The garment worker’s daughter

I am not sure what context to give this. I was visiting a garment workers' dormitory in Phnom Penh, looking for people prepared to share their stories of the impact of the financial crisis on their lives. I just saw this young girl at work and asked her mother if I could video her. She is six year's old, and wields a cleaver like an expert. I was torn between admiring her mature dexterity and sheer horror at the idea of a six year old being let loose with a sharp blade. She started showing off a little when I started filming. She was chopping less and being much more careful with her vegetable cutting when I first saw her.

Leaving Uganda but Uganda won't leave me

Tomorrow I leave Uganda for Ireland. It's been a busy few weeks. Some, the Ugandan government and anyone with money, say that the Global Financial Crisis hasn't hit Uganda.

Try telling that to these folks.

Meet Susan:
She is a single mother of 6 and is HIV+. She received food from the clinic, but not since the financial crisis.Now her children eat one meal a day.



Meet Jacob:
Jacob was my main man in Uganda. He's a college-grad who had a good job with an NGO supported by USAID. The contract was supposed to last for five years. Jacob got married and soon his wife Sarah was pregnant. Shortly thereafter it was announced that USAID was pulling the funding as a result of the global financial crisis. Jacob has been without work for 8 months. His daughter Nawira is now 2 weeks old.



Meet Cornelius :
Cornelius used to own several small businesses partly supported by his brother's remittances from the US. Cornelius doesn't hear from his brother anymore. Many of the businesses have been "crushed" by the crisis.



Meet Gerald:
Gerald lost his father to AIDS when the ARV meds were no longer free at the clinic. Gerald had to drop out of school to help support his family. He now lives and works at a small dry cleaners.

A lot on my mind

There’s been a lot on my mind lately between the stories I’ve been working on during the day and the reports I receive from home at night.

It’s crazy what my parents are going through. I’m not comfortable sharing the stuff here, but maybe as some time passes, I will. It’s not anything major in the sense of health or relationships. The false rumors of the local coconut telegraph already circulated that they were separating. How that got started we’ll never know. Mom and Dad joked that they should start making out in public.

Actually as a duo they are doing quite well. I get the sense that they are really there for one another right now.

I’m reporting on the crisis that I’m living. That’s a little weird. I have a lot on my mind, yes, but I could have more on my head.

I was walking behind this woman with bananas on her head. The plate wasn’t even teetering. Most of us carry out burdens inside our heads, not outside. In Uganda they do both.

Crisis chronicles: mental health takes a hit

While the NOTHING PERSONAL project continues to put a face on the more obvious pain inflicted by the global financial crisis, new research details trouble beneath the surface.

On APEsphere we have often noted the negative impact on happiness of contemporary business practices, but the global recession has made the problem all the more acute within the workplace itself.

According to the research by UK mental health charity MIND, one in fourteen British workers is now on anti-depressants. Other findings include: 10% have seen a doctor as a result of work-related stress; 8% left work last year because of job-related stress;  5% of staff have seen a counselor; half of those questioned reported staff morale as low; antidepressant prescriptions rose from 35.9 million in 2008 to 39.1 million in 2009.

Meanwhile, research by the Shaw Trust found that half of UK managers think their staff do not suffer from mental illness.

Mooted solutions include:

• ensuring staff take breaks

• giving staff opportunities to raise concerns without fear of reprisal

• better availability of psychological therapies as well as medication

• counselling services

• more innovative approaches, such as BT's vegetable garden

More than distance

I went to Tuol Sleng this afternoon. Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was labelled by the Khmer Rouge, used to be a school. When the revolution came it was turned into a detention and torture centre through which people would pass on their way to Pol Pot’s killing fields.

The building has been preserved largely in the state in which it was found, a reminder to new generations of the genocide that between 1975 and 1978 eliminated a fifth of the country’s population.

The buildings have that corroded air about them  typical of concrete buildings in the tropics that have not been recently painted. Wooden doors rest wide open now, while the louvered and barred windows stay firmly shut.

