1st International Children's Conference

“We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time,” laughed Meaning, a twelve-year old survivor wearing a ragged Beware of Land Mines skull and crossbones t-shirt and prosthesis leg scampering a random life pattern across fields near a stilted bamboo home in Cambodia.

“Are you with us?” pleaded a landmine child survivor removing shrapnel with an old rusty saw after stepping in heavy invisible shit, “or are you against us?”

She’s been turned out and turned down faster than a housekeeper ironing imported Egyptian threaded 400-count linen. No lye.

The thermostat of her short sweet life seeks more wattage. She faces a severe energy shortage if she doesn’t find food.

She’s one of 26,000 men women and children maimed or killed every year by land mines from forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate 110 million land mines lie buried in 68 countries.

It costs $3.00 to bury a landmine.

It costs $300-$900 to remove a mine. It will cost $33 billion to remove them. It will take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000 mines. Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Laos are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40% of all land in Cambodia and 90% in Angola go unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians is an amputee.

Expanding her awareness of mankind’s genetic stupidity, Lucky showed Zeynep a Laos map illustrating Never-Never Land.

Lao Please Don’t Rush is the most heavily bombed country in history.

25% of villages in Laos are contaminated with UXO.

Upwards of 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate.         

80 million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

More than half of the UXO victims are children.

Meaning hears children crying as doctors struggle to remove metal from her skin. She cannot raise her hands to cover her ears. Perpetual crying penetrates her heart. Tears of blood soak her skin.

The technical mine that took her right leg away one fateful day as she played near village rice paddies expanded outward at 7,000 meters per second. Ball bearings shredded everything around her heart-mind.

It may have been an American made M16A1, shallow curved with a 60-degree fan shaped pattern. The lethal range was 328 feet. Or maybe it was a plastic Russian PMN-2 disguised as a toy.

She never saw it coming after stepping on the pressure plate. Fortunately or unfortunately she didn’t die of shock and blood loss. A stranger stopped the bleeding, checked her pulse and injected her with 200cc of morphine. Strangers in a strange land carried morphine.

*

Cut the heavy deep real shit, said a female Banlung shaman.

Fear is a tough sell unless it’s done well, well done, marinated, broiled, stir-fried, over easy, or scrambled.

Fear is blissful ignorance.

*

Meanwhile, the 1st International Beggar Conference convened in Toothpick, a wasteland near Bright Hope - a rusting rustic dream of exploratory ways and means with scientific cause and effect and logical rational certainty.

It was chaired by a distinguished group of Cambodian orphans.

NGO Fascists rented 12,000 orphans out to fake humanitarian organizations. Abandoned youth pleaded with ill-informed rich donors for marketing and branding money to feed international guilt and shame.

“Let’s eat,” said a fat banker moments before his yacht hit an iceberg in 2008.

“What you don’t see is fascinating,” said Zeynep, “like roots below the surface of appearances.”

“We have so much ice and they have so little,” said an Icelandic chess player attacking Death.

“Everyone comes to me. My patience is infinite,” said Death. “I make only one move and it’s always the correct one.”

Beggars, landmine victims, genocide survivors and sick and tired dehydrated dying starving neglected humans from 195 countries convened in sequestered committee rooms filled with suits, scholars, academics, UN personnel, CIA analysts, NGO profit motivated scam reps, IMF bankers and plastic ornamental steering mechanisms.

“We agree to disagree,” said Rich Suit.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Wage Slave.

Orphans, beggars and children spoke about:

slave labor, hunger,

exploitation, corruption,

human trafficking

and the terrorism of economic poverty.

 “Bad luck,” said a rich slave. “That’s a you problem, not a my problem.”

Children addressing global media held press conferences focusing jaundiced eyes on lenses, recorders and bleeding pens. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Sound bites sang starvation’s misery.

If it bleeds it leads.

Incoming! Bleeding hearts ran for cover.

Orphan motions for adjudication, arbitration, fairness, equality and equity were tabled for further deliberation and discussion nowadays.

