A Hard Life

As you sit there reading this at your computer, eating a bagel and drinking champagne, feeling sorry for yourself since you have such a hard life, remember there are plenty of people in this world that are truly worse off than you. Spend a few minutes in the life of Dame Katerina Karamazov, an 80 year old peasant/farmer who single-handedly runs a 45 acre farm 30 miles south of the capital of Hungary.

Dame Katerina Karamazov is out in her barren fields pushing her human powered plow at 6 am when we caught up with her. She looks like she is 100 years old. She weighs about 88 lbs. She is plowing her turnip field. Turnips and potatoes are the only crop that will grow in this barren, magpie shit covered soil. Most of the crop harvested is infested with bugs of one sort or another.

Katerina Karamazov slaves 18 hours a day on her 45 acre shit covered farm and she does it alone. She has no husband and no children. Her barn that she lives in is nothing but a metal shack with a shit covered roof. No water, no plumbing, no electricity. She burns magpie shit for light and to cook her daily turnip and potato meal. She takes a shit and piss in a hole in the ground next to her dilapidated barn/house.

“I’ve had a good life. I’ve been blessed”, she tells us as she offers us a ceramic bowl of potato tea she made herself. “I understand things are better in America. They have transistor radios and tape recorders there. The young girls wear mini skirts and they have schools. But even so, it’s pretty good here in Hungary. I got food to eat and a place to shit. What more could you ask for?”

Dame Katerina Karamazov told us she actually ate meat on one occasion back about 1972. She found a dead magpie in her turnip field and cooked it up. “It was good. I cooked it in a ceramic bowl with potatoes and a turnip. It was the highlight of my life, so far”.

Karamazov knows nothing about the modern world. She has never even seen a car or a truck. She never heard of television, computers, the internet or miracle drugs. All she knows to do is work, and work hard, so she can put a meager amount of food to eat on a decrepit table.

So, while you are sitting there in the luxury of your penthouse suite, sucking up all the good things you have in life, complaining of how hard your life is, remember Dame Katerina Karamazov over in Hungary. She doesn’t know you or what your life is like. But you know her and what her life is like. Does that make any difference?

Writers Note: I actually met Karamazov on her farm in March of 1999. You can find the related story here. You may think she is “one of a kind” but the truth is there are thousands of Dame Katerina Karamazov’s throughout the world.

2/08

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