Now that the rains had started, it was plant­ing time. We each took a sharp­ened stick, stabbed it into the ground in the most eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble spots, tossed in a cou­ple of dried maize ker­nels, kicked the earth over with our feet, moved on. It seemed im­pos­si­ble to me that the earth would re­ward our pal­try ef­fort with some­thing ed­i­ble, but Mama Lina texted me a cou­ple of months later to re­port that she was cook­ing the maize I had planted. […]

Would we have had a bet­ter maize crop if we had been more me­thod­i­cal, cho­sen bet­ter seeds, spaced the plants more sys­tem­at­i­cally, dug and re­filled the holes more care­fully? Prob­a­bly. But if we could meet the fam­ily’s maize needs with just fif­teen min­utes of stab, toss, kick, stab, toss, kick, what would be the point of do­ing more?
 It’s not that Mama Lina has no as­pi­ra­tions. She her­self spent four years work­ing as a house­maid in Malaysia; her cousin put in eight years. They got up at 4 a.m., worked un­til 10 a.m., rested un­til 3, then cooked and served sup­per. Room and board were given free, so the salary of US$90 a month went straight into their pock­ets. It is six times what Mama Lina now earns as a part-time teacher. But nei­ther wants to go back. It’s a ques­tion of what life-coaches would call ‘work-life bal­ance’. ‘Here, there’s no salary, but there’s free food in the gar­den,’ said the cousin. ‘I can work when I feel like it, sleep when I don’t. It’s great.’
 Eliz­a­beth Pisani, In­done­sia, Etc.