Building A, the ground floor, was reserved for senior officials and their special, solitary treatment. You can still see the empty bed frame in the middle of the floor of each room. On each bed lies the steel bar and leg irons used to keep each person immobile. Photos on the wall show the bodies of the last fourteen inmates found dead in the rooms of S-21 when Phnom Penh was liberated. In what are now sun and time bleached prints you can see their bodies twisted into unnatural shapes, the lake of blood beneath the bed frame, limbs battered out of shape. Some bodies have a glazed look, as if they had been burned. But I think it was just the blood caked to their flesh reflecting the light.

In other rooms there are displays of thousands of photos of the newly admitted prisoners. Their numbers are pinned to their shirts or in at least one case to the man’s chest. They are taken sitting bolt upright. Many look simply serious; others look frightened. In some you see the petrification of the most profound fear imaginable. In one I detected a smile of defiance.

One particularly haunting image is an admission photo of a woman posing stiffly upright with her baby on her lap apparently asleep. Whether it was asleep then or not it is difficult to say. In any event, it would not have outlived its mother. Apparently, babies were killed in front of their mothers by being bashed against trees, or dropped from a high balcony.

A further room contains an assortment of torture apparatuses. A large tank that would contain water. The prisoner would first lie down on his or her front in the tank and the feet would be cuffed to the bottom. The prisoner’s wrists would then be cuffed to the rim of the tank, and the tank filled with water. Drowning – real or simulated makes little odds – seemed to feature heavily in the contraptions present.

Pervading everything is an air of intimacy. Tuol Sleng is human scale; it was a school, after all, before it was turned over to detention and torture, and no doubt the kind of school where the teachers all knew all the children. The classrooms would have been small enough to  manage the attention of a huddle of twenty or thirty young children against the noises competing from other classes. Now they stand divided into multiple cells by low cheap earthenware brick walls. Where teachers would have kept an eye on children playing on the ropes suspended from a high wooden frame, fellow prisoners would have been able to hear the screams and eventual silence of their fellow inmates suspended by their wrists with their hands tied behind their backs.

It is a big leap from financial malfeasance to torture, even if the outcomes can both be tragic. But they both raise questions about human nature. NOTHING PERSONAL is premised on the idea that if only those who took the actions that ultimately led to the financial crisis could see the faces and learn the stories of the human tragedy they had provoked, they would be deterred from taking such actions again.

But in Tuol Sleng – as in the concentration camps behind the Nazi genocide against the Jews – proximity and an intimate understanding of the pain being caused to others was not enough to stop them inflicting that pain or eventual death.

There is clearly something else in play in that situation, something that overrides our empathy-driven natural moral sense. It seems to me to be ideology - a mental cage, containing the arguments and assumptions that justify the end regardless of the means. When we accept such cages they constrain our awareness of our own individual ability to think and to choose to act differently. We may be motivated to accept them out of fear, of the need to survive or even flourish within a given reality; a desperation to reach the top of the pile of humanity.

For many of those we are trying to reach through NOTHING PERSONAL, helping them learn about the stories we are finding may prove to be enough to motivate them to change the way they do business. For others we may need to dismantle the ideological lens through which they see the world and justify their actions. That would be a book in itself – one that this financial crisis is helping to write.

Recap: why are we doing this?

For new readers of this blog I thought it would be useful to point you to Kelsey's excellent post that set out what the NOTHING PERSONAL project is all about:

It is personal

We both added to this in a couple of other posts:

Goldman Sachs: why the crisis needs a face
The case for "the human factor"

That's a lot of explanation, but it is worth repeating as Kelsey is about to start collecting stories for the project in Uganda.

Oshurmo’s soup

Another catch up post: you will remember Oshurmo, the lady in Khorog who was trying to make ends meet for her household of 12 when her children in Russia were no longer able to send money home.

