Today was our first day of experiencing the olive harvest in Croatia. We were ready to be picked up at 7:30 am, but our host’s father was experiencing heart pain and spent the morning being checked out at the emergency room.
He is fine.
Our host picked us up at 3:30 pm, shortly after three American missionaries arrived from Bosnia, and the youngest (a twentysomething missionary from Kentucky) traveled to the fields with us. We gathered up the sacks of dark purple and light green olives as well as olive wood and headed back to our hosts home before the sunset where the real work began: Transferring a ton, yes, 2000 pounds of olives from the cellar and upper floor into plastic sacks to be picked up and taken to the processor tomorrow.
The olives are stored in large magenta plastic containers–some as tall as four feet high. Our host’s mother, at 74-years old, put on her black rain boots, got inside one of these gargantuan containers and began emptying it scoop by scoop as our new young missionary friend carried the buckets of olives to the sacks. You go Croatian grandma!
Meanwhile, I worked with my non-English speaking friend Ana (who in her mid-fifties can more than hold her own!) emptying out three large containers of olives scoop by scoop by scoop as Leif made dozens of trips running the buckets up and down the stairs.
By the end of the evening we had all been baptized in the slightly fermented scent of olives. An unforgettable day indeed. We’ll be up at 7 am for olive picking before heading to the processor in the early afternoon.
I’ll never look at an olive the same way again!
*Photo courtesy of here
