenest peaches went on the bottom while the big, juicy, red peaches went front and center for marketing purposes. After packing about 20 boxes of peaches (about 1,500 pounds) we took a lunch break: sausage, bread, beer, more of that delicious eggplant concoction, and boiled tripe. I stayed away from the tripe and nobody seemed to mind that.

Packing the peaches - pretty ones on top!

As the heat of the day approached, we moved over to the nectarine orchard, where our jobs were pretty much identical. I picked even less though, as it was harder for me to pick out the ripe nectarines through the trees' denser branches. When I did pick, though, I found it easiest to perch in the middle of the tree and pick the nectarines from the inside. This situation also ensured maximum shade. The old women continued mobbing the trees with terrifying accuracy. By 5 pm, we had picked and packed 2,500 pounds of nectarines.

The Orchard Crew

While we were picking nectarines, Sandro (Alex's host dad and boss-man) drove the half-full minibus to the bazaar and sold the peaches off for about 30 cents a pound. Later that evening, after the nectarine picking, he sold off the nectarines for a similar price. By Alex and my calculations, Sandro and the family were making about $1,200 dollars a day. They started doing this in May and will continue working in the orchards (they own five, so they work a different one every day) until the end of August. It's a lot of work and I really have a lot of respect for those people who can get up day after day and put in 12 hours in the orchards the whole summer. Granted, they get the rest of the eight months a year off, but that still takes some endurance.

Sandro is a very wealthy man by Gurjaani standards. He's got an annual income approaching $150,000 and Alex says that costs for maintaing the orchards is about $40,000. That leaves about $100,000 profit every year - decent for a family of  5 by American standards but in Gurjaani, where a loaf of bread is something like 20 US cents, astounding. They don't put the money in the bank though. They have been conditioned to avoid that after their bank failed a few years ago and they lost tens of thousands. Instead, they either invest the money into their house (they had just finished a $50,000 up-stairs addition) or giving it to family members. Alex was amazed that Sandro was perfectly ok with the fact that he drove an old Soviet era Lada while his unemployed brother in law drives a Mercedes thanks to a gift from Sandro. Capital here seems to be stored in personal relationships, even ones that don't appear to have much promise of paying off, rather than in banks. The consequences of this situation means that it's just that much harder for others to get access to credit from private banks and have to rely on politically motivated government lending.

Wow. Ok, so as you can see, a day in the peach orchard has taught me a lot. Hard work is good for the soul and I went home exhausted after that day in the orchards. But it was also fascinating to get a glimpse into the Georgian agricultural economy.

Perhaps the Perfect Nectarine