A New Beginning
New life in Our Ancient Land New Life in Our Ancient Land
the year. During the harvest, the fields were worked twenty-four hours a day in three eight-hour shifts, with a snack break halfway through each shift. The people from the agriculture department sat in the dining room every night after dinner to work out the next day’s schedule and assign people to fields. One of the old-timers took me out for my first shift, and when he saw how well I handled the equipment, he made himself comfortable under a tree and took a nap. I was very happy to have won his approval. I worked the en- tire three months of the season doing various tasks. I never simply accepted the way things were done, but always tried to innovate better ideas. For instance, when wheat is harvest- ed, a combine separates the grain from the straw, which is then baled and dropped along the field every twenty feet or so. The bales are then loaded onto a platform pulled by a tractor. When I saw that the bales were often precariously balanced and fell off the platform as they were hauled away, I figured out a way to stack and interlock them so that the pile would be stable. Then, after they were load- ed and hauled away, we used the time to collect new bales in one place, ready to be loaded at once. I also told the workers from the ma’abara (temporary refugee camp) who worked for the kibbutz, “If we collect a certain number of bales, we can go home early.” Everyone worked hard and bene- fited from it. My system allowed us to bring in twice as many bales a day while reducing the time to six hours rather than eight. I received recognition for this and was proud of having improved the system. Working in the fields at night was a little scary. Some of our fields were far from the kibbutz and, although I carried a rifle, I felt like a sitting duck riding on top of a big tractor with front and rear lights shining brightly in the dark. One night, I was plowing with an eight-disk International Harvester tractor when some hungry- looking coyotes appeared and began to follow me. They followed the tractor as I went up and down each row. They followed me as I
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