91 of 4,000

I cranked out 4,000 words today on the Bangladesh chapter. Here’s 91 of them…

Three men wearing pink frocks are examining my “Jingle These” underwear. I mean really examining them. They pull them, stretch them, rub the fabric between their fingers, examine seams, hold them up to the light, pretty much everything but smelling them.

I packed light for this trip and the boxers still hold a place in my underwear rotation. As I watch the examination take place, I try and think of when I wore them last and if I had washed them since. I never expected them to come under such scrutiny.

Helping doesn’t always help

I never got around to posting about the other two parts of the Dateline piece, I will eventually. Until then, I wrote about it today while working on my Bangladesh chapter.

—
In 1993, Dateline NBC aired footage from inside a garment factory in Bangladesh, featuring a Wal-Mart production line where kids as young as seven were operating machines and trimming garments.

Wal-Mart argued that the people of Bangladesh are extremely malnourished and that people that appear to be seven-year-old kids are actually adult Bangladeshis whose growth has been stunted.

Obviously this ridiculous spin of the situation in Bangladesh did nothing to falsify the accusations. “Made in Bangladesh” became synonymous with “Made by Children.”

The American consumer, out of concern for the child laborers of Bangladesh, took action the only way they knew how – they boycotted clothing made in Bangladesh. The children didn’t want our help. In fact, they along with Bangladeshi children’s rights NGOs, and other garment workers, protested the American boycott. The children didn’t want to lose their jobs. They had to help support their families.

In 1994, The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), under pressure of the boycott and the damaged image of the “Made in Bangladesh” label, required the factories under their power to fire all children under the age of 14 without compensation. The local NGOs and labor unions protested this decision as out-of-work children flooded the streets of Dhaka.

Responding to the crisis, the US and Bangladeshi governments along with international organizations such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF), funded schools for the displaced child workers to attend until they were of working age.

And thus ended the widespread use of child labor in Bangladesh. Now you can buy clothes made in Bangladesh and know that they may have been stitched together by uneducated 15-year-old kids but at least they (probably) weren’t stitched together by uneducated 14-year-old kids.

A great weekend to be a writer

Writers’ conferences are depressing and they are uplifting.

The truth is always thrown in your face: how the slush piles are leaning towers of crappy writing; how slim the chances of you being published actually are. But for me this conference was mostly uplifting for a couple of reasons.

1) Every conference I’ve attended I leave feeling blessed to write nonfiction. There are a lot of places for me to publish my work and buildup the ever important “platform.” But the poor fiction writers carrying around their 858-page space/time travel romance fantasy novel they describe as “like Harry Potter, but with more sex and no wizards, and…you know…in space,” you’d have to be heartless not to feel their pain. There are very few magazines that publish fiction and they have to write their entire book before someone will look at it to buy. All I have to do is write a sample chapter and a book proposal.

2) They like my idea! An agent sat next to me at lunch as I was telling a little about my WAIW? quest. He was excited about the idea and gave me his card. While asking another agent questions about how the author-agent relationship develops (since this appears to be my next step) she got excited about my idea and gave me her card. That’s two agents who I wasn’t even trying to win over asking me to send them my proposal. Exciting stuff indeed.

Believe it or not this wasn’t even the highlight of my weekend.

Yesterday a childhood friend got married and I got to see a lot of my other childhood friends that I haven’t seen in a long time. Two of them, separately stopped me at the wedding reception and asked why I hadn’t had anything in the hometown paper in awhile. They enjoy my Travelin’ Light column and miss reading them.

Writing is all about the big payoff and it doesn’t always come from agents or publishers. It comes from regular people after a day in the field, or trucking, or building a barn, or whatever, taking a few minutes to read your story and enjoying it.

Thanks Jeff and Travis.

Today’s writing Zen:

When you are looking for an agent they are nowhere to be found. When you’re not, there they are.

Agents show more interest in your project when other agents have shown interest in your project.

The writing that pays the best is what you contribute for free.

The Midwest Writers’ Conference Day 1

One thing not so great about writers’ conferences is that they make you do silly exercises. Like this one I did in the workshop of Crescent Dragonwagon (yep, that’s her name. I took this session on “how to writer with the emergency brake off mostly because I wanted to meet the person behind the name. If you were wondering, she has red hair and wears a lot of black.)

The goal is to write your name vertically down the side of the page and then writing a few paragraphs using the letters of your name. The only rule is that you should try to have more than one word associated with each letter and it should be words that just pop in your head so you should do it fast.

K ick down to the depths of
E lephant fish and
L isten to the songs of the
S ea
E cho beyond the
Y ellows.

W ill
I return to the
L and of earthly
T reasures?

T oo many mammals
I mmerse themselves in
M an’s misfortune.
M ight we step aside and sink to
E nlightenment?
R ock bottom
M ight not appear –
N owhere.

