I Gave You A Gift Chpt 1: Observations by the Child of Migrant Worker

I Gave you a Gift
Chapter 1:
The Gift for the Child of a Migrant Worker

When I was a child, my father worked as a migrant or itinerant worker. Not always on farms, although he did work on many. He also worked in factories, poultry packing plants, garages, doing landscaping, decorating store window fronts, and many other odd jobs. He worked wherever he could find work, and often when the job ended, if the next job was not local, we moved. It was not until I was in grade 11, that I actually spent the school year in the same school. Some years we moved as often as every six weeks, and I attended as many as 8 schools in the academic year.

This taught me two valuable lessons.

The first is that work is work. We all need to work, and every kind of job we do is just as meaningful as the next guy's job. Take pride in what you do. Do your job with all your effort. Slacking off on the job is not acceptable. Just because you are doing a lower class job in some people's estimation does not mean you have to put in less effort than if you are doing the most important job on the planet, for every job is important.

The second thing I learned from all this moving around, is that change is inevitable, and okay. Change can even be a good thing. You just have to sometimes look around for awhile until you find the good part. But it is there, somewhere. I have always had an easy time adapting to change throughout my life, and I think this is because of the way I was forced as a child to accept the constantly changing environments I found myself in.