After I left Oshurmo’s place following that first interview I felt more and more confused by what I had heard. Oshurmo’s whole attitude was to minimize their hardship, and that created a fog around the precise nature of the changes they had had to make when the household’s already scant income dropped by more than half.

While returning to my hotel the previous day I had seen a landcruiser belonging to the World Food Program parked outside. I asked at the building reception whether the WFP was in the building, thinking there was perhaps a conference on. Yes, I was told, their office was on the second floor – the same floor as my Delhi Darbar hotel room. Bed, breakfast and food scarcity expertise along my corridor, all for $30 a night. What a steal.

So when I returned to my hotel from Oshurmo’s place I called upon the World Food Program’s office and had a great meeting with Malohat Shabanova and Gulazor Mamadrizobekova. We brainstormed the kinds of things I should be asking in order to cut through the fog and get a clearer understanding of how her household’s life had changed since the crisis hit.

I returned with my translator Farid to see Oshurmo and learnt the following:

The size of the household has changed over the last two years. Two years ago she had eight mouths to feed, now she has 12 mouths to feed: two of her daughters-in-law and nine of the grandchildren.

Proteins: the family used to eat meat three times a week before the crisis, but now buy just 1kg (2.2 lb) of meat each month. They mix beans into their rice a couple of times a week. That has not changed.

Even though the size of the household has increased they still buy the same quantities of sugar (1kg), carrots (2kg) and potatoes (5kg) that they were consuming two years ago.

They have six apricot trees on their land which together provide a sack of dried fruit to last them that lasts all year. They use them in a local dish called Noshkhukhpa (about which I would like to learn more).

Since the crisis began they have acquired US$1,200 of debt that cannot be repaid from the combined household income of 280 somoni (US$60) (Oshurmo and her daughter-in-law’s wages, and Oshurmo’s pension). The debt is split between a rising backlog of electricity bills and the cost of a ticket to send her fifth son to Moscow to find work.

It seemed to me that one of the principal ways the household has adapted to the loss of remittance income from Russia following the crisis is to not pay the electricity bill. But apart from the cutback in protein I still didn’t feel I had a complete handle on their food situation.

I decide to get still more specific. I ask what dish they eat for the main evening meal. Twice a week they eat soup. OK, so how do they make the soup now, and how did they make it before?

Before the crisis (for 8 people)	Since the crisis (for 12 people)
200g (7 oz) rice 2 potatoes 2 onions 3 carrots 150g oil	250g (8.8 oz) rice 2 potatoes 2 onions 3 carrots 150g oil

Oshurma also explained that they add more water to the soup to make it go further.

So that’s it, their other coping strategy: they thin the soup.

As with the previous interview, Oshurma had responded to all my questions but with a certain brusqueness. I got the impression that she was being purposely dismissive of the significance of the questions, as if we were not touching on something as important as basic survival. As before, when we started, the family members were all gathered around. But this time, now we had started to drill down into the detail of their hardship and the decisions she was having to take to ensure they got by, I realised they had all disappeared from view. Oshurma was sitting here alone.

I turned off my sound recorder and sat on a low stool just in front of her. I commented on the way she seems to acknowledge the family’s deteriorating situation only grudgingly. I asked how she felt when the remittances stopped flowing.

She smiled and swayed back and brought her hands down with a light slap onto her knees as she sat. Yes, she said, sometimes she does get frustrated and angry about the situation, but what else can she do? Yes, it is hard, but she hopes and really believes that it will get better.

But then this tough, weathered woman’s eyes began to redden, and she hurriedly brushed a few escaped tears from her cheeks. She is not one to let her emotions show, and I hurriedly gathered my things, thanked her and left.

In and out of Osh, b’gosh

I set off from Khorog on 1st May for Kyrgyzstan’s southern city of Osh. This was the day my five-day Kyrgyzstan transit visa was dated to start, a deadline that added a certain frisson given the uncertain state in Spring of this, the only road I could take.

