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When I was a kid, I hated history class because I felt like all the people (mostly men, mostly white) we learned about were nothing like me. I’m a quasi-radical now, but I can’t imagine who I would be if I would had known about Grace Lee Boggs when I was a kid. I’ve just donated a few days worth of lunch money to help fund this awesome documentary about an American revolutionary who is someone I can aspire to be.
indiegogo.com/AmericanRevolutionary
American Revolutionary – Indiegogo Pitch from American Revolutionary on Vimeo.
That was me in fourth grade- nine little years on this planet. It was my first year at a new school that wasn’t in a predominant Asian-American immigrant neighborhood.
There was this kid, Richard Sanchez, who tormented me. He called me every Asian-related slur his ten-year-old brain could remember. I spent entire lunch recceses hiding in a stall in the girls bathroom rather than face him. I sat on the toilet, with my pants at my ankles so that it looked like I was using the potty, and just stared at the metal stall door as I waited for the end-of-lunch bell to ring. The confusion and anxiety that I held inside my small body was compounded by the fact that I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t think they could help. I was in the fourth grade, learning about fractions at school and calling utility companies to ask about billing questions at home. If my parents couldn’t settle an odd charge on our phone bill, how would they stop Richard Sanchez?
Even though the bullying hurt terribly and I was just a kid- I never questioned why I was who I was. Even though I had never felt such blind vile hate shot right at me- I knew that I was worthwhile. Even though I would watch TV sitcoms and daydreamed about how lovely it would be to live with a white suburban family- I knew that I belonged where I was. Even though I didn’t think my parents could make it better- I knew that if they survived the Vietnam war then I could survive a kid who made me cry every day.
I had a type of strength that only a child could have, the type of strength that comes from truly believing in fairy tales and the heroic deeds and historical legacies of the folks who existed before us. Fourth grade was the year that I learned about Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. and about altruism and character. I learned about how a single person can inspire social change even if they are made to feel powerless. I learned about how people build movements—one mind and one heart at a time. I learned to let Richard Sanchez get it out of his system, because he was just another kid of immigrants too, probably frustrated and confused about the two worlds he lived in.
Now, 20 years after fourth grade, I find myself working for an organization whose mission is to build a progressive movement from the ground up—with people power. Our organization, Western States Center, supports the work of other orgs and individual community organizers who fight for social justice in the region.
We have a program here called WILD (Western Institute for Leadership Development), which is a year-long intensive training for emerging community organizers. Through WILD, participants gain invaluable leadership, management and community organizing skills. They also deepen their understanding and analysis of social justice issues such as gender justice, LGBTQ equality and racial justice.
Taj Suleyman a graduate from our WILD Class of 2006-2007 said “If it’s not for WILD I would continued to feel lost and isolated in the U.S. I wouldn’t know how to advocate for my community and for what we need.”
Folks like Taj are continuing to lay the foundation for progressive change within our communities that can help to build and inspire a larger movement. Our WILD grads may not be written about in history books, but they are working toward creating history.
I think about the folks who arrived in America long before my parents walked through the LAX terminal, toward the Social Security administration office to receive their refugee status, about all of the work that community organizers had to do to create systems that offered multi-lingual and multi-cultural services to my mother and father. I think about the folks who organized and protested the war in Vietnam- to end the brutality on both sides. I think about the grassroots movements, and the people who worked tirelessly within them, that shaped policies that we take for granted- policies for inclusion and diversity. I think about how I can support the work of community organizers, to ensure that we can continue to pay it forward and forward for future generations.
I think about who I would be if I didn’t have Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. to look up to, if I didn’t have those two community organizers to ignite my own belief in myself- who would I have become?
This is why I am asking you to join me to support the upcoming WILD class of 2011-2012, which starts this fall. The work of community organizers is only as strong as the community that supports it. Folks like you, who support the progressive movement, keep the momentum going to build stronger communities where everyone can thrive. Your support is just as essential as the training that the activists receive at WILD.
Please visit my fundraising page for the next WILD class and considering supporting the work of community organizers and activists. The grassroots movement toward building a more just society is propelled by people power. Will you be one of those people?
From Razorcake #56, published in May 2010.
Hustle Like You Mean It
Regular people don’t say these things to strangers in exchange for money. But I do.
