In Qingshui River Village, the team leader and several village cadres treated Li Long like an honored guest.
At the team office, watermelon had been sliced and apples set out, along with a plate of wild strawberries procured from somewhere-something Li Long rarely saw anymore even on his trips into the mountains.
Li Long could tell that the apples had probably been picked from someone's tree at the last minute. One still had leaves attached and looked quite fresh. But local apples only grew sweet after a frost; they were rather sour at this time of year.
The wild strawberries were quite fresh. Even in the mountains, they were getting hard to find, so finding them here took some doing.
These days, getting any fruit other than watermelon wasn't easy. It showed that these team cadres had put some thought into it.
"Comrade Li Long, were you satisfied with those first thousand big brooms?"
"Yes, very satisfied." Li Long nodded. Honestly, he really was. Perhaps people here had never taken on such profitable work before. Apart from a very few who had tried to slip shoddy work past him, the vast majority had tied their brooms exactly to specification, with excellent quality. Their average standard actually surpassed that of the Fourth Team.
"You see, our villagers cut quite a lot of Achnatherum splendens and plenty of poles too. We've worked pretty well together. Comrade Li Long, do you think you could allocate us some more? Even another thousand-no, five hundred would do!"
The team leader had had enough of poverty. This village really had very few resources. It was far from the County Town, and the villagers were fairly conservative in their thinking. Not a single person in the whole village went to the County Seat to run a stall,