Noni work

The farm here deals with Noni growing and juice making. The owner owns every part of the production--from the tending of Noni plants to mailing off the packaged juice bottles. Pramod and I get to take part in all of it.

Noni plants grow on this island and they seem to flourish in volcanic rock. Though the climate here is similar to India, there are no Noni plants growing there. There are some other countries that grow Noni but not many.

The Noni juice is no apple or grape juice. It isn't consumed for its great, refreshing taste. It doesn't taste very good but it is medicinal. I have heard many rumors about the benefits of drinking Noni juice: 1.) some WWOOFers who used to work here drank lots of Noni juice daily and apparently it showed. 2.) People who drink it say that they feel really good afterwards (and they're pretty sure that it's not just the tiny bit of alcohol present in the juice due to fermentation--this is all boiled out before it is sold to the public). 3.) Someone told me that this juice is being given to cancer patients in China. 4.) A Hawaiian local has "died" 3 or 4 times from stab wounds or gun shots and his grandmother brought him back to life by giving him noni juice!

It is interesting stuff. It sells for like $30 a bottle on the main land. With all these benefits, it seems like they would outweigh the bad taste. We are in a perfect position to benefit from this juice for free. That is true; however, being a part of the mass production process brings me close enough to it to never want to drink the juice again.

I am considering making my own juice, however. It's easy. All you need is the fruit and a container to keep it in. It only needs to sit for a few weeks. We'll see how that experiment goes.

As for the mass production: we go out to one of the 4 farms owned by these people daily to pick up the bags of fruit that have been picked that day by someone living here. These bags, full of hard fruits, weigh like 60 lbs each. Pramod and I ride in the back of the truck while driving to each spot where the bags have been kept. When we bring the fruit back to the factory (I call it that as I consider our work to be factory work rather than farming), and load them into these huge, 500 gallon barrels. As the fruit sit in the barrel, the release the juice. We leave them in there for about 2 weeks. After letting them sit for a couple of weeks, the juice is drained out and we unload these much lighter but much stickier and messier bags into a compressor. There, the fruits are squeezed. The juice is filtered multiple times then pasteurized then bottled. Pramod and I have helped in capping and cleaning the bottles, putting labels on them, shrink-wrapping the lids, and boxing them. That is what our 3-4 hours of daily work will entail.