I stand in front of couples on date night, small groups of friends, and once – a secret society of bearded bears, to holler golf-related innuendo. They’ve all gathered into a bare, drafty room in downtown Portland so that I can take their tickets or cash, check their IDs, and give them my safety talk before they venture off to play demolition derby putt putt, something part-art-installation and part-man-eating-miniature-golf-course.
Everyone who does the door at Smash Putt gives different versions of the schpiel, my take on it skews obnoxious.
“This is what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna go in there and shit your pants because you’re doing putt putt with robots and beers. You’re gonna wanna hit everything because everything is gonna look so fucking hittable.” Emphasis on fucking hittable. “But what I need you to do is to not swing your putter with excessive force because you might hit someone in the face. And that’s not cool.”
“If your balls fall into some kinda contraption and it looks like it may be too dangerous to grab your balls.” Emphasis on your balls. “Don’t grab your fucking balls. We’ll happily grab your balls for you or give you new balls.” Watch men’s eyes light up. “Because we don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Which leads me to: if you do get hurt and/or die, we are not responsible nor are we liable for your deaths and injuries. You’re responsible for your own death. Me? I get paid cash and I’m gonna go home and sleep very well tonight. I don’t give a fuck.” Emphasis on don’t give a fuck. Smile like I’m selling girl scout cookies. Everyone’s happy.
The more obnoxious I am, the more high-fives I get. This is what I do now for money, trading in asshole-ness. But it’s only temporary, the folks who run the self-proclaimed “miniature golf apocalypse” will pack up and leave town in a couple weeks and I’ll have to hustle my wares elsewhere.
When Joni and I talk about being regular, we’re not discussing our bowel movements. We’re talking about how we are so unlike our mothers, about how when our folks were our age, they had families, mortgages and the idea of stability. We’re talking about how we have fleeting moments of doubt about how we’ve conducted our lives thus far—and now we’re catching up to playing grown-up versions of ourselves. We placed thick bookmarks right before the chapter on adulthood, and left them there. And now we wonder if we should have just gone through the story of our lives without pausing, if we should have just plowed ahead and found security in mediocre careers, khaki pants and polo shirts.
“But regular people are content, right?” I asked.
“Regular is lame.
“Regular people have purpose, right?”
“Regular is lame,” Joni repeated.
We both know she’s right, but I can’t help but to ruminate because I’m lost. I’m trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go, but there are no directions. At least regular folks have committed themselves to a lifestyle that’s been mapped out: get job -> job pays for family -> buy things for family -> spend rest of life paying for things -> forget that you once had dreams for greater things -> stay at job -> go on annual two-week vacations to see sanitized versions of different locales -> go back to job to pay for vacation -> quarter/mid/late life crisis -> teach your kids to do exactly as you’ve done -> rinse -> repeat.
Fuck. Regular is lame.
So, now what?
So, we hustle.
We’re constantly moving, buzzing, orbiting between cities, relationships and jobs in an effort to convince ourselves, and those around us, that we’re worthwhile. We hustle for money and time and the things in between.
Me? What do I hustle for?
I hustle for quiet respites between hustling so I can sit with my hands and write stories, embroider the names of my friend’s kid onto pillows or to push play on the new Reigning Sound record because I enjoy music again. I hustle to get on the guest list so that I can save my cash for booze, and when I stand by the amp I can feel the alcohol and the guitars buzz through my entire body. I hustle to feel things because I worry that our hearts will atrophy with time if we don’t force vitriol and ambition through it. I’ve seen too many folks, with lines around their eyes, who feel like they blinked and lost ten years to a desk job to not be afraid of the same thing happening to me.
I hustle for mascara and eyeliner to brighten my eyes, so then when I flutter my lashes at a boy, he’ll know I’m saying, I like you enough at this moment and it’s possible that I might like you more in the future. Then maybe one day when we’re both tired and weary of chasing and being chased, we’ll settle into each other because me and you are good for each other. Because no one wants to be alone. I hustle to meet other hustlers. I hustle because sex is fun and love is worth taking risks for.
I’m grateful that many of my friends hustle for the same things, to avoid mediocrity, so that I don’t feel like I’m unrealistic or irresponsible for wanting what I want. I hustle because I refuse to believe that the breath of the human experience is limited to what we know, and I don’t know shit. I hustle so that when I wake up in the morning, I don’t feel like I wasted the day and night before.
I hustle because being regular isn’t an option. I don’t want it and it don’t want me.