The journey took me through the Pamir mountains and a cut through the snow laden Akbaytal pass some 15,000 feet above sea level. The journey and the arrival in Osh on the 2nd of May warrant a blog post all to themselves. Just remind me to tell you the bit about the Kyrgyz border guard and the leg of mutton.

I had only one contact in Osh: a number I had received from Abdulfattoh, a cousin of the family who had looked after me so well in Dushanbe. Abdulfattoh’s text had simply read: “[telephone number] Tell him I’m friend of Mirasror”.

I still have no idea who Mirasror is. I repeated the message to the voice at the end of the phone line and in short order Hakimjon, a journalist with Radio Free Europe, arrived at my guest house. His lanky form unfolded itself from the back of his black car with precise moves, leaving the door wide open. He stepped aside and gestured to me to get in. As I did so I saw his illuminated and connected laptop on the back seat with Google Translate on screen, ready for my instructions from English into Kyrgyz. There was more than a touch of Mission Impossible in his style and in the manner of our interaction.

I explained that I was in Osh to get a comment from a political analyst about the causes of the seizure of power the previous month, a struggle that left 84 people dead and hundreds injured. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev had been ousted by the political opposition, and was now holed up in Belarus. The self-declared interim government that followed has since been recognized by both the Russian Federation and the USA, but the situation is far from resolved. And the USA depends upon its Kyrgyz base at Manas as a supply line for troops in Afghanistan. Political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan threatens the US’s national security interests.

Hakimjon took me to meet a translator, Elmurad Kasym, whose English was astonishingly good. He had spent a year in LA but that hardly explained his grasp of idiom. He would be perfect for the task. They put their heads together to think of a suitable interviewee. It took them just a few seconds.

Elmurod made the appointment and we drove to the home of Ganijon Khalamatov in a well-to-do street in the northern part of the centre. Though just 61 , my interviewee has a ravaged air about him that I was informed stems from long term illness. We sat cross-legged on cushions around the table in his drawing room and his wife set down the tea.

There is more than one way of telling the story of the country’s descent into political upheaval; Ganijon Khalamatov’s preference is for grand narratives. A theatre director for some forty years, his sweeping histories of ethnic rivalry make him a journalist’s talking head of choice on political developments in the country.

An Uzbek by ethnicity, Ganijon sees himself as an outsider to the national political scene dominated by the 60 per cent of the population that are Kyrgyz.

His explanation is insistently punctuated with one word: “Tribalism!” When you meet an Uzbek, he elaborates, he asks you which part of town you are from. When you meet a Kyrgyz he wants to know from which tribe you are from. The Kyrgyz feel greater allegiance to the tribe than to the nation. Hardly surprising, I reflect, given the arbitrary boundaries by which the modern state was created in the Fifties.

Mountains divide Kyrgyzstan into north and south. The people in the north, he said, include many people from Russia, and make up a goodly proportion of the country’s intelligentsia. The people in the south look to the north for spiritual leadership, tapping into the northerners’ deeper history. This leaves southerners, he said, with an identity crisis.

Northern clans had been ruling the country for a hundred years until the Tulip revolution in 2005 when a southern clan took the reins. Since then the new president and his son Maksim had become bywords for rampant corruption.

In this year’s uprising it was the northerners taking to the streets. Apart from the ousted president’s own tribe, the south has been “semi-neutral” to the seizure of power, he noted.

The political opposition used the economic condition of the population, he said, as a trigger to get them out onto the streets. There had also been recent substantial increases in electricity and heating costs, while the people had thought of Kyrgyzstan as a country of abundant natural energy.

I interrupted his flow to ask Ganijon whether he thought the economic crisis had anything to do with the political crisis. He was dismissive. There has always been an economic crisis, he said, but then he acknowledged that everyone in the country was dependent to some extent on remittances from family members working abroad and that remittances had fallen substantially following the global crisis. Then he insisted that the global crisis had been good for the country because it had actually reduced prices. But prices had fallen, surely, because falling remittances meant many people no longer had the money to buy goods.

