Welcome to my page 22, my farm life experience
My farm life experience
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In the farms and in the fields people are forced to live a very lonely life, it might be okay for an old man like the one in the photo, but for a very young man it is a very lonely and perhaps even sad if you have to live there most of your life.
These types of animals in the photos were the animals that I and other young people like me had to look after in the farm, when we were young. Farm animals need to be fed, watered, and groomed every day, so it is a never ending job to look after them
Dear readers, this
article is the continuation of our last hub ‘an old man story’, where I was
about to start telling you my real life story, so, this is another chapter of
my life story; therefore, let us begin to tell you my story.
As we know life is
full of many surprises, sometimes those surprises may be good and other times
they might not be that good, but we have to live our lives the best way we can
whenever and wherever we happen to live at the time when those events happen.
I believe that there
are times in our lives when we might not even know whether the way that we are
living our lives is good or bad for us, and we will discover that value much
later in our lives; because what we have been doing during our early lives may
well take us to a destiny that we had never thought could happen to us. Having
said that, now let us talk about our lives that we have lived, and let us see
what we think today about the life that we have already lived; therefore, let
me continue to tell you the story of my life, as I have started telling you in
our previous hubs of, an old man life story.
So, dear readers, as
I have said this hub is a continuation of our first farm life experience of, an
old man life story, here we are going to add a few more descriptions about my
farm life when I was a kid; now there are reasons to believe that once you have
read my farm life story or writings, you will all agree with me that the way of
life that I and those other youths, whom lived like me during those times in
the farms, it was a way of life that to most of us nowadays may seem archaic,
unreal and to say the least unfair, and indeed it was really unfair to myself
and to all those youths that ended up in a similar position as myself in their
families farm.
But at the time
when this happened it did not seem that bad to us, because we were so young
when we started to work in the farms, and everybody thought that this sort of
life had been practised from our forebears for many generations before us,
therefore we were not aware then of the adverse influence that it could and
would brink to us in the future, as we didn’t know then that we were placed in
a disadvantaged situation and even our parents did not see how bad the situation
could become to some of us, because they could not see how fast life was going
to change, and even if they did guess that things were going to change very
rapidly, they didn’t know what else to do. So let us talk about this unfair
situation that we were in at those times.
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Farm life unfair situation
The farm life
unfair situation
Now, this situation
that I am talking about here was most unfair to us because it affected only us
in the farms, but not all the young citizens of this somewhat rich rural town
of Genzano di Lucania, because they would be living a better life in town;
(Here rich rural town means only Genzano town by comparison to other rural
towns which surround it).
So, as it happened
then, we a portion of the young citizen of Genzano became caught in a
disadvantaged position including myself, and this position would affect us very
badly for the rest of our lives; but we didn’t know then that it was going to
be a disadvantageous position for us in the future, and we did not know what
else to do, and there was nothing that could be done either. The few exceptions
who were not put at a great disadvantaged position were those youths which
their families were rich land owners, because it would always be an advantage
for them to stay in the farms and learn their future trade and then use their
farm knowledge in the future to their advantages, in their own family farms.
But for the rest of
us young men who were working in small farms like myself, and did not own
enough land to secure a good living in the future, what we were doing would
turn into a disadvantaged position later on, but at the same time we had no
other opportunities in life but to continue the old tradition of farming, just
because this same tradition of farming had been a way of life to the rural
community of this agricultural town for centuries before us, and therefore,
when I was young it was thought to be the only way to earn a living if you
happened to own any land at all, so we had to be trained to be farmers in order
to look after our own small farm when we would become older, and anyhow, in
those times there was not much else that could be done, but this helping in the
farm and training to be a farmer for us became a great disadvantage, because of
the changes that followed in farming later on. Now to be fair here I may have
to add that there were also a few other youths that their families were so poor
that they were also working in the farm like us by looking after the farm
animals and other small tasks, they had no land at all, so they worked in the
farm just to be fed and a few other things, if the farmer could afford that.
Anyhow, nobody
could be blamed for putting us youths in such a position, which in the end
would result for us in a disadvantaged position: because the very same way of
life had served the same community of farming well for centuries, and those
people did not feel disadvantaged and were not disadvantaged at all then. But
nowadays because of the enormous change of the modern era, which has brought
with it also changes in the value of work that any worker does, and for this
reason we became greatly disadvantaged. But this is not all, because there are
a lot more that can be said, about the way we became and the ways we were later
on treated from the rest of the community.
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My harsh destiny
The harsh destiny
We have to say that
some of us would like to believe that we are born with a destiny to fulfil, and
if it is so, then my destiny is not a bright one, because from the beginning of
my life I have had a hard life and this has continued during my life, perhaps
it will still continue until I die, but anyhow let us go back to my life story
in the farm, whether it was my destiny or not.