The average monthly wage was $96 in a Bangladesh clothing factory.

Cambodian women making $190/month stitched garments for export companies.

Give someone a sewing machine and with a little luck they’ll feed their family.

Let’s Eat.

Hammam

The author was in Morocco on 9/11.

Twice a week he left #187 and walked through dusty stone rubble past discarded plastic trash and small broken trees to the Moroccan hammam. The Turkish style public bath cost seventy cents.

The left side was for women, men on the right. He paid the shy girl behind her veil, went in, stripped to underwear, crammed his clothes in a plastic bag, handed it to a smiling toothless Moor, and got two buckets made of old tires remembering the suq alley in the Medina where boys cut the rubber, hammered, made and sold these buckets.

He pushed open a heavy wooden door. Three medium vaulted arched white tiled rooms receded with increasing degrees of heat and steam. Men reclined on heated tiled floors, collected cold or hot water from faucets in buckets, soaping and scrubbing themselves down.

Passing unrecognizable human forms he entered heat’s mist dream, walked through two rooms and found a space near a wall. He filled one bucket with scalding hot water and another with temperate liquid. He stretched out on his back absorbing heat and closed his eyes.

Heat penetrated his skin. It was a respite from the outside world, the chaos of poverty, begging, humor and hospitality. No one could see him, no one knew him. Feeling peace he rolled onto his side as heat blasted skin, muscles and bones.

Inside steam and water music sweating men slapped themselves on the broiling floor. He watched an old wiry man dissolving kinks bend a customer’s arms and legs into pretzel formations. The skinny bald man energetically worked wrists, elbows, shoulder joints to the point of snapping them off skeletons. He rolled patrons over, pummeling spinal chords, slapping backs while bending knee joints leaving men spread eagle on wet tiled floors. Content faces welcomed his attention.

Satisfied with the meditation, Point sat up, soaped and scrubbed layers off skin with a rough hand cloth. He rinsed oceans across inlaid tiles, walked out, retrieved his bag of clothing, covered himself with an ikat sarong slipping out of wet underwear into dry clothing. He gave the attendant a small tip. The old man smiled, shook his head, rolling his eyes. It wasn’t enough. He dropped more coins into brown frozen fingers.

“Shukran. M’a salama.”

He stepped into cool night air. The dusty path was filled with scooters, boys playing on abandoned rusty cars, scavengers probing piles of trash and mothers dragging black gown hems on the ground. Bright yellow slippers slapping earth flashed light in silt. Wandering children sang happy innocent songs.

A one-eyed beggar stumbled past looking for alms. Point gave him one thin coin and skirted an alley through debris for thick black coffee at a local cafe. Entering, he passed men watching 24-hour global terrorism catastrophes at full volume from a television propped on steel supports hanging from a ceiling.

“Ah, Ahab,” said the waiter, a smiling young man in a purple vest balancing a silver tray of cups and water glasses.

“Coffee?”

“Yes please, no sugar,” gesturing outside where empty tables littered cracked pavement. Dejected desperate shoeshine boys tapped wooden boxes. Their dark unemployed eyes inspected shoes of chronically idle men drinking coffee and endless glasses of tea. A hopeful boy wandered in and out of tables tapping his shoe box. Strong mint tea aroma filled the air.

At the bar a waiter cut mint tea leaves, crammed them into a silver plated kettle, dumped in a brick of sugar, closed the lid, raised the pot and poured a steady stream of light brown tea into a small purple embossed glass. Opening the lid he dumped the tea back into the pot and placed it on a table with glasses, spoons and sugar cubes.

A subtle red color extended across a high adobe wall. The Atlas mountain range wore white snow.

Women in billowing rainbow fabrics walked across the desert from clustered stone villages to take a local bus into the shimmering Red City or sit on broken cement stones along the road talking with friends enjoying their social hour in eternity.

