The 45-Day School Break

“Rice” is one of the most common words I speak every day. Whenever two people meet, the proper greeting is to ask each other if they’ve eaten rice yet. “Tapaailaai bhat khanubhyo?”

The richest families in the village own rice paddies and the other families work in them. We have a 45-day rice planting break during monsoon season (June and July) and during harvest (in October) many of my students are absent from school. I’ll take you through step-by-step what this four-month rice-growing process is like.

First, the rice fields are plowed to prepare for the season. Usually this is done with yaks or water buffalo. It’s a little bit difficult because the rice fields are built on hills, so they are quite narrow. Then, the fields are flooded. The initial seeds are planted close together in only a few small fields while the other fields are plowed and flooded.

Growing rice

After the rice has had a chance to grow to about 8 inches, they are taken out and replanted among many fields. Each one is about six inches away from the next. This takes the most time. The schools have a 45-day rice planting break during this time so families can devote all of the time to farm work. One of the most interesting things is that only women plant seeds and only men plow the fields. It just isn’t done that men plant seeds. I don’t know why- they participate in all the other areas of growing rice, but they won’t plant seeds or replant the plants.

A lot of rice

They grow during the monsoon season, when there is plenty of water (even in my water-scarce village). At this point, they only require routine weeding.

After several months, when they’ve turned from bright green to a more sickly yellow, it’s time to harvest. Men, women, and children descend with sickles in hand to harvest the rice. By this point, it has grown several stalks, so each stalk of rice is about the size of my fist. During this time, attendance at school is very low because everyone’s help is required during harvest time.

And after that, there is an abundance of rice. Each small section of field (approximately 7ft by 20ft) produce around 20kg of rice.

My favorite parts? At the end of every day of work, everyone sits together and eats snacks and no one’s ever too busy to have some fun!