My New Job! HAZZAH!!!

As I mentioned before I used to work in the apple factory which let me tell you was AWESOME! Hint: See Sarcasm in the dictionary. Not meaning to say to those of you who knew I was already being sarcastic that you are stupid, just sarcasm in text is very hard to read, and I love me some dry sarcasm!

But moving on with the main point of this post. My new job! I worked 1 day in what we call ramps, this is the area located on the back of the kitchen where the trucks come in and drop off food and what not for the kitchen to use. You just sort it all and put it in the proper place. it was wonderful to be outside in the sun and not stuck in the dreaded 46 job, Apple Packing. (If unclear on the 46 reference see post http://mlaucke.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/46/) After my one day of freedom from apple packing, the little taste of happiness they gave me they took it away and put me back into the apple factory, Sad Face… The kitchen was informed the work I did was excellent and a week or so later, Mosche (the guy who normally does ramps) was called to the millitary and I was his replacement all week. I enjoyed work so much I finished early every day. After they saw me working ramps and befriending a couple of the right people I saw the lovely 130 in my worklist which means Kitchen! One of the more desired jobs on the kibbutz for it’s atomosphere and ease of working. It is so nice to work at a place where it matters how fast you work. The faster we work the faster we all get off and get to enjoy the sunshine! We also get off at 3 instead of 4 which is an extra lovely hour in the sun sometimes and an extra hour inside out rooms when it’s raining. But we start at 6! Just gotta add another coffee onto my order of around 6ish a day, with plenty of cups of tea to compliment them. The kitchen is awesome now that I’ve been working there for the last 3 weeks. You make friends fast, I get to practice a little hebrew. י’שכצ’ד oh yeah! Don’t worry that doesn’t mean anything. I can switch my keyboard to hewbrew, the only problem is I don’t know where any of the characters are since I haven’t got the little stickies to put on the keys yet. Fail. I also am working with one boss every monring, so it is nice to build a friendship with him. A couple of interesting observations is. There is 4 people who speak really good english in the kitchen. A lady in the office who orders everything, the two head chefs thankfully, and one of the other members who is 18 who works with us. Besides that it is either Hebrew or Arabic with a splash of english. So, whenever we can communicate on any level with one of the people who don’t speak much english we celebrate it! It soon will turn into an inside joke. So, for the whole day we are shouting back and fourth our inside jokes (around 4 of them) and laughing. They are pretty ridiculous if I must say so myself. But the super interesting thing I thought about was, when I was a kid my friends and I sat around and were talking about how many times you can repeat a joke until it isn’t funny anymore. We came to the conclusion that the first 3 times are funny, then the 7th time. The 7th is because you repeat it so much it becomes funny out of sheer stupidity of repeating it so many times. Then after that you must wait until the right situation usually around a month or so later when everone has forgotten about the joke. Well, this completely does not hold up in the kitchen considering each day each joke is probably mentioned 100ish times. That’s all, that was all I had to write about. Oh and we had an awesome fieldtrip day in the kitchen. We finished early (except for me since I Was stupid enough to request off the day we had a half day and a field trip go me!) We went to Tiberias which is recorded as one of the holdest cities in the world. It’s next to the Kinneret or as we know in english the Sea of Galilee which is the biggest water source for all of Israel. We were right next to the Syrian border, around 100 ft I would say. We went to this hotsprings where they also had a zoo of animals from Africa, which was kind of random but of well. We saw some interesting animals, a parrot show,

It could have been dead for all I know. He didn't move once!

Waiting for their turn to impress us!

basically nothing to write home about, shortly after we were on our way to the nice smelling hot springs! By nice smelling I mean nice smelling if you like the smell of rotting eggs.

The whole kitchen crew!

The lovely rotten egg smelling hot springs!

Night time at Tiberius Hot Springs!

After, spending a good 3ish hours in the water, clensing ourselves we moved onto this amazingly cute little restaurant.

This cute little restaurant overlooking the valley that was rebuild from ruins served us an amazing dinner to not forget.

It was actually a ruin that was rebuilt. very small in the shape of an L the small part of the L is the kitchen and the dinning room was the longer part. sitting around a max of 45ish people. Here is the menu! You can see all the good choices we had to choose from! And no there wasn’t an english version Just point and hope it is good

Kind of challenging for us English speakers, eh?

