Tires and avos

When you’re travelling, not everything always goes according to plan. So we had a flat tire, and what we do best in such a case is look helpless…

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Luckily, we were in an area with many plantations and farms.

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The workers and manager of one of these farms helped us a lot, providing us with a jack, filling up the spare tire and fitting it on our car. Unfortunately, the spare tire did not fit our car (don’t know how that is even possible…). In a complex switch, the manager gave us two of his tires to fit on our car, so that we could continue our travels. So good to meet kind strangers!

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The farm was an avocado plantation.

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We were invited to visit the harvest.

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The avocados are harvested once a week, from February to November. This day the manager had hired about 100 extra workers to help out.

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When we arrived they had just finished. The workers were heading off. They walked to the office, where they would receive their pay.

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And the boxes with avocados were lifted into a waiting truck. According to the manager, the avocados are then sorted according to size – large, medium and small. Apparently, people in Germany only want large avocados, in the UK they prefer medium, and in China small is popular. Spain takes any size. Learnt some great new things, and we were given some avocados to take home with us – what an experience!

Author: johannekekroesbergen

I am an anthropologist of religion and photographer, currently living in Pretoria, South Africa. I wrote my PhD-thesis on narratives about Satanism in Zambia. Currently I am preparing a new research project that uses photography as an ethnographic method. In my free time, I love hiking, safaris and enjoying nature through photography.

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