DanE hustles whimsy— trading smiles for a place to sit. A pink-white-brown flag whips above his shop in southeast Portland, where he churns out artisan truffles and chocolate handlebar mustaches on a stick. His chocolates release endorphins and memories, like the ants on the log chocolate that taste exactly like a scoop of peanut butter in the shallow groove of a celery stalk with raisins crawling atop. When folks see his mustaches, a curvey piece of chocolate with little lines scratched in to mimic the scraggly texture of facial hair, they can’t help but smile as they prop it beneath their nose and right above their lip—looking like a distinguished gentleman .
“I realized something,” he said at the end of a long day, “I was sitting on my couch and relaxing.” I imagined him reclined into the soft cushions, surveying his living room of bare essentials: his dog Jack spring around, the oil painting of a ship in rough waters above the fireplace, the stack of records leaning against the wall. “I realized this is what I hustle for—a place to sit.”
This reminded me of where I was seven years ago, fresh out of university and ready to attack the world. I landed the job—the career—that was supposed to propel me into adulthood, 401Ks, and retirement. After my two-year tenure, I was earning more annually than my father did at the factory job that he’d had since I was born. When you opened the “A” book in your Encyclopedia Britannica collection, and thumbed through to “American Dream,” there was a Sears portrait with my mug in it. But I was unhappy because I spent more awake hours at my work desk than I did at my apartment. I hustled for a place to sit, but was so busy hustling that I didn’t even have time to enjoy it.
It was a Shel Silverstein moment to behold. The Giving Tree is my favorite children’s book with its lesson in selflessness (or codependency) and how we hustle. The boy hustled the tree’s apples, its branches, its trunk until nothing was left. Decades later, the boy returned as an old man, bent over, wrinkly and without pants. The tree apologized, for it had nothing to offer the boy except its stump. The old man—defeated, grey and lost—took a seat on the stump and the tree was happy. I suppose we, as children, were to surmise that the boy was happy too. After years of hustling, he could finally rest.
But Silverstein didn’t show us the boy’s hustle, he didn’t show us how the boy sold those apples, or how he built that house with the tree’s branches, or how he hollowed out its trunk to make a boat to sail away from his unhappiness. He didn’t tell us how to avoid being beat down, but that getting beat down is just another part of growing up. The story didn’t teach us how to hustle, it just told us that we will. It told us that we will be lost. It told us that we shouldn’t be afraid of it because maybe it’s worth it.
This was written more than a year and a half ago. I’ll admit I was a little buzzed from a cocktail of fruit juice and whatever vodka I purchased at the Thai airport. I can’t recall what prompted it, but here it is in all its desperation, accusation and seeming randomness.
I’m calling ya’ll out.
Sandra Cisneros
Dave Eggers
Muhammad Yunnus
Ira Glass
Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam (MIA)
Sam Bailey
Maria Eitel
David Sedaris
Natalie Solomon
I need you guys to pick me. Life, this pulsating beat of Earth, is a game of dodge ball. And as far as I can remember, I’ve always been picked last for that Darwinistic schoolyard game because I was the shortest kid in class and I have no upper-body strength to hurl a cherry ball.
But now I write, and I’m calling you guys out to pick me- not last, not second to the last, but first in our metaphoric dodge ball game.
I need you guys to validate what I’ve devoted the past few years of my life to.
I have a voice, it stumbles out of this five-foot-one-inch body attached to a beer gut. Its high and shrill or low and mumbly. It makes sounds and enjoys it most times when people listen to the noises that squeak out of it.
And I’m calling out Seth Rogen to take me on a date. Seriously. It’s him or Stephen Merchant. Gregg Gillis looks like he likes to party, I’d be down with that. Or that Gordon-Levitt kid, he likes smart girls, right? James Franco should call me when I move to NYC.
Filed under: Big Bang, DIY Mania, Fotorama, Operation Engrish Prease, PDXcitement, Razorcake Columns, When I Grow Up, WTFlux
From Razorcake #51, which came out in July 2009. This was a column I had written while still in Bangladesh in anticipation of returning home.
A convergence of greed, debt and consumerism—hallmarks of modern-day Americana—has exploded in our collective red, white and blue faces. The economy and us, we’re on a break. Our honeymoon, that flourishing period of my young adult life where jobs were to be had and money was made to be spent (not saved), was gorgeous and felt right. The economy and us felt invincible. We were in love with one another, we indiscriminantly lavished it with our ever-increasing expendable income and it gave us a living wage and encouragement to incure debt, Dang, it was to be.
