Chapter 11 No One Said It Would Be Easy (1/2)

The next day I woke up at 5.30 am. Because I had nothing to eat I could only go out and complete my tasks. When I arrived at the well, I noticed couple of buckets laying around. I then looked at the map and decided the route I will take.

When I filled the first bucket with the water from the well, I noticed that it had holes and the water was coming through them like in a sieve. I poured the water from that bucket to another one. It happened again, then again… until I was left with only one bucket.

'These motherfuckers!'

I thought. They obviously did this on purpose, with two buckets I would only need to make 50 rounds from the well to the households but with one bucket that was 100 rounds! I understood that they wanted me to work but this is just plain wrong. I vowed to myself that they will pay for it one day.

It took me around 30 minutes to do just 10 households. That means I would need about 1.5 hour to complete this task. I still had an hour but the thing was I still needed to make it to the woodcutter's lodge at 7am therefore about 5 to 10 minutes was taken away just for travel. I was angry but still completed the task. Although walking with one bucket instead of two was easier and less heavy but covering the households a bit further from the well was more time consuming and also I had to walk more.

At 6.50am I finally finished with the water carrying task and went off to the woodcutter's lodge. I timed myself and it took me about 5 minutes to get there at normal speed, so I had 5 minutes of so called free time. I sat down outside the lodge and waited.

At 7am a middle aged man came out of the lodge and so I got up. He said ”Follow me” and moved behind the lodge. He then pointed at an old and tattered axe and said ”Go to work, next time when you come here just start doing your job” and he left.

I was left with mountain of logs and an old, rubbish axe. Of course they wouldn't give me anything sharp, it wasn't because they were afraid I would attack someone. No, it was to make it more difficult for me, to make me more tired.

I started splitting the logs into halves, then splitting the halves again to obtain quarters. After about 10 minutes I started to sweat. 'This axe is shit!' I thought to myself. I had to use more strength just to split the stupid logs and I had no such thing as strength because of lack of food.

I slowed down with the work but still after half an hour I was too tired to continue. I decided I would rest a bit. I placed the axe back on the stump used as a cutting table and shook my hands around to relieve some pain.

Not even 2 minutes later I could hear a voice shouting ”BACK TO WORK!” and so I picked up the axe again and started to split the logs but with much lower speed now. Even though I was tired, I persisted until about 8.30 am and had to rest again. This time the voice screaming ”GET BACK TO WORK!” only after 5 minutes. I wondered 'why was that longer than the previous time'.