Greetings everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend.
My parents are not involved in many businesses; the only major thing they do is farming, which they primarily use for food for the family and to get some funds to cover other household needs such as school fees for the children, clothings, and other necessary things.
Farming is something we, the children, grew up with and were( and still are) expected to be a very supportive system because the farms are usually large and require significant effort to balance in every aspect to achieve a good yield. It was a must for us because that's where we got our food such as cassava, yam, pepper, and others, so refusing to go to the farm in those days attracted a lot of talk from dad and mom, especially from dad.
Back then, I was the only grown-up boy available at home; my immediate younger brother was living with my aunt in the city, so all the 'men' labor fell heavily on my dad and me.
The 'men' labor here refers to clearing the forest with a cutlass, digging ridges for yam planting, and mainly weeding grass, which is done four times before the cassava and yam mature.
Every weekend, going to the farm was a must, and most times we would go on Sundays, skipping church because we wanted to keep up with the work. We would work tirelessly, even when our bodies were strained, but we wouldn't feel it because it was something we had to do to keep living.
My mom, in the end, would be with the girls, taking on lighter tasks such as planting cassava, melon, and pepper, and most times they were also in charge of harvesting.
Just because I said 'lighter tasks' doesn't mean the work doesn't tire someone out; of course, they're strenuous tasks too, but not as compared to those of men.
Currently, most of us are grown-ups and have left the house, some for school, some for work, and some are married, but we still support the system by sending money home for them to hire laborers to help with the farm work since there are no longer enough capable hands at home to do such work.
Thanks for the approachable agricultural means of clearing grass now with the use of pesticides. With this, it has been much easier for them because hiring laborers these days is so difficult as modern-day youth don't want to get involved in anything involving hard work or farm work.
Imagine if we decide to back off right now, it'd be a big challenge at homr because currently, buying food items is very costly. It's much easier for people producing in their farms to people buying.
Sometimes my mom would call me and keep asking how I'm surviving with food purchase because things have really changed and it's very unbearable by people that are not financially buoyant.
We'll keep supporting them at home with funds to keep farming to provide food.
Thanks for reading.
This is for day 7 of #Aprilinleo prompt.
Do well to read the full details here