Take bus #11

Greetings,

I'm walking across a screaming motorcycle street in Saigon. Bus #11 is bearing down fast and furious. I escape. Another person in another country in another life along another path said.

'Poor people walk. They take bus #11. It means use your legs.'

The gap between rich and poor - such is the reality in developing countries - is becoming more apparent.

Recent figures speak. Average city wages - $1,054 a year. Rural wages - $540 a year.

The central party hopes their economic stimulus will encourage rural people to buy appliances and cars. I need a 4x wheel drive washing machine so I can I take my family on weekend excursions to the beach, the Himalayas and deep tropical jungles where life is simple. Yeah!

The process evolved like this. I walked. I saved and eventually bought a bike. A Flying Pigeon. Black. One speed. It got me from home to the village rice paddies.  

We had a radio in the work unit. The local propaganda machine blasted revolutionary worker party anthems day and night. We got one for the home. My wife was happy. Then we had the required one child. We wanted another one but the forced abortion committee and local officials said, NO! You do not qualify for two children.

Then my wife wanted a TV. Ok I said, let's get a 24" flat screen with a remote.

What about a new rice cooker? Ok I said.

How about a used refrigerator? What's wrong with the box of ice? You shop for fresh vegetables at the market every morning. Why do we need a refrigerator? Because the neighbors have one.

Oh, I see. I scrounged around and traded rice for some chickens and traded the birds for some used teak wood smuggled in from Burma. I developed some connections. One trade led to another and I eventually found a well used fridge. My wife was happy. Then we filled it up with baby formula.

The formula was tainted with a chemical to increase the protein. We didn't know this small fact.

Our little girl became sick. The Worker's Hospital #8 said I had to pay them a lot of money for medicine or she would die.

I sold my bike to buy medicine. Now I walk to the hospital to see my daughter. It takes forever and a day.

I want to move to a big city filled with neon and food smells and construction projects and appliances hoping against hope to find a job but party leaders say millions of unemployed workers are returning to their villages in the new year.

I have a feeling the new year is going to be a lot like the old year.

The radio and flat screen scream stream tells us to stay home. Be quiet. Don't worry. Practice social stability and harmony. My future opportunities look precarious.

I have to go now because they will cut off the electricity soon and I need to buy some candles.

"Life is found in a desperate situation." - Chinese proverb.

Metta.

 

Labor to eat

Cash For Trash

Greetings,

Saigon, wandering and sitting in markets, pagodas, mosques, enjoying Indian and mutton curries, Italian lasagna, clean green salads after simple street food up north.

Images and serenity inside places of repose and spirit. 

At night across the street is live music and carnivals as Saigon hosts the Asian Games. I made images of Iraqi and Chinese kick boxers practicing at night, in the dark, shielded by the moon. Gaping residents pause and watch men and women punch and kick their training partners. Images will follow after editing.

Saigon (young, vibrant) is a complete delight after the hush of conservative Ha Noi (old, dull). Up north I lived in a normal neighborhood away from backpackers and neon for five months. I had a table, palm tree and balcony.

I'd sat in the Old Quarter for two weeks after Indonesia, more like Amnesia, then moved into a room in a house in a family compound. Dogs, yelling crying babies, construction workers, a "service" girl working the construction laborers under the cover of night, taking care of their desire, relieving them of cash. 

Here it's a different reality. Or, as the popular t-shirt says, "Same-same. But different."

I am in the heart of darkness. After sunset all the predators are out. Many are wearing stiletto high heels.

Are you the hunter or the prey?

On the street of dreams. Cheap digs, variety of food joints ranging from street eats to places with tablecloths. Plenty of foreign tourists moving through on a quick three day visit before taking the boat or bus to Cambodia. They move in tribes carrying worn guide books, wearing out thin soled flip flops. They are having an adventure.

They are gathering memories of weight and language and humid heat. Some of them look distraught, lost, angry, hungry and confused, just like people they know and love. Some older ones are long time residents. Their faces and posture are one step from the morgue. They struggle forward searching for who knows what.

Only The Shadow Knows!

Two visions in Ha Noi along the road to the airport. A confidant looking man walking near a lake tripped on cracked broken tile, didn't break his stride, eyes straight ahead - don't lose face - stoic, passive, marching.

A young girl, maybe 10, sat slumped against a blue stone crevice. She held a small box with something to sell. Her eyes held all the secrets of the world. Where is her family? Will a neighbor woman or a kind person extend their hand, open their heart? Is this suffering her destiny?

One child among millions in the world. 

Metta.

Authorized to speak truth

According to me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because I am not authorized to reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

1. truth is classified. The source of truth concerning Everything is classified. Ossified.

Yes, I am authorized to say, with complete anonymity that truth is filtered, it is compartmentalized, abstracted, excerpted, sliced, diced, parsed, fossilized and classified. It hides inside a deeply buried locked black box. The key is classified. The key is not on a social network site designed to distract.

The key is, for the Time Being, a woman somewhere in India carrying the world on her back. She's the key. 

2. truth is a joke. The source of truth concerning jokes is classified. I am not authorized to reveal the joke. The big joke, the laugh track. Your tears speak streak truth, mangling truth.

3. truth is a myth. The source of the myth is classified. Read it and weep. As Antonio Porchia well said, (he was authorized to speak) - "Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides." 

4. truth is the Next BIG Thing. It will modify seeds providing billions of humans with a genetic food source.

