Knee deep in planting season

The growing season

I arrived in Timor-Leste to start my Peace Corps service in December 2024. It was the perfect time to see an entire village mobilize to grow rice, their staple food, which they tend to throughout the 6-month wet season.

Landlocked in the center of Timor-Leste, the village has been bustling in the months since December with one common objective: planting rice. Just an hour from the capital city of Dili, this serene village is nestled in temperate mountains adjoining a lagoon. Rice paddies checker the landscape and almost every family in this village of 600+ households owns a piece of the checkerboard.

Planting rice

The labor-intensive rice planting process begins with sprinkling rice seeds into select rice paddies (small, flooded fields) to germinate, starting in November or December, depending on whether the taller or shorter variety is being grown (my family uses the shorter). Meanwhile, the men go out most mornings and use hoes to slash and build up the mud banks on the sides of the empty, overgrown paddies; this helps contain the water and makes it easier to walk around. A handful of hand-pushed tractor-like machines are shared among the families to till the mud and make it soft for planting. This process alone takes several weeks.

Dividing the plants

By February, the rice seedlings are the perfect height to be gathered into bunches and placed along the banks or in the prepared paddies to avoid drying out before planting.

Up to this point, I had been observing, but when it came time for my host brother's six rice paddies to be planted, I couldn't stay on the sidelines. The first day, I followed my host mother (and dog) along the slippery, narrow banks to bring lunch to the family members (ages 8 and up), who had been recruited to help plant. I soon found myself barefoot and knee-deep in mud, bent over at the waist in a line of people rapidly detaching 2-3 stalks of rice seedlings from a bunch and pushing these smaller clusters into the soft, watery mud a few inches apart. We continued like this until the bunch was divided before repeating the process until the entire paddy was dotted with little grass-like tufts. Despite having a group of experienced planters whose hands moved as fast as I could blink, the heavy rains slowed our work so that we completed work in only three paddies.

Hard work, but fun

Two days later, two of my host brothers were setting out to finish the job, and I decided to tag along, figuring that any extra hands-even ones as inexperienced as mine-could help. We started around 10 a.m., taking breaks only when the wind and rain had us crouching behind two muddy umbrellas, running to a nearby house for shelter, or enjoying a light lunch at a nearby café.

By the time we completed work and returned to our house six hours later, we were exhausted. People couldn't stop laughing at one brother and me, who looked like mud monsters (I even had a mud beard and mustache painted on my face). My other brother had somehow managed to avoid our antics and was relatively clean. I was promptly told, "Brother, you need to shower," to which I replied that it was time to reap the benefits of my full-body mud mask. Although my skin was indeed very soft, my muscles were not, and subsequent walks to work that week took noticeably longer than usual. However, recounting the experience provided a great opportunity to laugh with my coworkers.

The best part: eating

Growing up my family ate a lot of rice, and I often heard the phrase, "Don't waste even a single grain of rice." My understanding of these words was greatly deepened by this experience. Now, I carefully scrape every single grain of our naturally sweet yet nutty purplish rice from my plate. Every day when I walk along the lagoon to work, I pause to admire the rice paddies as they become increasingly green and look forward to watching them slowly turn golden as we head towards harvest time-and then my favorite part: eating rice.