Isn’t that just a little ridiculous? What this tells me is that I may be a deep diver, but like “many mammals immerse(ed) in man’s misfortune” I should avoid deep thinking whenever possible.

More on the rest of the conference later.

A not so subtle suggestion from my writing assistant

It’s time to take a break and pet me.

In an Email from a Cambodian friend…

“No I did not eat any spiders as it is not the season and I don’t feel I want to eat I would prefer baby duck instead ”

Phalline loves her baby duck.

The USA Exports T-shirts?

In fact we do. But not brand new ones.

40% of the world’s used clothing exports originate in the USA. This is why if you’re in Romania, you could see a faded Deloit Dragons Little League shirt on which the letters have fallen off to reveal unfaded shadows of them, being worn by a wrinkled grandma.

This is also why in Africa the Buffalo Bills are one of the greatest NFL Dynasties of all-time.

Read Far away, Super Bowl’s Losers Will Be Champs

The Hash

The Hash House Harriers is a drinking club with a running problem.

One person is appointed “The Hare” and lays out a trail using flower or spray paint. The group attempts to navigate the Hare’s trail trying not to get distracted by various false trails and dead ends. When the trail ends the drinking begins.

I went on my first hash in Cambodia after reading about an opportunity to “run through the countryside surrounding Phnom Penh” in the newspaper. I went. It poured. It was awesome.

Imagine that you live out in the countryside and you are sitting on your porch waiting out a torrential down pour. And then a string of soaked foreigners splashes by in running shorts. Trust me. You’ve never seen anything like it. I can tell because I’m one of the runners and that look on your face says it all.

If we got lost, the locals would point the way. Local children would practice their English and when you responded, “HI!” they would giggle and hide behind their mothers. The Hash is a great way to see the countryside and meet the people that live there.

It’s also great to be around other people who have some shared common experience and language. For me the Hash was an opportunity to escape my quest for a few hours. I didn’t have to use hand gestures to talk. Most people try to treat foreigners with the utmost of respect. This gets old after a bit. It takes another foreigner to put you in your place, “You’re full of shit.”

At its worst the hash is junior high – filled with immature sexual innuendos and drinking beer from bedpans (Ok, maybe not exactly like junior high). The jokes and songs do get old, but in all, the hash is a kind of therapy for expat professionals and anyone else who wants to run 4-12 miles and act silly.

I went on two Hashes in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and two in Guangzhou, China.

Paul Berton, a British comedian, went on the Guangzhou Hash a few years ago while taping a television show about his travels. His show (watch it now) focused on all of the ugly parts of the hash – the local women trying to meet a sugar daddy foreigner; foreigners looking to becoming a sugar daddy of a local woman. While this is apparent and something I will definitely address when I write my chapter on Cambodia, the Hash is also about positive interactions between foreigners and locals. But that’s not very good television.

The Hash is also about running and sometimes a little post-run, post-sushi bowling…

“Lightning Bugs” in the CS Monitor

In my neck of the woods we call them Lightning Bugs. So you can tell the editors assigned their own title in my most recent contribution to the CS Monitor, Fireflies illuminate summer memories.

I like the title, but to me they’ll always be Lightning bugs. Lightning vs. Fire…which one sounds cooler? I thought you would agree with me.

And if you were wondering, I caught some lightning bugs since I’ve been home this summer. And let me tell you, it’s not easy catching them when you’ve got a dog following you snapping them out of the air.

On Rickshaws…

From today’s writing…

The Bangladeshi rickshaw is a bicycle-powered, poor-man’s chariot.

A rider perches themselves on the narrow seat that requires sitting with the most perfect of postures. The drivers, known as a wallahs, push at the pedals with their skinny legs and pull at the handles with their veined arms to get the creaking contraptions rolling. The chain runs from the bike to the wheels beneath the carriage. There are no gears. Faced with much of an incline, drivers dismount and pull their rickshaw. Lucky for them, Bangladesh is one of the flattest countries in the world.

It’s not uncommon to see families of five on one rickshaw – a Bangladeshi mini-van.

The drivers pedal in the offensive heat and humidity. They pedal through torrential down pours and the flooded streets that result.

Some of them peddle hash or women to tourists, but most of them don’t.

They show pride in their vehicles through the gold tassels and sparkling sequins they affix to the carriages’ canopy and in the paintings on the carriages’ backside.

The streets of Dhaka, the country’s capital, are drab and dusty. The rickshaws and their colorful artwork are a relief to the eye. Their tinkling bells that cut through the motorized chaos are a treat to the ear and, if viewing Dhaka from one of its taller buildings, the most prominent sound that drift to the rooftops.

The Dhaka police estimate that there are 600,000 rickshaws operating in the city.