Women carrying 20L jerry cans from the bore-hole back to their homes. “A pint’s a pound the world around!” meaning these women are carrying around 42 pounds of water each for a half-mile or more.
The distance crops travel from the fields to your dinning room table is baffling. Its easy to forget about the hard physical labor that is spent, well before it even makes it onto a delivery truck. These are photos of some extreme cases.
The famous Dabbawala or Tiffin Wallahs of Mumbai…Photo taken April 2008.
Tiffin Wallah translates as one who carries the box. Tiffin is an old English word for a light lunch, and also the name of the multi-compartment metal lunch box that carries it. The Tiffin Wallah originated over a century ago when the many Indians working for British companies disliked the food served at work. Tiffin service was created to bring home cooking to the workplace. Today the city’s 5,000 tiffin-wallahs deliver 200,000 tiffin-boxes filled with home-cooked food each day. According to a recent survey, there is only one mistake in every 16,000,000 deliveries and the system has registered a performance rating of 99.999999. Prince Charles is a fan and patron of the Tiffin Wallahs and countless businesses and corporations study the system to learn of its success and efficiency.
Bean-bag-head
Tlacalula Market, Oaxaca.
Sometimes what we carry isn’t all about function, but adornment. It seems as though in Oaxaca, they are always are finding a reason to celebrate. This shot was taken at a parade crossing over the Zocalo (main square) in Oaxaca city.
In Oaxaca, we spent an afternoon up in the Sierra Norte Mountains learning how to cook from an amazing 74 year old woman named Dona Lucia. But before we could cook, we had to forage for our meal. Being late in mushroom season we were weary of what we would find, but hand it to beginners luck, we struck jackpot.
Once we surpassed the capacity of our pockets, we had to use the hoods of our jackets to carry the mushrooms as we continued foraging. A solution of necessity, making genius design.
Now remember….
There are a lot of Old mushroom foragers..and a lot of Bold mushroom foragers..but not a lot of Old-Bold mushroom foragers.
It’s that time of year…..How will you get your Pumpkin home?
Men carrying baskets in Nairobi, KE using every available body part to maximize the load.
Photo by Kristen Maryn, June 24, 2011
· Images are either from personal archives or borrowed from the web-o-sphere.
