The good news is that we have finally completed our 88 days of regional work! Woho! I’m so happy to have done it all and to have earned another year in Australia. It was defiantly the right decision to do it in the beginning of our first year visa, because we don’t need to worry about it anymore. We can go on with our life here without even worrying about taking time of work/life to complete in the future or stressing about whether or not we’ll be able to find regional work in time etc.

The bad news is that we still have another 4 weeks left here and I’m constantly visualizing us packing up our bags and leaving. It’s been a good experience, but the last few weeks have made us all really fed up with the situation. We have been working 8-10 hours a day for the past few weeks. The work is extremely repetitive, sweaty (30+ degrees with a high humidity) and are slowly breaking our backs since we need to bend down to reach the water pipe that are running along the trees. We even need to crawl under some of the branches to reach and we have 10.000 trees, which means that we need to bend down 20.000 times to get the job down. I’m so glad that me and Vince is going to Bali after this, where we’ll have daily massages until our bodies are back to normal!

The work is manageable though, but it’s really not worth the money that we’re getting. We were originally going to get paid for all of our worked hours at $21/h, which is something we counted on and is also partly why we decided to go to Bali for December. We have already completed our 88 days, so there’s no need to work simply to gain it. They changed their mind a few weeks later and proposed that would only get paid for 4 hours a day (the other 4 hours would be volunteering for food and rent as before). Me and Vince had to accept it since we need to stay on the farm until we’re leaving for Bali. It will be even more expensive for us to leave since we’ll then need to pay rent etc somewhere else. We cant really afford to leave and we need all the money that we can get at the moment. The 50% pay cut completely messed up our budget, so we don’t have a choice and feel trapped here. We’re basically working for $10/h and the rent (which would be next to nothing since it’s located in the middle of nowhere). I think the minimum wage is around $16, so we’re getting a really crappy deal.

It’s a such of shame, because it’s been a very nice experience and the money issue is ruining it a little bit.