Dusk and twilight married to procreate many children. More field hands, more child labor in dead end trades making less than a $1.00 a day. Many would walk to northern Morocco and, if lucky with money, slip across the Mediterranean into Spain. Some angry marginalized naive kids would join T cells in Madrid, or Hamburg and disappear in Europe. A select few would attend flight training school in Florida. Others became wealthy drug runners wheeling and dealing hash heaven in Amsterdam.

Women sat gossiping on cracked pavement surrounded by trash. People discarded their lives as they went through it like caterpillars morphing into exotic species. Attempts to plant a single tree inside a small block of dirt surrounded by cement had proved futile.

People had stripped off the branches and leaves leaving a sharp broken piece of wood sticking out of the ground. People wandered aimlessly or sat in dust. Unemployed men on haunches stared at the ground. A fruit seller with cardboard boxes of green grapes under a single bulb on a rolling cart waved at lazy flies.

A man in his wheelchair poured bottled water over a handful of grapes. Grapes of wrath. Water disappeared into dust around his wheels of life. He ate one grape at a time watching laughing boys weave past on broken bikes as rusty chains grasped crooked sprockets.

A bearded man struggled along the street collecting discarded pieces of cardboard in his recycled life. Cardboard was utilitarian - a cheap sidewalk seat, a foundation in rolling carts to keep stuff from falling out the bottom, sun hats, beds and doormats in front of shops after infrequent rain.

Shredded telephone wires dangled from the wall of a telephone business office cubicle as men with mobile phones punched in numbers and lined up to make calls on the single working phone.

Disconnected grease covered boys manipulated mammoth truck tires along broken sidewalks to their shop. Tools spilled into public paths. The area was alive as people relying on their survival instincts scrambled to make a living.

Off the main road people set up evening flea markets. Two men unloaded piles of shoes from the back of a car along a sidewalk. Location, location, location. One seller spread a bright blue tarp on the ground anchoring it with bricks. His partner arranged cheap dress and casual shoes for potential buyers. No ‘adidas berber’ shoes for these guys.

They fired up a propane lamp. Neighborhood people escaping small flats after a day of oppressive heat prowled the street with friends looking for a bargain or just plain looking.

A Century is Nothing

Vice Versa

Young girl dances with positive energy behind her bland parents going to market.

Meditative dance. Quick clean clear. Free.

Themes: social consciousness / political / generations / social environment / economic conditions / poverty/ art

Great novels are above all great fairy tales. - Nabokov

Mandalay, Burma

*

Memory being present tense.

Literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

Life is the least realistic of all fictions.

The passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist ... or vice versa.

Great writers invent their own world ... a totality of the experience (a novel, a painting)

Burma

her chance

Bursa, Turkey

the woman on the metro

with a burned leg - you remember her clearly
how she sat after dragging her bad leg

into the compartment
this image of her
alone
cold
scared
in pain
how did it happen? why is she alone?
on a cold night in a flimsy sweater

her skin below the knee
running to her ankle
all burned away
exposing blood red lines

her abstract expression
her sacred scared distracted face
watching night fly past windows
where blue televisions and children eye each other

how she kept going
on the metro past a stop
where the expensive private hospital on a Roman
hill gleamed its extensive intensive pensive care
ward and her treatment was delayed
forgotten useless
here

because she is poor
so she stayed in her seat
anxious now feeling her pain
wondering where she would go
where she would end up this night

as a stranger studied her anxious passive 
expression feeling burns, violent burns
inside sensations fire and heat
nerve impulses darting through

along sensory
channels where signals blocked by
neurotransmitters shut down
her chance

Buy An Eagle?

Omar meditated as workers drilled, hammered, poured, pounded, sifted, sorted, packaged, shipped, received, laughed, cried and analyzed their efforts to make it heavy, deep and real.

A newspaper in the Marrakesh souk whispered about trillion dollar foreign wars. An endless labyrinth of global deficit spending prospered in a radiant mathematical certainty.