5. truth will provide more than 1 billion people with access to safe drinking water.

6. truth will enable literacy for 850,000,000 million people worldwide who cannot read. Woman are 2/3 of this number.

7. truth will employ 2.8 billion people surviving on less than $2 a day. Truth will employ 1.1 billion people existing on less than $1 a day.

8. truth will assist 70% of the people in the "developing" world having no access to electricity in their homes, health clinics and schools.

Truth is a fatal disease, like love. A sledgehammer.

Metta.

Natasha from Kiev

I recently read an article about how women are treated in some countries. For example, in Turkey, health care workers report that 65% of all wives are beaten by their husbands.  It's considered normal behavior because many, not all, women are treated as property. There and elsewhere. 

We've all read stories about arranged marriages, child marriages and the desperate plight of women in many countries.

It reminded me of a story I wrote about a women named Natasha. I put it in my book. Recycled. Here it is.

At the beginning of September 2001, passengers at the Amsterdam airport waited for their flight to Casablanca. There was Youseif, a Moroccan man from Fez living in San Francisco going home to see his family after many years. He would stay three months. 

There was a woman from Kiev with her 5-year old son. Her name was Natasha and she was tall, slim and beautiful. She was married to a Moroccan man. They'd met at the university in Kiev and now he lived in Amsterdam. She had not seen him for three years and he didn’t know his son.

He did not come to the airport to see her because he didn’t have the correct papers nor was she able to leave the airport and see him because she lacked the correct papers so she waited for her flight to her new home. 

Natasha had heard about her new home but had never seen it. She was taking her son to Morocco where they would meet her husband’s family for the first time and live their life. 

She did not speak Arabic. Her cheap red, white and blue Russian plastic baggage was falling apart at the seams. Her son was a terror and pissed his pants leaving a trail of urine in the departure lounge. Natasha was beside herself. 

I'd finished a book that summer about a woman who spoke every language and I was jumping through a window into new adventures and gather new material. Everyone spoke the same language as night fell around the roar of planes leaving gravity taking people somewhere.

We were buried at gate 54D, miles from bright gleaming duty free shops full of perfume, electronics, banks, casinos, toy stores, restaurants, gleaming diamond rings and watches, customs, clothing stores and business.

Shoppers carried plastic bags saying, “Buy and Fly.” 

It was midnight when we landed in Casablanca and walked through a towering hall full of intricate inlaid mosaic tiles and waterfalls. Huge framed images of smiling monarchs watched us. Customs was a formality and the baggage conveyer belt broke down as frustrated passengers waited. Small wheels on useless baggage trolleys were bent and stuck. They careened left and right as people wrestled impossible loads through green ‘nothing to declare’ zones toward friends and relatives.

I helped Natasha load her broken bags on a cart and she disappeared into the throng with her son. I watched her husband’s Berber family approach her. It was his father, mother, brother-in-law and grandmother dressed in traditional jellabas. They welcomed her with a hug speaking words Natasha did not understand. They scooped up the boy.

As the old couple slowly walked away I knew they would take him forever, this progeny of theirs, their connection to their son. 

Natasha, an alien in their world, an aberration, would be relegated to a new life. She moved into their world with a Ukranian passport, speaking unknown languages where she'd be welcomed on one hand and relegated to a life in a new reality serving her new family. 

She was going to be many things to them and they would manifest their loss on her. She'd carry water and gather wood. She'd cook and clean and slave away. She'd carry their fading light, hopes, dreams and connections. Their grandson would realize everything. They disappeared into a sprawling chaotic city of five million.

Their son in Holland relied on his mobile. He could do no wrong. He was a grand man in their eyes and hearts. Many women came and went in his life. It was his dark eyed nomadic destiny. 

When his wife was trapped in the airport he was with a prostitute and he didn’t have the correct papers anyway. He wasn’t lying when he said his family would take care of her.

This was the story I whispered to Natasha but she found it hard to believe.

Metta.

Friday Dinner

A group of teachers pile into a Blue Bird taxi and zoom through the polluted capital to a mall for dinner.

There's a Filipino woman, married to a local with two kids. The whiners are at home with maids.

Beck and call.

There's a fat happy Catholic Filipino relic of a science teacher, a young angry Hebrides science fiction android and a wandering scribe. They find a diner. They feast on Caesar salad, chips, tomatoes covered in cheese, dip and 150 grams of cooked beef between bad white bread.

Watching people flow past, in and out of gleaming neon stores, the scribe and woman talk about advertising, marketing and the relentless pressure people feel to consume, to buy, to get STUFF. They need to buy to feel better, to improve their internal sense of worth with external STUFF.

She is waiting for her local marketing husband to fight and survive traffic to get to the mall. When he arrives he doesn't smile. He doesn't greet anyone. He slouches, collapsing in a chair. They don't talk. This happens in many old boring Friday night marriages. No surprise here.

Everyone gets up and wanders around the mall. The husband tells his wife he's going to find some dim-sum. He goes off to eat alone. Alone.

"Great!" she says, "I'm going to look for phone accessories. I really need something new, flashy and fashionable for my Strawberry."

The android and introverted priest stand around eating sweet I Scream. Waiting to leave. Waiting to become trapped in a car while the husband negotiates a business deal at the wheel next to his silent wife as the priest talks about finding a female nest.

A ride through Hell-o Friday.

Metta.