His own son worked in Russia as a cook. He observed happily that cooks are always in work as people need to eat.

While acknowledging that there had to be an economic crisis to bring people to the streets, he insisted again that the economy was merely used by the opposition as an excuse, and that the real reason for the seizure of power was tribalism.

The people in the south, he went on, have been doing better economically over the last five years than people in the north. In the south the economic drivers are the trade in goods from China and the trade in drugs. In the north there is perhaps greater reliance on remittances because of the stronger connections (ethnic, linguistic and transport) to Russia.

Even so, he was sure that people in the north could have been brought out onto the streets even without the economic crisis. People have stronger allegiances to their tribe than to dealing with their own personal economic positions, he said sipping his tea. We were diverted a moment translating the English word “china” as used for fine crockery.

So why, I wondered aloud, had it happened now; not a year or two ago or a year or two hence but this year, in the aftermath of economic meltdown.

But for Ganijon the conversation was over. We stopped to eat Mustava – a soup containing meat and rice that gets its name (literally “drunk-heat”) because it used to be made early in the morning with lots of pepper, an antidote for a hangover.

For a less magisterial but insightful view of the roots and timing of the political crisis in Kyrgyzstan, take a look at this analysis by Madeleine Reeves. She argues that

it is poverty, in an absolute sense, as much as inequality that brought people out to demonstrate.

She goes on:

For many households the choice this winter has been a simple and stark one of cutting down on heating or cutting down on food.  At the same time, the single primary source of income for many rural and peri-urban families – the remittances sent by family members working in the Russian construction sector – has declined dramatically this year.  Many of those who travelled to Russia in search of work in 2008 or 2009 are “working on empty”. My research in the south of the country earlier this year suggests that many families who would ordinarily expect to receive money from family members in Russia once every one or two months have been waiting, without transfers, for a year or more as the financial crisis stopped Russia’s mid-2000s building boom in its tracks.

On the political dimension, she argues:

There has been a crisis of governance in Kyrgyzstan, certainly.  But an analysis focused on state failure conceals the extent to which what has occurred is also the product of a glaring social and economic crisis – part of the “long-range” fall-out from the global financial crisis that has pushed many families to the brink.

Making that fall-out feel less long-range is what NOTHING PERSONAL is all about. So let me paraphrase Madeleine Reeves’ conclusion: the global financial crisis triggered Kyrgyzstan’s upheaval and with it the loss of those 84 lives.

If it still feels too distant to matter, let me put it another way. Patriotism features often in public discourse about the economy, often enough in protectionist form. So here’s a question: how patriotic is it for Wall Street to unleash an economic shock wave of planetary proportions, placing in jeopardy not just fragile economies, but fragile states – some like Kyrgyzstan that are crucial to the US’ national security interests?

Some catching up to do

Yesterday morning at about this time (6:00am-ish) I was on a sleeper train pulling into the terribly modern Shenzhen station. It was the last leg of my train journey from the far (they might say “wild”) north west of China to the far corner of the  industrial south east.

In the last week I have spent over eighty hours on trains – almost as much time as my brother Michael spends commuting to work in London in a regular week.

Just kiddin’ Mikey.

The station is buried within a massive shopping centre. You glance up as you walk inside and see signs indicating where to walk for restrooms, different metro lines, oh, and to Hong Kong.

Yes, one country, two systems, and one consuming passion.

Once through immigration I headed straight to Hong Kong’s international airport, grumbling to myself that I was missing out on the opportunity for some fabulous Dim Sum. But the last week had been a slow one for NOTHING PERSONAL and I was anxious to get back to some intensive story-gathering here, where I have landed up, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Before getting into why I’m here, I need to bring you up to speed with what I saw between my last post from Khorog and the start of that epic cross-country train journey. Stay tuned.

A walk in the slums

Andrew and I are exploring the lives of folks who were plugged into the global economy only to have their world and the economy come crashing down. Some folks never had the luxury of being a part of the global economy. I spent the past week with an organization called Life in Abudance that works in the slums.