At Djemaa El Fna I perused old Touareg jewelry, rainbow carpets, silver bowls, cracked dishes, green ionized utensils, long leather bullwhips, elaborate Berber bags and junk. Dealers bought and sold pots, pans, brass and silver.

The day was hot and the souk was cool. I evolved into F/stop sense trapping light and freezing time.

Writing with light I followed leather smells along narrow corridors into a zone of low wages, unregulated workshops and child labor exploitation. Poverty’s people hung scraps of clothing on thin lines in stale air.

Inside a small room, a ten-year old boy slaving his six-day week for $6 applied coats of thick viscous liquid paste to leather.

“May I make an image?”

“100 Dirhams,” said an older boy punching holes in leather.

Metalworking, jewelry and mosaic making were the most hazardous jobs for children because of the chemicals. Children making slippers were exposed to glue vapors. Dust caused respiratory problems for children working in pottery sheds. Child labor was linked to the politically sensitive question of educational opportunities.

Poor families globally see education as an expensive waste of money & time.

There’s little pressure from local political parties, trade unions, or wider public opinion for any legislation on child labor.

UNICEF targeted Moroccan authorities to persuade artisans to stop hiring children under twelve and release those already employed for a few hours of schooling each week.

The bare room was 8x10 and filled with noxious fumes. No ventilation. I negotiated without inhaling. One dim bulb heaven, empty walls with leather punching tools and piles of treated leather needing a brush.

“Too much.”

We engaged in a broken animated conversation. No deal. I walked. Show them the soles of your shoes. Singing boys glued magic slippers. 

*

Animal pelts hung from wires in the old slave market. Leopard, fox, and rabbit complemented long wide boa constrictor skins. There was a falcon in a cardboard box and a young nervous eagle in a cage.

“How are you?” said a boy.

“Good, thank you.”

“Is everything ok?”

“Yes, I’m just having a look. How much is your eagle?”

“For you I make a special price. Morning price. Two thousand.”

“Two thousand? ($200) Expensive. How old is it?”

“It is two-years old. It is from the Atlas Mountains. For you I make you special price, morning price. Brings me good luck.”

“You make your own luck. I’ll think about it.”

I wanted to buy the eagle, get on a Super Tour bus, reach the Atlas Mountains, hike to a stone village in a blue-fogged valley and release the predator. Trapped in humanity’s cage starving for food, water and freedom I needed someone to release me in clear mountain air.

I turned to photograph men pushing and pulling a donkey dragging a cart through a broken wooden gate.

“Where are you going?”

“Maybe I’ll be back.”

“Come, mister,” said the desperate boy grabbing my vest, “come here see this animal skin. It makes a strong medicine. It helps you with your wife.”

“My wife doesn’t need help.”

“Where is she? We have many perfumes.”

“She’s wandering around. She smells a good deal when she nose it.”

“Maybe spices, maybe you like spices.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe you are looking for something more powerful,” he said, “something to take with your tea, a special blend from the Rif Mountains?”

“What is it?”

“Ah, it is a fine, how do you say, potion, a special blend from a mysterious plant. Hash helps assassins forget their troubles. It protects them in heroic battles against sticks, stones and drones. No hash? Then perhaps a little of this balm might interest you. Here, try a sample. Rub a little on your temples. It takes away pain.” He opened a tin and smeared red paste on his fingers.

“No thanks, I’m ok. Pain is a sickness leaving the body. Suffering is an illusion. See you later.” 

I dissolved into a swirling unedited film where sense data, memory and imagination were unified as director, player and audience.

The sun burned through the Red City reflecting shadows and dust. As men shoveled dirt others hauled bricks in broken wheelbarrows to a lot. A man with bleeding hands laid them to infinity.

Donkeys clipping along a fractured road dragged carts overflowing with boxes of fruit and vegetables. They pulled loads of mattresses, end tables and cabinets to distant destinations.

Homes were all cinder block. Men made the blocks and loaded them on pallets so donkeys could pull them to sites where they waited for generations to finish their education and get to work.