Until it wasn’t.
Until we realized that the economy is a cruel mistress, that she was being bedded by irresponsible home mortgage lenders. We broke up, and it hasn’t been easy. The economy wants all its stuff back, like all that money it lent you. Or worse yet, it took all the friends you made together, like your job.
* * *
This is what I’m coming home to face: a poor analogy for the collapsed economy. I am conflicted because I am both ecstatic and anxiety-ridden about my return.
Ultimately, I am more stoked than not because having lived the past 18 months in a developing, conservative Muslim country leaves me wanting nothing more than to go home where even the toughest things, like finding gainful employment, seems easier than spending another day in a place where so much of who I am is constantly repressed.
It is with this infinite optimism of a more fruitful life back home in the States that I am reaching out to the Razorcake Readership ™. I need ya’ll to help me find a job.
I’m making a plea to my friends to let me know if they might know someone who might know someone who might want to employ me in the greater Portland, Oregon area. (I might be willing to move, but the job will have to be insanely lucrative and/or involves me being the personal assistant to Joyce Carol Oates or Michael Cera. [Or better yet, a benefactor is always welcomed.])
To help you to help me, I’ve attached my resume. Feel free to photocopy and distribute to anyone who has a payroll.
Objective: Get money. Get paid.
Education:
- California State University. Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism with a concentration in Photojournalism. Minor in Women’s Studies.
Accrued debt: $12,800 – Remaining balance: $10,800
Awards & Distinctions:
- Margaret Duff Elementary School Spelling Bee Finalist (1st-3rd Grade Division)
- S.A.N.E. Anti-Drug Use Campaign Poster Winner: A crayon drawing of an aluminum garbage can brimming with stuffed black plastic garbage bags, fish bones, generic pills, packs of cigarettes, empty “XXX” beer bottles with the slogan boldly written above, “Don’t Do Drugs / There Just Trash.” (Yes, I’m aware, wrong “their.” I was a nine-year-old ESL student, cut me some slack.)
- Honor Roll / G.A.T.E. (Gifted and Talented Education) Student / Chronic Asthma / Gigantic Geek
Employment History:
1997
Sunny Cleaners – Quality control robot who slipped plastic bags over freshly-pressed garments. The heat and humidity of working in a dry cleaner was compounded by its location in southern California. I’d end my shift with salt chunks tangled in my hair and a white ring around the neckline of my oversized black MTX Starship t-shirt. My awkward Korean boss, a man who found his wife through an arranged marriage, asked me, in all seriousness, “You don’t have many friends, do you?”
1998
Toys ‘R’ Us – It felt like a rite of passage when an irate customer accosted me on Xmas eve because he was forced to wait in a very long line. I smirked. A Latino goth co-worker tried to gift me a stolen VHS copy of Disney’s Mulan to prove his crush on me. I frowned.
Disneyland – The first job I had with a uniform dress code, but had the benefit of roaming the amusement park after work. But being at Disneyland alone is a sad reminder of our ultimately loneliness. Quit after two weeks.
1999
Insurance Underwriting Firm – Learned to use a foot-pedal operated transcription machine. Typed so much I couldn’t grip a pen. First exposure to cubicles and fluorescent lights. Realized that some people spend all of their middle age here. Terrified.
2000
Wound & Wound Toy Co. – A wind up toy store. I bought Gus the Nunzilla, a wind-up box-shaped nun that waddled about while shooting sparks out of her mouth. My boss was a professional at wearing ape suits in Hollywood films.
2001 – 2002
Ebay PowerSeller – Exhibited initiative and entrepreneurship by shopping. This job was an excuse for me to go to a thrift store every week to buy t-shirts for 99 cents and then resell them for $10. Paid the rent and upheld the American spirit of enterprise
Learning Resource Center Peer Tutor – If you graduated from an American public high school, you are more than likely lacking in the ability to write a cohesive academic paper as you had not been equipped with these skills. In comes your peer tutor—me! How’s it feel to be tutored in English by a non-native English learner?
2003
Screenwriter’s Assistant – The woman I worked for penned two qausi-well-known films, one’s about life from a parrot’s perspective and the other is a fairy tale. I know I signed a confidentiality agreement, but the film she was working on while I was her assistant had to do with competing sportscasters, one of whom was a female-to-male transman. When not taking dictation or transcribing her screenplay, I assisted her in errands and learned about the value of cobblers and affordable groceries at Trader Joe’s.