Great dinner! Amazing appetizers, which basically Gur and myself ate. We kept stealing the plates from each end of the table until we had massed a pile of 7 empty plates on top of eachother right in front of us. Naturally, I ordered a rare steak which melted in my mouth.

Mouth watering steak! Kibbutz food is pretty much the same from week to week so it get's old REAL fast! So a refreshing steak for a change is about 10 times as good as normal! Life was good that night!

And surprising everyone else’s food was delicious as well, there wasn’t a bad dish in the restuarante. Sharing a bottle of wine also could of helped.

A lovely red wine to go with my steak!

Dessert was lovely as dessert always is, although I didn’t get too much because Timor was licking the plate clean…

Dessert went quickly, I could barely get a bite!

And then we had the long drive home. Where I fell asleep for a little while, thankfully there weren’t any sharpies in my car. Trying to keep this post short and simple. So with that! Thank you kitchen staff for being awesome! And Boss… “I’MMMMM SOOOOO SIICCCCKKKK!!!!!”

From a moving bus somewhere in the north of Israel! I Say goodmorning to my fellow Californians!

I hope today is as sunny for you as my day was in Tel Aviv!

-Mike Laucke

46

The most hated number on Kibbutz Bar’Am. I guarantee if you ask any volunteer what their least favorite number is after volunteering for a month on Kibbutz Bar’am they will say “46″ without hessitation.

Now let me explain why. But, first let me explain what a Kibbutz actually is.

A Kibbutz is a collective community only found in Israel. It was traditionally based on Socialism and Zionism. It’s forms of income were mainly agricultural, and although those are still some of the forms used today, the more mainly used forms of income are industries. But there are many changes being made to kibbutz now-a-days, becoming privatized as well as other things making them slightly different then what they were founded on. Multiple kibbutz is called kibbutzim and a member of a kibbut is called a kibbutznik. in 2010 there were 270 kibbutz in Israel.

Now that we are all clear on the conscept of what a Kibbutz is. We may continue on with our least favorite number, 46. Our work schedule is posted every week in the bottom of the kitchen it includes every volunteers name and where they work. Instead of writing out each place of work which includes, Plastic Factory, Apple Packing, Dinning, Kitchen, Ramps, Members club, Cinema, and so on and so fourth. They just abbreviate it to numbers, like 130 for kitchen, 131 for dinning etc… well, as I’m sure you can guess the abbreviation for apple packing is 46. The worst thing to see on your work schedule!

 

As I mentioned above most Kibbutzim have some sort of factory that they use to export some goods to make the majority of their money. Well on Kibbutz Bar’Am it is an apple factory. Doesn’t sound so bad at first eh? Eat as many apples as you want, maybe make some apple pies. I could think of worse jobs, or atleast that’s what I thought before I started working at the apple factory. Which is actually called apple packing by the volunteers. This is because that is what the majority of your time spent there is. Just standing in one spot from 6:30am-4:00pm packing apples 5 days a week. I know this sounds bad. but, infact it actually is worse then bad! It is terrible. imagine with me for a second, that you are standing packing apples into a box.

Like this.

Maybe 8 per container, or 12 or just to the brim pretty boring and repetitive huh, but when you think it can’t get worse you just now imagine that someone comes up and starts yelling at you telling you that you are packing apples wrong! Think for a second, how possibly can you pack a box of apples wrong. Okay, sure you have to sort the bad apples out, natually. Then you must alleign the other apples so they are facing each other, now that is just stupid, because between the machine carrying your packed boxes, the fork-lifts carrying them around then the trucks driving over the windy mountains to take them to the store, (where they just unpack the apples anyways), they aren’t going to stay in the spot you put them in. Sorry, just doesn’t work that way Mrs. Apple Factory.

One other very funny thing that happens in the apple packing factory is the classification levels. There are 3 classes. Class A. a perfect apple you would find photo shoped into an add. Class B. Still edible. Class C. Shit that barely classifies as an apple, basically is used for making apple juice and things of that liking. Well, now that we know what the classification levels are I can tell you one of the jobs is sorting the apples that got put into the wrong line. There is usually 2 lines of Class A, 2 lines of class B and a single line of class C. At the beggining of each line is a person who examinines each apple to make sure it’s in the right class.