Beasts of burden labored past men and boys repairing bikes and inoperable scooters.

Poor people took bus 11. Walk.

Women with babies strapped to backs drifted through red dust. Old men in jellabas hooded against wind shuffled in bright yellow slippers.

In dusty alleys men chopped tea bought from an old man on his bike offering fresh mint spilling from crushed baskets.

Men crammed leaves into a dented tea kettle, poured in boiling water, threw in blocks of white sugar, closed the lid, filled a small glass, swished it around and poured it back into the kettle with ballet dexterity.

Bad teeth decayed in hungry mouths.

A beggar shuffled past reciting the Qur’an. Waiting to feel a coin his open hand held everything. On Fridays someone gave him Dirhams.

Swarms of flies and starving cats patrolled perimeters near a butcher removing white fat. Young kittens in deserted dark corners waited for inevitable death. Happy children returning from school sampled dates, calendars and centuries. Girls carried fresh kneaded bread to a neighborhood oven for baking. Veiled babbling women haggled with sellers of henna, saffron, turmeric and aromatic spices.

At Djemaa El Fna a dancer in white robes, red sash and maroon hat wearing bells and clappers twirled as friends pounded drums. Sedated white tourists dropped coins in a sorting hat. Europeans entered the show of shows.

A musician played his flute. Black cobras fanned diamond skinheads. Exchange rates were favorable. Water sellers worked crowds selling H2O from goatskin bags. They poured life into jangling brass bowls hanging from their creased necks. Photos with tourists cost extra. 

Packed tour buses competed with humans, petite cabs, grand Mercedes taxis, pedestrians and horse drawn carriages. Desperate shoeshine boys banged on wooden boxes inspecting shoes of idle men sitting in cafes watching idle people watch idle people.

A boy draped in clothing wandered through a cafe trying to interest men to purchase a khaki vest with many pockets, the latest fashion statement. Men wore them buttoned and well pressed with empty compartments. A man tried on a couple. They discussed price. The boy was tired and persistent. The man found a reason or excuse not to buy it because of price, size, or too embarrassed to admit he didn’t really want it or need it. The boy put the vest on a hanger, gathered clothing, trudging toward idle men at another cafe. They read newspapers, drank tea, smoked and chatted with friends in their city oasis.

Red, blue and yellow carpets draped over ochre roof edges created a patchwork of adobe, blue sky, white mosques spires and a cold crescent moon.

Rows of men squeezing orange juice yelled for customers, “Come here my friend, I have what you need.”

Salesmen bagged fresh dates, figs and nuts.

Souk seller beckoned people, “Have a look at my shop.”

Shops were crammed with leather, ceramics, swords, clothing, lamps, rugs, hats, spices, shoes, knockoffs and scented cedar tables.

Men in a one-light bulb heaven scrapped scented wood or pounded leather on steel platforms as well manicured idle wealthy men in clean white shirts, pressed pants and leather shoes slouched near their Berber carpet shops discussing prosperity and idyllic life.

Young men up and down alley mazes competed with each other for Dirhams as young sellers advertised Adidas Berber merchandise. The world was full of merchandise. Buyers and sellers competed for the best steal deal. The art of negotiation played a litany.

Always Be Closing.

At Djemaa a black Cobra gunship helicopter emerged from under a thin goatskin drum to unravel its three-foot long body on a threadbare carpet. When tourists approached, a young boy waved his hand close to the reptile grabbing its attention. Rearing with a flared black hood it weaved with the boy’s gestures. Playing an old game of survival, they danced and darted toward each other. Tourists dropped spare change on the carpet and wandered away to get lost.

An old stoic Berber in shade hoping to sell red yarn played with the dial on his dusty portable radio looking for a new frequency and better reception.

Hustlers plying language skills switched from German to English to French to Japanese trying to initiate conversations with blind tourists. Everybody wanted a slice of a diminished post-9/11 pie.

Humanity floated through broken reed shadows.

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation - A Memoir