More Workers

Most of the landscaping and grounds keeping in Suzhou is done by hand.  Most of it is done by elderly women.  I don't know where these ladies come from; whether they are migrant workers or whether they are poor widows from the Suzhou area.  But there are a lot of them.  You see them in teams of 5 or 6, sitting on their knees, pulling weeds in the parks.  All day they work, slowly moving across the lawn like sheep grazing.  They wear hats of woven bamboo to shield them from the sun.  If it is raining, they wrap the hat in a black garbage bag and keep on working. 

The photo above was taken at our new factory on the East side of town.  It shows some of the landscaping women on their lunch break, sitting in the shade of the bicycle parking shelter.  They are making rope. 

This team of women had spent the entire morning laying sod for the new lawn.  The sod came rolled-up and tied by strips of thin plastic.  The strips were about three foot long.  The ladies collected all the strips and you can see them here twisting them to make a continuous length of rope.  You can see that the lady in the foreground is using her right hip to pin down the plastic strips as she twists them.  If you look closely, you can see a length of tightly woven rope emerging from her backside.

I've never seen anyone make rope by hand before.  I figured that was a skill that disappeared sometime in the last century.