Here’s a post I first wrote for my own blog:

A billion people live in the slums of our world.

As one of the 5 billion that don’t, I think we have an obligation to at least know what life is like for the other 17% of humanity. So, I thought we would take a stroll together through the slums of Mathare.

Wait, you are going to wear those shoes? Are you sure? They look awfully white.

Man makes things in straight lines. The Mathera valley is anything but. The tin shacks, rickety antennas, rusting roofs, and winding paths are awkward and uneven, organic. Nature takes what’s given to it and makes what it can. People living in poverty do the same.

This path leads down the valley. It hurts my knees to take such large steps without anything to hang on to. I’m 31 with a bad set of knees and it’s a bit challenging. What about the old folks? Well, considering the average person lives to be 50 in Mathare, it’s not that big of a deal. Something else usually gets you before your joints fail completely. There aren’t any walkers or scooters here.

You’re asking me what you just stepped in? How am I supposed to know, you are the one who stepped in it. I told you that you shouldn’t have worn the white shoes.

There are puddles here. Lots of them. You can’t really call them water puddles or mud puddles because they are a mix of bathwater puddles, laundry puddles, pee puddles, and any other form of thing that oozes and runs from high places to low. You stepped in a slum puddle.

You’ll get used to the smell after awhile. Trust me, I’ve been sprayed by a skunk. The smell would never be canned and sold, sure, but I don’t think it’s bad as you think. You know how when you don’t like the way something tastes, you hold your nose? Well, here in Mathare, if you don’t like the way something smells you can close your eyes and it won’t smell so bad. You won’t see the four-year-old boy dropping trowel, you won’t see the three little piles of poo next too each other, each unhealthier looking than the next. You won’t see food scraps, plastic, cardboard, and people in various stages of decomposition and degradation. You won’t see the screaming toddler on the ground kicking his feet after a painful fall, not looking for his mother because she’s not watching, dusting himself off and going about his unsupervised toddler business.

Speaking of the kids…just let the kids tug on your arms. They don’t see people like us that often. We have arm hair and they don’t. Anytime you meet someone with hair or an excessive amount of hair in a place where you never knew that hair grew - or at least in such a quantity - it is natural to pet them. Enjoy it.

While you’re being petted, I recommend working on a few Swahili words, Jamba and Sassa both mean hi. You could also teach the kids how to thumb wrestle, how to pull your thumb off, or anything else with your hands that requires the movement of your hairy little digits.

Watch your step, it’s especially slick and steep here near the river. Yep, that’s not a river of Orange Crush splitting the valley. This isn’t Candy Land. In board games everyone plays by the same rules, everyone has the same chance of getting to the Peppermint forest before any other player, everyone has an equal chance to be a winner. Mathare is full of losers.

The people started at home - likely a surrounding province - moved to Nairobi “the land of opportunity,” and foud themselves stopped in the land of molasses with little hope of ever returning.

The river of Orange Fanta is nearly worthless. It’s good for carrying waste of humans or from humans away. It can’t be used for drinking or washing. It damages homes when it floods. And the true test of any body of water to it’s usefulness, kids can’t/won’t play in it.

The bridge is a bit tricky. I’m sure you could build a better one with a $25 gift card to Lowe’s and 20 minutes. Still, there’s no other way to cross. Yes, it’s uneven. Yes, it bows beneath your weight. No it probably hasn’t been “inspected” since the last person walked across it and it didn’t break. But it didn’t break, so buck up and cross.

Welcome to the west side of Mathare. It’s pretty much like the east side so I’ll shut up now and you can soak up Mathare for yourself.

There is one last thing you should know: the folks on the west side think the folks on the east live tougher and more dangerous lives. In turn, the people on the east believe the same thing in reverse.

It’s our nature to think someone else always has it worse than us. In some instances, it’s healthy. But for you and me, who belong to the privileged 80% who don’t live in a slum, it’s anything but healthy.

In fact, it makes us sick.