Word: peasant
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There's more to France, however. There is, for instance, the vastly different world of the peasant, as I found out while living and working last summer on a small farm in southeast France. Life was very different there, and I learned a lot from the family I stayed with--Henri and Charlotte Vallet and their 23-year-old son Gilles...
...peasants in Moras En Valloire have little to look forward to but more work. The only respite from the toil comes with death--all the peasant's life he is little more than a tool, bobbing up and down the rows, pulling the weeds or picking the fruit. For me it was an adventure. albeit not always a very exciting one. For them it is the only life they have ever known--and the only life they will ever know...
...sense, the peasant ethic of the villagers is an anachronism, a relic of the past which is out of step with the 20th century. Many of the villagers are reasonably well off, but they are so used to working that they can never take the time to enjoy their profits. The Vallets have a large bank account, but they are always too busy working to spend the money. The work ethic is so deeply ingrained within them that they simply can't bear to be idle, to work less than their full capacity...
...young who are most responsible for the changes in Moras En Valloire. They retain the peasant work ethic, for that is too deeply rooted in their psyches to discard; but generally they tend to be impatient with tradition. Instead, they prefer the future with its glittering promise of a new and better life ahead...
Most of the summer was not nearly that interesting, however. Most of my time was spent picking fruit to the ever-so-slow ticking of my watch. The peasant lifestyle was very different from anything found in America, and especially different from life at Harvard. Intellectualism was worthless in Moras En Valloire--nothing counted except how quickly a person could pick the peaches. It was a hard life, one in which a person spent most of his waking hours working, with few diversions and only the simplest of pleasures...