As I have already
mentioned above about my farm life when I was young, where I reckon and feel
that it was really unfair to my personal self, and to those youths that had to
live in the farm as I did, this fact of life I will continue to describe to you
at length and in depth as I keep writing on, since the main point that I want
to make here is to show you how I had to struggle and to suffer while I was
living in the farm, and even later on in the future as we will see. In fact for
me life was going to be much harder than I thought, since that way of life
which I had lived in the farm had left me so far backward, because of that isolation
that existed in the farms I even lacked in local general knowledge, and also in
communication skills including all those nice things that a person says and
does, which would make that same person attractive to the rest of the
community.
Here I have also to
say that this early disadvantaged way of life has affected me greatly for the
rest of my life, and although I have tried to improve myself during my life, I
have never been able to catch up with the rest of the world completely. So
that, I feel it within me even now, as if I will never be completely satisfied
with myself, because I think that I could have been better off if I had a
different and better way of life when I was young to start with.
But since what’s
been done is done, and one cannot go back and do it in a different way, I
am/was stuck with it. Therefore, I had to put up with my backward way of life;
and I had to accept that the only possible way that was left for me to earn a
living for the rest of my life, had to be that I had to do hard physical work, which
I did in a way or another and this hard work has helped me to overcome some of
my drawbacks. From this life experience one could say that we should always try
to improve ourselves and work hard for it, even when it is hard for us to find
an easy way of life, if we are able to keep this attitude and work hard during
our lives, we would be able to overcome many issues that could otherwise run us
down.
Now let us continue
to tell my life story; anyhow, at the time when all this hard and boring life
was happening to us, including all those young people which used to live and
work in this town’s farms, doing this same work as I did it all seemed normal
to us, because even our forebears before us did that, as they had all lived
this same way for centuries before us.
As I was saying also
my forbears used to live in this town that I was born, and in which I had to
live my youth just like them. But, most of my youth and I mean the most
important years of my young life, at the time when a youth would like to try to
find out the meanings of life, which would help him to learn how to deal with
his life in the future in the society we are living in; all those years were
spent to live in our family farm and not in the town itself, and this did put
me in a disadvantaged position from the very start, as I have already mentioned
before, all because everything in the world was changing too fast and farming
the old way was on the way out.
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Breaking away from my farm life
For about twelve
years I lived this farm life; so, the only time that I had a real break from
farming was when I was called to go in the army, which in Italy was/is a
compulsory service to the country, which every able young male must serve when
one turns twenty-one years old or soon after that. Then when the army released
me I migrated to Australia, and I was then in my early twenties. I was young
and not afraid to do hard work, since I had learned that in the farm that we
needed to work hard to earn our living.
But let me say just
a few words about this service in the Italian army of those times, being in the
compulsory Italian army is a hard life for anybody, and everybody laments about
everything especially about the discipline, as for myself I did not find it very
hard like some complain it is, but at the same time it was, because you do what
you are told to do, at the same time you learn something new because you are
exposed to a different way of living. But the hardest part of it all is that
the compulsory army of those times, they didn’t pay us, we only got free food
free clothes and just enough money to by some cigarettes if one was a smoker.
Anyhow it is good to be in the army and learn a new way of life, it makes you
feel better when that is over and done with.
But, let me go back
to tell you about my life in the farm and what it did to me. Because as I have
already mentioned before, the farm life of those times was not what one would
prescribe for a young man like me, if one wanted me as a young man to develop
my potential properly, so that, I could be ready to meet the challenge of life
when I would be older, in all sorts of communities not just farming a small
farm.
But you see, as we
have already mentioned, at the time when all this happened to me, no one could
have ever thought of the forth coming changing world, and of the difficulties
that I and some of the other boys that shared the same fate as me would have to
face in later life. Just because the way of life happened to change so much and
so fast since we were young.
Now, in order to
understand how unfair it was for me and for those youths of my time who ended
up in the farms like myself, I have to convey to you the different set up of
this town of Genzano; the way that people separate each other in classes, not
because they like to be different to each other, but because they are
different, and therefore they think and talk in different ways, so they group
themselves with their equal, because they feel more at ease that way: But in
reality they are somehow all equal, as all the groups need each other soon or
later.
There are reasons
to believe that this way of life would usually happen everywhere else in the
world in small towns, where there are two main groups of people in every
community: There are those who live directly from the land, which are called
the rural community, and those who work in town in all sorts of jobs, which
would be called just town’s people and they include; shop keepers, doctors,
vets, craftsmen, clerks, schools and
school teachers, priests, policemen, (carabinieri which are Italian policemen),
guardians, and every other sort of jobs that one can think of, in order to run
a town properly; and then all the rest of the population, like whole families
and women and children, so that a town would be self-reliant.
Anyhow at a certain
stage of my life I started to become aware that I had to break away from this
type of farm living, because a lot of things were changing and we didn’t earn
enough from the small farm that we had, so it was time for us young would be
farmers to change also, but let me say a bit more about my farm life views and
the town I have come from, so that it would be better for my readers to
understand what was going on at those times. After all those times will not
come back anymore, and it would be good to have at least a sort of record, in
order to remember how those times were.
So in my next
article, let me talk about my farm life views, followed by several other
articles about my farm life, and then talk about the town of Genzano and its
communities, to explain better how those times were, in the fifties and
earlier.
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