Firestone Rubber Plantation

Yesterday I went to the Rubber Plantation that is owned by Firestone. You may have firestone tyres? We went driving through the massive platation which is esentially a huge community. It has a school, clinic, the rubber factory and all teh rubber stations. The workers are required to tap 1000s of rubber trees. they use a sharp instrument to score the tree and then around each tree a small collecting pot like the size of a small plant pot is strung around the tree. As the sap drips it is channelled into the pots. We were talking to some of the guys that work there. They work 7 days a week and very long hours. It is hugely heavy work. It takes 4 hours for a tree to fill one cup, then this is all added together in a bucket of about 8 gallons. In the one station we stopped at, the guys are expected to collect 68 gallons per day of the rubber sap. That is a phenomenol amount! Plus once they have collected the small pots of rubber, they have to fill their buckets then carry them (walking), some of them for 45 minutes from their tree area to the main station, using a bamboo yoke. Several of the workers were coming back to their station as we arrived and they looked exhausted.
the workers get paid £1.50 a day and work 7 days a week. It was pretty enlightening to say the least. I never knew what a process was gone through to get rubber! It seems pretty strange to think how much this company is making when their workers are getting paid so little.
The forest itself was beautiful, really tranquil and so peaceful. I forget how noisy it is here in Monrovia, there is never any let up with noise!