Have you ever looked deeply at marble? I love marble. I see the greatness of God’s creation in it. How can a stone of this beauty and detail—the tiny lines drawn inside it in an arranged way, the consistency of colors as if it were a painting of a great artist—be so natural? I’m not talking about the slab on your kitchen countertop. I’m talking about stones coming directly from the earth’s crust.

When I was eight years old, my father took me to his work. He still works in the family office at our marble and granite factory. It’s an Italian-Egyptian export-import company for marble and granite. I loved to go with him. I liked to see the huge marble stones which looked even bigger than they really were to a small child like me. I was going just for fun then, but when I got to my first year of high school, I told my father that I wanted to start working in the marble factory. Only, I wanted to work as a worker in the factory, not in the office, which was harder. It would be my first job. My father said yes, as long as it was only during the summer vacation, and after that, I would focus only on school.

I started working six days a week, from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. I hated waking up early. It was the only problem I had with work at that time. 

The marble came in the form of big stones. First, we cut it into slabs on big cutting machines. The slabs’ thickness depended on the customers’ orders. After that, we treated the slabs with epoxy to repair the defects. Then, we took the slabs to the polisher machine, which was the first machine I started working on. It gives the finish on the slabs. The finish also depended on the customers’ orders. 

The polishing machine gave a lot of different finishes. One type of finish was called bush hammer. It made the marble texture rough and not shiny. Another finish was the full shiny, which made the marble texture very soft and as shiny as a mirror. There were a lot of other finishes. Some were from this machine, and other finishes were from others.

After we finished the slabs, some orders would say that they needed the order in the form of squares, so we cut the big slabs on a machine called the Frieza. This was the second machine I worked on, and it cut the slabs to individual measures depending on the order. 

However,  because I was the son of one of the owners, I wasn’t only going to learn on one machine or one section. My uncle, who was the other owner, gave me the freedom to work everywhere and learn everything. After I finished learning on one machine, I would move to another. 

I was a hard worker. I wanted to improve myself and my skills. After one month of working on different machines, I started working on packing the orders. After two weeks there, I moved on to taking care of final order details and shipping.

I kept moving, but the thing I was most interested in learning was how to make the samples of marble that we showed to customers as a form of marketing and promotion for our marble product. 

The piece of marble from which we took the sample had to be carefully chosen. We cut these pieces on manual machines in order to be accurate enough, so that the sample was small in the end and the customer could identify the whole slab from one small piece. The sample also had to be a wonderful model to attract the attention and admiration of the customer. The people in marketing always asked me to do the samples for their customers, while the people who worked in the shipping section in the office asked me about the orders and the final details. 

During the three months of summer vacation, I was one of the best workers and connected the office and the factory. Everyone was surprised by my work because of my young age. Everyone had thought that I was a spoiled child who came to spend his time only for fun, but I worked hard because I loved to explore. The more I worked with marble, the more I loved it.

By the end of the summer months, I was sad to go back to school, but my uncle was impressed by my work. He asked my father if I could keep working in the company while still finishing school at the same time. My father and I had made a deal, though, so I said no and went back to studying.

That summer was one of the most interesting summers I’ve had in my life. I learned how to be responsible for something and how to be a person that people can rely on. I learned the value of labor and how much work goes into something that, in the end, is so luxurious. I learned the value of things and why some things are more expensive than others. I learned the value of people and what a team can make when working together. Most importantly, I learned through work, and understood that working on the things you love makes you do your best. Even if the work is hard and you suffer, you love to do it. Like I said, I love marble.