If not they put it on a separate conveyor belt that sends it to the next class level. Well, often I find myself sitting there sorting apples peacefully, to have one of the managers come up and say “no no no no like this, these are bad apples, these ones are okay.” I reply with “okay no worries” and switch my sorting to their specifications, shortly after a few minutes maybe a different manager comes up and says “Mike! What are you doing no no no no sort like this.” Not wanting to disagree with one of my bosses and point out the fact that I was told something different 2 minutes earlier I respond with “Okay yeah no worries”. A couple of minutes later the first manager walks by and exclaims “Mike! What the fuck! I just told you how to sort the apples!” Now at this point you prey that the second manager is in yelling distance to call them both over to discuss the actually bad and good apples. But if not, you just have to keep an eye out to who is walking past and switch your sorting style accordingly. This happens more then one would like to think. They will sometimes come over from across the room 10-15 meters and say “Why’d you throw this apple away! It’s good!” To which you just sorta stare at them with a blank look on your face since you are probably about to fall asleep since it is a sitting job and no one sleeps on this Kibbutz. Then they usually walk away shortly after and you go back to sorting your apples “wrong” That is life.

But at least we get some breaks in the day. let’s see. Breakfast, 8:30-9:10 minus the 5 minutes each way it takes to walk there, then a 15 minute break from 11:00-11:15 which you really can’t do anything but sit in the coffee room in the apple factory since the weather usually isn’t nice enough to go outside. then Lunch from 1:00-1:40. so overall a work day consists of 7 hours and 55 minutes with 1 hour and 35.
Now let’s do some simple math fun. If one packs a box of apples let’s say for shits and giggles that there is an average of 52 apples per box and this person packs sorta fast around 2 boxes a minute. That is 104 apples per minute. As mentioned above there is 7 hours and 55 minutes in a work day which is 475 minutes of packing apples at 104 apples per minute that is 49,400 Apples by one person. Let’s say that there is 4 people working per line and 2 on the class C (The Worst looking apples) that’s a total of 14 people at just shy of 50,000 apples per person, we pack around 691,600 apples a day. Those also have to be stacked by usually 2-3 people, that means those people are stacking 335,000 apples each. We know they do around 40 tonnes of apples a day, meaning each person is lifting 26,300lbs if they work there all day. Now Obviously there is a constant stream of apples or not everyone works as fast as I am suggestings simply because it’s depressing, knowing the fact that if you pack 120 boxes and hour or 2 boxes an hour you aren’t getting out of the factory any faster. There is ZERO motiviational factor. Besides of course not getting kicked out of the Kibbutz. To get the more realistic number of how many apples we pack a day you’d have to take off a few hundred thousand apples I think.

Here are some pictures I took of the apple factory! I only actually took these photos after I no longer worked there. Since, no one who has a day off from the Apple Facotry wants to be anywhere near there, or speak of apples at all!

The Conveyor belt that takes the boxes to us for easier access to move less and pack more efficiently.

A couple of facts mentioned above and new:

The apple factory approximately does 35-45 tonnes of apples a day. That’s enough to give every Israeli an apple per month
If everyone working stops for 1 minute, they loose $1,000. (Quoted from Guy one of the Managers)
The apple factory has enough apples, pears and kiwis in their fridges to last all winter long. If you figure they can do over 1 million apples a week that’s a lot of apples stored in some pretty large fridges.
There is an average of 45ish people working in the Apple Factory on any given day
The apple packing machine costs a few miillion New Israeli Shekels (NIS) around $500,000
Coffee is the soul of life of the Apple Facotry. Without free coffee machines, there would be no apple factory.

With love and thanks to the lord for no more apple packing for me! I say goodnight from Kibbutz Bar’Am, Northern Israel, 1km away from Lebanon our lovely neighbors, Israel, Middle East, World, Solar System, Universe and beyond.
-Michael Jacob Laucke
P.S. More posts to come
P.P.S Disclaimer: I have no problems with anyone from Kibbutz Bar’Am or any of the people who work in and/or manage the apple factory, you are all very nice and I miss you. I will come visit again soon.