„Everything is worth for Money”

We are in Borsod-Abaúj Zemplén County, in the Cserehát. The Cserehát serves as a bridge between the Bükk and the Zemplén Mountains. The Cserehát is traditionally a region with dozens of small villages. There aro no job oppurtunities so the rate of unemployment keeps rising. In the last four years it was around 17-20%. The locals often take on occasionaly jobs. One of these jobs is collecting walnuts. The video represents the process of the collecting, we meet the employer who usually collects the „life saving" treasure in Tomor and around. We hear about the gender division of labour and we can take a look at collecting and nut skinning. It turns out that the purchaser differenciates two different kinds of nut and pays for them differently. The families gather nuts from their own gardens but sometimes they collect it from the vineyard with the permission of the vine-grower. This is a great oppurtunity for the people because they can earn more money to buy wood for the winter. Mostly gypsies take on this chance, travelling from village to village. They create groups and they try to collect more nut this way. Unfortunately there are hardly any full-time jobs in the region so they try to earn a living with occasional works like this. The families earn a complementary wage and surely enough walnuts remain for the Christmas cake. VIDEO -Who is living in the nutshell? Not everyone can live there, only the old nutshell-man. If you strike on the nutshell, it opens and the old nutshell-man crawls out. -Men collect the walnuts, break it, then the women peel them. Later men take them to Szakácsi where the walnuts are taken. -I keep some of the walnuts for the family, I bake pastry from them. I peel it and I put it in the pantry. The rest I sell on the market, social welfare money is not enough for living.I beat on the walnut once or twice, if I beat on it too hard, I can't peel it. We go out to the vineyard after the harvest and we collect the remaining fruit and the walnut. Oh, I'll get a hear attack from this... I sell it in Inota, I don't know yet, how much will they give for it... -My name is Sándor Dobóczi Translated by Andrea Tallós