The Potato Fields

The year was 1999.  It was September.  I had just arrived from America and was now in Irkutsk, Russia, in Siberia, just north of Mongolia.  The days were cool, the nights cold.  It was autumn in Siberia.

When I arrived, I was immediately invited over to Sasha’s.  He lives in a dorm room with his wife, Lena, and their year old daughter, Katya.  In this small room are all their earthly possessions.  They have no kitchen.  They cook with a single electric burner and an electric teapot.  They have no running water.  For water they must go to the not-maintained bathroom they share with dozens of others who live on their floor.  This is their home.

For my coming, in typical Russian hospitality, they prepared the best meal they could afford.  For them it was a type of vegetable soup.  It was, basically, hot water with a few traces of finely cut carrots at the very bottom.  It was all they could afford.  It was all they had.  But I had not come for the food.  I had come to spend time with them.  It was a time to catch up with what had happened in each of our lives since we had last seen each other.  It was a time of deepening friendships.  It was a rich time...as we sat on those unpadded wooden crates around a makeshift “dining” table sipping on the limited soup and eventually pretending we were full.

At one point in the conversation I found out Sasha was going out in a couple days to the potato fields to dig potatoes.  I thought back on the day during my previous time in Irkutsk when I was at their home and Sasha came with a bag of potatoes.  He had just bought them.  His wife, Lena, was very excited.  Now they had potatoes.  She exclaimed, “Potatoes for breakfast!  Potatoes for lunch!  Potatoes for dinner!”  She was not apologetic about it.  She was sincerely happy.  It would be what they would be living on.  It was, for them, life.

Now it was time to dig the potatoes Sasha had planted last spring.  He was offering anyone who would come and help with the digging a bag of potatoes.  While I was hoping to start a Bible study with Sasha, and others, I instead found myself telling Sasha I would come and help him dig potatoes.  It just seemed to be that which God was saying to do.  It seemed more important than even a Bible study.  

Sasha had graduated a couple years before from the University in aeronautical engineering and was now an engineer at the large military plane factory.  He made about $100 a month.  With this he must support his family. 

The plane factory rents fields outside the city for its’ employees to raise potatoes for food.  When it is time to dig the potatoes, the plant closes for the day and rents dozens of buses to bus its’ employees out to the potato fields.  The buses were leaving at 8AM on Friday morning.  Sasha said to meet him at his dorm room at 7:30.

I lived on the opposite end of the city from Sasha.  It takes about an hour and a half to get to Sasha’s, taking various buses from where I lived.  The first bus in the morning started around 6 AM (bus “schedules” are not exactly exact in Russia). 

On Friday I got up early.  It was cold and windy and dark.  I dressed as warmly as I could.  I walked in the dark to the bus stop and caught the first bus.  It was still dark when I arrived at Sasha’s.  He was surprised both by the fact that I had actually come and that I was on time.  He gave me a bucket and we headed out to catch the buses that were heading out to the potato fields. 

Ceseg also joined us.  Ceseg is Buryat.  The Buriyat people are closely related to the Mongolian peoples.  The Buryats are Buddhist by tradition.  They were also severely treated under the communists with many of their temples destroyed.  In missiological terms, the Buryats are considered an unreached people group.

Ceseg had just graduated from the University in architecture and had not yet found a job, had no place to live (her family lives in a region to the east of Irkutsk called Buryatia), and had little money for food.  She was willing to help Sasha dig potatoes all day to take him up on his offer of a bag of potatoes as payment.

I wasn’t sure where the plane factory came up with the buses, but most of them looked like they wouldn’t, couldn’t, or shouldn’t run.  By the time we loaded our bus, it was standing room only.  As we waited for the bus to leave, I looked around.  I was standing on an old bus which by all appearances was filled not with aeronautical engineers, but with peasants wearing potato digging clothes, colored plastic buckets on their laps or on the floor next to them, and all holding assorted rigged-up digging tools. 

It was an hour long standing bus ride out into the country.  The hills of Irkutsk were almost more than the buses loaded with people could manage.  There were times, as we were ascending a hill, that one wondered if the bus would even make it.  It always did.

At one point during the trip, I leaned to Sasha’s ear and asked him if the military plane factory had ever had an American join it in digging potatoes before.  He just smiled and shook his head.  While on the bus we only whispered English to each other.  It was not that there were a lot of military secrets out in the potato fields, but there was no point in making a scene.  I was trying to just be another Russian peasant going out to dig potatoes.

