The majority of our work this month has been at an organic farm about 30 minutes outside of Kuala Lumpur. We have gotten to work with people from Bangladesh who commit about 5 years of their lives working 12 hours a day/ 7 days a week just to send money back to their families becasue the pay is better in Malaysia than home. I have always thought that it is a right to be with your family, but with meeting a lot of workers around the world I’m starting to learn it’s not a right but a privilege, one that we definitely take for granted. As a result I have made a couple new friends and now know how to speak more Bangla than Malay, which pretty much means I know about 5 Bangla words compared to 3 Malay words… hey I’m trying! These men are awesome and amazingly patient with their new Western workers.
that you would expect such as planting crops, tilling the land, or shucking corn, we have been clearing land into brush piles and making fence post. Now, usually when you need fence posts you just call up your nearest fence maker, or run to Lowes’s. But let’s see how we do it in a culture where the words instant and gratification aren’t the most popular, especially when it comes to manual labor.
8 Easy Steps on How to Make your own Fence Posts
1. Find a good bamboo forest.
3. Begin deforestation. Tools necessary…machete, hack saw,
and a lot of mosquito repellent.4. Always look up and dodge. After it falls dangerously close in front of you begin to chop of the branches with the machete until you have a nice smooth piece
of bamboo (usually more efficient with a bangla worker).5. Saw the shoots into posts, with the hack saw, that are the length of 5 elbow to finger tips. (as you can see this is also more efficient when getting help from a Bangla worker)
(Easy)
6. Be on a team with girls who somehow take joy in the
amazingly monotonous work of piling bamboo posts all day.
7. Pose for the classic picture that shows the group beside how much work you have done for the day. I was pretty excited when I saw this, but less excited when I realized it wasn’t even half of the post we needed to finish the job.
mixture of both. 
