I'll miss the smell of kiwi fruit in the mornings... NOT

Aaaaaand the moment you've all been waiting for: THE KIWI FRUIT THINNING BLOG!

Two weeks ago I wake up at 6 am to start working by 7am on a kiwi fruit orchard. And I'm told that everyone works 10 hour days. Wooooah. So, we work from 7-5:30, with two 15-minute "Smoko" breaks (from taking a smoke break, but we use it to refuel with food...) and a paid 30-min lunch. Yes, it is a long day. 10 hours is what you have to work, at $12.50 minimum wage, after taxes, to walk away with about $100 at the end of the day. I think out of the 12 days I worked, only 2 of them were ten hours, because the job is highly weather dependent. But even 8 hours of looking at kiwis all day is exhausting.

So, here's what we do: We stand under the kiwi vines, which is kind of like a canopy, so you kind of have to squat if the bay is too low. (the work area is set up in square bays, and many bays make up a row, and the set of rows make up a block, so the seven of us (six Germans and me) would work usually a row to ourselves, finishing a bay at a time, until the block was finished, then move onto another block.) You look at all the kiwis hanging down, for rows and rows and rows, and pick off all the "bad fruit". This is the fruit that doesn't look like what we see in the grocery store- perfectly oval, long kiwis. Turns out that kiwis can grow into all sorts of shapes, and this is pretty much what kept me slightly intrigued by the job after the first few hours. There are the kiwis that are too round or slightly square, but then there are crazy ones that look like pumpkins, or four leaf clovers, or decapitated snowmen, or Gonzo, or a bunny rabbit... seriously, we saw the weiiiirdest kiwis. We also had to take off ones that had 'hooks', which was like a little piece of peeling wallpaper that could break off in a crate of kiwis and make everything rot. Yeah, so thats bad and it needed to go. So if we see this bad fruit we need to drop it- which you cant do just by pulling, you kind of have to flick it from the vine, in a motion not unlike turning on a faucet.

We were all pretty amazed at how much fruit is left on the ground, it seemed really wasteful. We all wanted to know why we couldnt just let everything grow? But our boss says its not really up to them, its all of society that wants to buy a perfect kiwi or apple or whatever. And she's right to an extent- I know I look for the best bananas, but I also love getting big fruit, so I just wish we weren't conditioned to wanting to eat just one shape. Maybe an orange shaped like the White House would be hard to peel, but that would be so cool! I mean, in Japan they now engineer watermellon to be square, so, why not goofy kiwis?

The job is really weather-dependent. It rains a lot here, and if the vines are too wet, you cant work really, because you just get rained on every time you pick a kiwi, ugh. We often worked just 10 minutes drive by car (we carpooled from the hostel), but sometimes we would have to wake up at 5:30 to catch a 6:30 van to Edgecumbe, an hour away, to start work by 7:30. Going out to Edgecumbe always got us in a foul mood because we didnt get paid for the travel time, so could only work an 8 hour day when we always intended on working 10. But once youre out there youre stuck, so one day it starts pouring less than an hour into work, and we just had to stop until the rain did. But we didnt go home. Nope. We worked. And we all brought our rain coats but the water runs right down and onto your pants wherever the coat ends. So we all looked like we wet ourselves by the end of the day. The vines dry off within an hour of the rain stopping usually, as long as the sun comes out, but you're still soaked or really damp and unhappy for the rest of the day. Part of the joys of the job, I guess.

Thinning could be pretty nervewracking, though, because our boss, Rachel, would sometimes show up and look at the fruit we picked on the ground and come over with an armful of the good fruit that we had accidentally picked. For me, it was REALLY difficult to tell sometimes what was good and bad fruit- it seemed to look different on the vine than it did on the ground, and even sometimes on the ground I would argue that a fruit truly looked square to me. Rachel would always say 'If you're unsure, just leave it on the vine'. But then I would go too far and the next day she'd say I wasnt taking enough off the vine... argh! I just felt like I couldnt win! And honestly, by the fourth hour all the fruit started to look the same and it just felt so endless...

One day another supervisor actually had us do the fruit round up, where we went into each others' bays and do a line up of the good and bad fruits. On this day we all royally sucked and all of us had picked off waaaay too much good fruit. I didnt realize how bad it was- I just figured that because there was always tons of good fruit that would keep growing it wasnt a big deal, but our supervisor Penny let us know that if each of us in this one bay cost the orchard one tray of good kiwis picked too early, that could be as much as $20 in one bay alone. Multiply that by each bay in a row and all the rows in a block... it was not good. As bad as we felt, what it really did was help me to see how to look at the hanging kiwi fruit and make much better decisions about what was considered good or not, because I was honestly struggling with the work. I mean, this was a pretty boring job but we were making decisions the entire time so we really had to pay attention all day. But I WAS paying attention and still not getting it, so this day was really helpful. I actually wished we had done it sooner, because three days later we finished working...

And, truly, though it was boring, it could have been a much worse job. I was with really nice Germans (though some of them spoke German in front of me and then even the ones that were really great about speaking English to me and around me would sometimes respond in German and it was super awkward always asking whaaaaat or just feeling like I couldnt contribute to the conversation..) and our boss Rachel was really nice even when we sucked at the job. She would bring us treats a lot, like fresh watermelon and once she brought some smoked fish and pipis (mussels), and on a hot day she bought us ice cream cones, another day let us jump in the river with our clothes on, and on the last day she got us cream pastries. We loved her so much that we printed out a picture of all of us with the phrase 'Dont drop the good fruit!' and 'Kiwi Thinning Crew 2010' and all of our names signed on the picture frame. We brought it to her house and she was so pleased that she offered us all beer and showed us pictures of her daughter's wedding. She said we were like a second family, and reminded her of her daughters, so even though maybe we werent the best thinners she knew that we were earnestly trying and we were pleasant to talk to. She said we could come work for her come picking time again, and a few of the girls are keen to return, I think.

It's funny, I've actually kind of missed working this week. there was something nice about the comraderie of waking up at the crack of dawn and groggily eating cereal and getting together smoko snacks and lunch for the day, and tossing each other random siamese twin kiwis that we found in our bay throughout the day. Im FINALLY leaving Opotiki tomorrow, we all waited for some of the girls to get packages from home, and it was a mistake to not work because we're all living at the hostel but not working, and theres not much to do here. Or, like, really anything. We've watched a lot of movies and gone swimming in the river, and been to the beach a few times, but its really time to go. At least in the down time Ive applied for the GeoCorps program to be a summer tour guiding intern in the US National Parks, and I just sent in an application to work as a tour guide at the Franz Joseph Glacier on the south island, so the down time wasnt completely useless. But it still would have been nice to make money, even if it is, as the only other non-German in the hostel puts it, a shit job.
Hey, at least I have stories. And a new appreciation for perfect fruit. Now I can look at the kiwi fruit in the supermarket and say tsk tsk, this is a bad fruit! Or see that it was picked in NZ and say hey, I helped!