As we neared the potato fields, the roads looked less and less like actual roads.  In the end it was simply a deeply rutted dirt track in a field.  When the buses reached the limit of what they could traverse, they stopped and let us out.  Before us were the potato fields.

Sasha’s plot of potatoes were with hundreds of others covering the hills.  Except for where some potato plots had already been dug, the fields were mostly still all green.  There had not yet been a frost and the potato plants had not yet turned brown.  The people were spreading out across the hills to their plots.  Ceseg and I followed Sasha to his.

Sasha’s plot was 6 potato rows wide and stretched up the hill beyond where we could see.  I hadn’t asked many questions about this thing I had volunteered for and thus did not really know what I had gotten myself into.  I did not know how many potatoes he had to dig or how many of them we were going to dig today (all of them). 

To dig potatoes, there are two critical things one needs: a flat fork to dig with and large sacks to put the potatoes in.  Sasha had neither.  He could not find a fork to borrow, so he borrowed a dull and previously misused spade.  He found some sacks to borrow, but they were in bad need of repair.  He had spent the previous night trying to sew the holes shut in them.  We started digging with the only previously misused spade we had.

How we worked with just one spade was this - while one dug up the potato hills, the other two, on their knees, dug through the dirt with their hands to find the potatoes.  Each potato, no matter how small, was precious.  It was food.  It was life.  Hitting and cutting an unseen potato with the spade was like a knife to the stomach.  It would mean the potato would spoil.  It was one less potato.  It was one less meal.  It was life shortened. 

Sasha and I took turns digging with the spade.  We worked back and forth across the 6 rows and gradually up the hill.  We would collect the potatoes first in buckets and then, when full, would dump them into the large sacks.  It was a system most of the others around us were also using.

As I dug with my hands through the dirt for the potatoes on this wind-blown hill, 3000 miles from Moscow, in Siberia, I thought of what I had been doing just a few days earlier.  I had been designing exclusive homes and executive offices for clients in various locations across America.  Today, I was on my hands and knees digging potatoes in Siberia.  I thought, “What a life!”  There is nothing I would rather be doing with my life.  To be able to both design projects and dig potatoes on opposite sides of the earth in the course of just a few days is awesome. 

Why, when not designing, would I want to sit on a beach working on my tan when I could be digging life-giving potatoes with friends in Siberia?   

We worked very steadily.  We needed to get all the potatoes dug, bagged, and loaded on the trucks before the end of the day.  The work was back-breaking. 

At times we would stand up to stretch and straighten our backs.  It was amazing looking out across the landscape.  One could see for miles.  It was beautiful.

The landscape was of hills covered by various crops with stands of birch trees mixed in.  The various crops were of various harvest colors.  Some fields were green, some were golden, and some were earth colored, as they had already been plowed for spring.  Amongst these rich colored fields were the white barked birch trees.  Many of the birch trees were in their autumn splendor of yellows and golds.

The sky was filled with white puffy clouds moving swiftly across the blue sky.  As their shadows moved across the landscape, the colors of the landscape were in constant change.  Where the sun shown, the colors were vibrant.  In the cloud shadows the colors became muted.  It was glorious.

The hills we were on were covered with people, all digging their potatoes.  As the day went on, the color of the hills gradually turned from the green of the potato plants to the brown of the freshly dug earth.  With the hundreds of plots being dug at once, the pattern the plots made on the hills were ever changing.  As the potatoes were dug, hundreds of bags of potatoes began to appear spread out across the potato plots.

We continued digging our way up the hill, only stopping briefly for some lunch and warm tea (thermos).  The wind was cold.  It was one of those cold winds where you find your nose running even though you don’t have a cold. 

At last we finished.  I stood up and thought of how bad I was probably going to ache tomorrow based on how much I was already aching today.  But, it really didn’t matter.  We had dug all the potatoes.  They were all bagged. 

Sasha got one of the large flat bed trucks to come over to our plot and we loaded the sacks onto the truck.  Some of the sacks required two of us to lift them onto the truck bed.  Sasha made arrangements with the driver where to bring his potatoes, and when he should meet him there.

With the potatoes dug, bagged, and loaded, Sasha started doing some figuring.  He was very excited with the amount of potatoes he got from his plot.  He figured how much money he had “made” by not having to buy potatoes. 

But most exciting to him, as he calculated the potato harvest, was when he realized he had enough potatoes to feed his family for the entire coming year.