Take Amazing Risks

After Ankara he’d accepted a new adventure in Bursa. This shocked everyone in the capital lower case. They assumed he’d stay with them forever. Students and teachers celebrated his transition with a sparkling cake. Women cried sadness and joy.

“We are not here for a long time, we are here for a good time,” said Sappho the poetess.

One adult student who’d articulated her desire to move to Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire seeking an educational engineering job in a quality control factory school producing obedient robotic idiot children and live with her boyfriend cowered behind her futile quest for independence from over-protective parents. “My father won’t let me.”

“Take control of your life. Get a grip. Let go. Jump. Discover courage and your wings on the way down.”

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“To do amazing things you have to take amazing risks and suffer greatly,” said Zeynep, his five-year old genius friend in Bursa, Turkey.

 “Here,” she said, “many a-dolts stay with their mothers forever and a day because they are afraid of freedom and accepting responsibility for their lives.

“They eat fear morning noon and night. They are afraid to speak their honest feelings, to express their innate desire for independence.

“They are willing victims of traditional conservative attitudes and values. Free will is a foreign language. They are scared of taking risks, letting go and growing. I may grow old but I’ll never grow up. If I grow up I die.”

“I feel the same way.”

One day while sharing lunch and drawing in notebooks, he said, “When I was 9 I was going on 50. Now I am 50 going on 9. I exist outside adult time.”

“We are passing through,” she said, lighting a candle in darkness.

Weaving A Life (V4)

The Language Company

Northern Laos

Mekong Blue

Mekong Blue, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center is in Northeast Cambodia.

Fifty women are trained in a six-month silk weaving course. They plant mulberry, harvest, dye and weave silk textiles. It is a UNESCO award winner known for superior quality, creativity and originality. 

Mulberry leaves everything behind. Worms eat the leaves. Their saliva makes yellow cocoons. Saliva becomes a protein and stronger than steel. They boil silkworm cocoons to extract raw yellow silk. One thread is 300 meters long.

It is separated into soft and fine threads. Women dye the threads using natural materials: banana (yellow), bougainvillea (yellow), almond leaves (black), lac insect nests (red and purple), prohut wood (yellow and green), lychee wood (black and gray), indigo (blue), and coconut (brown and pink).

Women also weave Ikat, a technique creating patterns on silk threads prior to dyeing and weaving. It is called HOL with 200 motifs.

The center improves the women’s quality of life. It breaks the cycle of poverty through vocational training and educational programs.

They have a primary school with thirty-five kids and two teachers. Everyone receives lunch. It is the single biggest employer in town after the government.

Mekong Blue