Los Angeles PBS Station’s New Media Associate – My first grown-up job. Salary, health benefits, rolling office chair. While on the clock: got told to “act my age”, bet on my first NCAA pool, regularly reprimanded for forgetting to turn on my boss’s computer for her, maintained and updated station website through content management system, watered boss’s cacti. Cried three times during first months. Mom suggested that menopause was the reason behind my boss’s cruelty.
2004-2005
Los Angeles PBS Station’s New Media Associate – Became an expert at killing time and subsequently developed an addiction to celebrity gossip blogs and a newfangled social networking website called MySpace. Used my salary to become a card-carrying member of the ACLU, NOW and Planned Parenthood, subsequently resulting in a deluge of junk mail from leftist organizations asking for donations. Began to suffer from acute fluorescent-light poisoning, symptoms of which included malaise and “working for the weekend.” Retired.
2005
High School After-School Tutor – Someone placed at-risk high school kids in my care and nobody got hurt.
Ebay PowerSeller’s Associate – Earned a ridiculous butt-load of money (by my lowly standards) helping a woman sell “vintage” purses. Ladies love bags, and we had sacks full of them. Consumerism is beautiful sometimes.
Green Noise Records – Blasted Reigning Sound, Bent Outta Shape and The Black Lips.
2006
Volunteer Oral English Instructor in Hunan, PRC – Taught 1,450 Chinese adolescent students. Managed to burst into tears in only four classes.
2007
Volunteer Oral English Instructor in Hunan, PRC –
Green Noise Records – Blasted Underground Railroad to Candyland, The Zombies and The Boys.
2008
Dishwasher – Operated the Jackson ES-2000 dishwasher. Operated mop and mobile mop bucket station. Smoked out with head cook and prep cook.
Volunteer Literature Teacher in Chittagong, Bangladesh – Learned that four hours of sleep and insurmountable responsibilities and stress might result in an optical floater which is the degeneration of one’s retina and over degeneration of one’s mental an emotional health. Created an academic literature curriculum geared towards south Asian students. Educated the next batch of female leaders of this region. Superhero.
2009
Volunteer Literature Teacher in Chittagong, Bangladesh – Survived.
American – Unemployed in an non-employing economy.
Additional Skills:
Sari wrapping, spring roll rolling, free-hand embroidery, block-printing novice, advanced ability to use Photoshop stamp filter,
Favorites:
TV Sitcom: Small Wonder
Running shoes: Brooks Adrenaline GTS
Thing to eat in a bowl: Pho
Xmas present: Long-reach stapler from my youngest brother
Means of sustenance: Employment.
Hire me.
This morning, on my daily rickshaw ride to school, a familiar sensation sank from the front of my forehead down to the pit of my stomach. We were stuck between a rusty, dented bus brimming with passengers and darting golf-cart taxis, my rickshaw wallah was a middle-aged man with taut skin the color of coconut husks and draped in a graying dress shirt and lungi. He pedaled slowly, his over-sized tricycle pulling me along in a vacuum of car horns, men shouting, bicycle bells tinkling and an elderly man who stood on the road median and tossed up half a brick just to see it crumble when it crashed onto the pavement.
I breathed in deeply, sucking in polluted air to satisfy my lungs, and daydreamed eight hours ahead. “I can’t wait for 5:15,” I thought. Five-fifteen is when the school’s grey mini-van leaves its converted residential driveway to head to our home in the Panchliash neighborhood. I try to catch the 5PM shuttle everyday, but more often than not, I’m stuck in the 8PM ride instead. I hadn’t even arrived at work and I was already fantasizing about getting home.
It reminded me of when I used to sit in Los Angeles traffic heading south on the 101 to get to the TV studio lot where I was a New Media associate. I used to sit in my brand new jeweled maroon Toyota Corolla, bought with the salary I earned at the job that was an hour-long stop-and-go commute each way, and peered into the rear view mirror and through my dusty windshield to see where I was headed and what I had left behind. All I saw were cars, eeking forward, with human-like zombies behind the steering wheel.
This was where I was going, this was where I was stuck, and this is all there ever was.
“”Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”
From Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
That sinking feeling that settled and rumbled inside my stomach was unwelcomed and unsettling. Had I really come to the other side of earth to wake up every morning wishing it was already the end of the day?
