Picking Green Tea

BY GEORGE ORICK

Green tea. Everybody says we with prostate cancer should drink green tea. Hard to find in France, hard to miss here in Indonesia.
     A few years ago in Southeast Asia there was a TV commercial for a car -- The Car That Never Fails -- Toyota, I think. A young couple in love stand by their car, she in a very wide-brimmed straw hat and billowing dress, he in slacks and a bright shirt. They wave at tea pickers in a field on a slope, women in chic versions of a very wide-brimmed hat of a type common here, serving as both umbrella and parasol, brims about a yard across. The tea pickers wave back, and we see their faces -- young, beautiful. They're there, these pretty women, among the tea plants, in gaily colored light blouses, happy.
      The commercial ran for a couple of years on Singapore television, but was taken off the air after a week or two here in Indonesia. Why? Indonesians know about tea and how it's picked. Nobody smiles.
      On the road from Jakarta to Bandung, dangerous road with huge busses overtaking huge busses and cars swerving off onto the extra-wide shoulders, there are mountain passes winding among volcanoes and ridges. It is said that most Indonesians live and die within sight of a volcano. There are 147 active volcanoes in this country.
      The first mountain pass beyond Jakarta is really just a mild depression between two mountains at a place called Puncak (pronounced Poon-chock), means 'summit' in Indonesian. Right there, at the summit, there's a huge Chinese restaurant, with big windows looking down the slope into the valleys beyond. That's where my green tea comes from, those slopes. I can sit there looking through those windows at the tea pickers in their wide hats working their way through the rows of tea plants, romantic, exotic scene.
      On the way up the mountain, or on the way back down, you see them up close, the tea pickers, drinking tepid Coke at little wooden stands at the edge of the tea field, just off the road. And you see the tea plants.
     The women are sitting, exhausted. No young beautiful faces, no gaily colored light blouses, no smiles. These women are wearing heavy canvas pants tucked into tough knee-length construction boots, heavy canvas vests over thick sweatshirts, and beside them are heavy work gloves. Their hands are gnarled and swollen, criss-crossed with slashes and scars. They work in pain.
      The tea plants are tough obdurate bushes, about waist-high, planted in rows so close together there's no open space, and the women have to force their way through them, picking tea leaves (which may for all I know be tender) and putting them over their shoulders into big long baskets harnessed to their backs. Without the canvas clothing and the boots and the gloves, the women would have to be hospitalized with multiple slashes and scrapes after one pass through one row of bushes. No light lovely blouses, no long slender Asian hands waving designer tea-picker hats, no laughter -- just grim hard work in heavy clothing in the heat day after day.
     Now, don't boycott green tea, you American PCa families. Appreciate it, use it in health, for those women of Puncak are part of your support chain.

©1998 by George Orick. All rights reserved.

George Orick, a journalist and filmaker, served in World War II as a radio operator in the Marines. He was posted to the Pacific island of Tore Shima. In 1986 he retired from ABC Network News in New York. He and his wife, Emily, moved to the South of France. Emily died three years ago.
Now, a writer with prostate cancer, George is going to marry again."What kind of woman." he asks, "would be crazy enough to marry such a man? Her name is Gigi. She's a Filipino. Gigi is 42. She lives in Indonesia, where she works as a specialist in small-business development." With Indonesia on the brink of crisis, George is preparing to join Gigi there.

George and Gigi married in Jakarta and lived happily there together. George died of prostate cancer in 2002.