I’m fortunate though, because later this evening I will retreat back to the comfort that is beneath my dusty mosquito net. And months from now, I’ll be on a Boeing 747 rather than a rusty bicycle rickshaw. I get to go home.
But what will I leave behind? What about the people for whom this place is their home? What about that sinking that weighs my mind and body down? Will I carry it with me wherever I go, whatever I do? Will I ever be satisfied?
Is this where I am going? Is this where I am stuck? Is this all there ever will be?
Through happenstance, a friend of a friend contacted me discuss potential to find development work in these parts because she just completed a Master’s program in Gender, Development and Globalization. Holly owes a hefty sum, more than $50,000, in student loans and simply cannot afford to volunteer and needs to find work that will pay her a reasonable wage. This premise prompted a discussion about the inherent dilemma about volunteer work, something that is seldom explored within the NGO/volunteer community.
Holly was able to say precisely what I’ve been trying to articulate, but have never been able to put the ideas down so cogently as she had:
I certainly understand (and respect) your argument for volunteering, but after doing so for the bulk of my adult life (and happily so, in general) has left be somewhat embittered in many respects. Volunteering for the sake of volunteering is one thing, but NGOs systemically taking advantage of young workers and Interns desperate to get their foot in the door of their organization is another. I’ve been used, abused, and exploited by feminist organizations that I’d once respected. I’ve seen progressive orgs structured like old boy’s clubs, ageist and hierarchal management structures in women’s orgs that moralized against such policies, and nepotism abound in human rights orgs that espouse equal access to resources. That said, I will likely volunteer in some capacity for the rest of my life; my work simply needs to be financially valued as well in NGOs that can clearly afford to. It has nothing to do with greed or valuing a paycheck over pursuing my passion. For me they are one in the same.
You’re doing what you’re doing because of a passion for service (regardless of the “issue” you’re working on), but simultaneously are not feeling as valued as your gut tells you you should be.
Generally, it’s not about money, but because our world operates on a capitalist system we assign value based on how much something is worth in cash. Therefore when some organizations have volunteers (paid a living stipend) working alongside salaried employees (paid what they are worth) and you see a discrepancy in how they are treated based on the ingrained capitalist notions of worth- it’s bothersome to say the least.
I’m a volunteer for naive, altruistic reasons, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be respected for the work I perform.
Another 10-hour workday. Another $16. For the entire day.
Depending on how many hours we work over the weekend, on some workdays we may make as much as $20 because the hourly wage gets bumped up if we don’t work over the weekend too. (But that’s just wishful thinking.)
But when you’re a volunteer, these numbers mean jack, just like our stipend. The numbers are negligible–the hours, the stipend, the months in which we’ve suspended our lives back home. At least we’re away from the economic crisis that’s bringing our nation to its knees, right?
At least until this summer, when I go back.
My list of things I am not looking forward to upon my return to my glorious home country is short (and will likely expand one I settle back), and only consist of two concerns at the moment:
- the economy
- winter
“Why is the recession bad?” I may have expected this question from a student, but it was another teacher who asked me. I think she was confused because although we are going through a recession, she had yet to see the effects of it in your middle-class family.
“A recession means job losses. Lots of folks may lose their jobs.” I tried to explain the intricacies of our interlinking economy.
“But if you still have your job, you’re okay then, right?” Her folks are still employed in their white collar jobs.
“I guess. But for the people who don’t have jobs, they can’t make rent or pay their mortgages and stuff.” This was about a year ago, before the unemployment rates have shot up. I wasn’t aware of how severely interdependent the economy is. It isn’t just about if I have a job, or if my friends and family are still working. Regardless if its server at my favorite bar or the machine operator at the plastics manufacturing factory who loses their job, there are other jobs that are dependent on them being employed. If the server isn’t working, it’s because the bar is doing poor business, so maybe they have to cut the amount of beer and food they order. The beer supplier has to lay off folks because they’re not selling enough. The trucking company, that moves the beer from the factory to bars, has to lay off drivers because there aren’t enough deliveries to go around. Ad infinitum. It’s cyclical, and all these folks have to figure out how to pay for their shelter and foodstuff.
And this is the climate I’m returning to. Yipee.
The upside of unemployment when I return is that I’ll have plenty of time to ruminate about my soul-fulfilling/bank-account-emptying volunteer life abroad. Hurrah!
This is about 20,000 takas, which is the equivalent of $300 USD. Who says the dollar is weak?
