A Day in a Bangladesh Factory-My Response to the Dhaka Buidling Collapse Tragedy

I was pretty new to Bangladesh the day some friends took me to tour a carpet factory. The experience was incredible to my 22-year-old senses. Huge machines wielding massive spools of thread, following instructions poked into cards like the kind that used to run those old self-playing pianos, shuttling out row after row of what would become another of those beautiful oriental carpets that cost so much money on this side of the world.

Piles of jute waiting to become a carpet.

We were shown around and I marveled at carpets stacked 8-10 feet high in huge warehouse rooms. When I climbed up on one stack to get a picture, I accidentally breathed in some clump of something and started coughing. I coughed and coughed and almost couldn't breathe. I can't imagine working their every day all day for years.

The thing that struck me most about the factory was not the beautiful rugs or huge machinery or even the workers. It was the measures they had put in place in case of fire. Next to a support pole I saw a barrel of water. Above that barrel hung two small buckets that had once been painted red, labeled, "Fire."

With all the dust, threads and debris floating through the air, not to mention the carpets and jute piles all over the building, a fire would incinerate the place with fury, and quickly. That little bucket-full might douse an overcooked marshmallow, but was ridiculous in this situation. Yet it hung there, almost in mockery of anyone who actually cared about safety.

Hearing about the garment factory that collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was painful. Like that fire bucket, that garment factory probably had "safety measures" put in place only to satisfy some clause in some document that would make overseas realtors feel like they'd achieved a modicum of safety.

Bangladesh is one of only 2 countries in the wold in such bad shape it's considered a 5th world country. The buildings are decrepit and conditions are bad. It's a very good place to get very cheap stuff.

But the cost is still high.

I lived in Bangladesh for 2 years and every day could see the huge groups of girls walking together in herds to and from the factory (it's not safe to walk alone--it can also be unsafe to be a garment factory girl if a manager takes an interest). I was there when Kathy Lee Gifford changed the rules that kids couldn't work in her sweat shops. It made things harder, not easier, for families in Bangladesh. What was intended for good ended up with families having to bribe the factory owners to let their children come back to work. Now that it was illegal for children to work there, the owners could get them for less pay, knowing people were desperate and if the children didn't work the less there was to eat.

As much as videos like the above (about the Dhaka collapse and major companies who refuse to sign a document insuring more safety measure like fire escapes) are important, and documents and laws create good change overall, I see a bigger problem, one that streams all the way to each of us and the choices we make.

If we were in Bangladesh, I would take you to a special outdoor market where the extras from garment factories are sold. I could buy name brand stuff ridiculously cheap there. In fact, I could even buy the brands themselves. At one place, I bought a handful of labels--Calvin Kline, Reebox, etc. For pennies, I could have bought a major name brand and put it on any dumb shirt I had.

I fact, I had this urge to buy the ugliest outfit I could find and slap a major label on it, and see if people thought I was cool.

It's a modern version of the emperor's new clothes. Americans ignore the fact that their mega brand expensive shirt might be made in the same exact factory as the cheapo stuff at Wal-Mart. Instead, our culture for some reason loves to pretend there's a big difference, and spending lots of money on one makes us more significant than spending a little money on another.

Not buying name brands is not going to fix Bangladesh's factory problems, but it might help with the bigger problem that connects all of this. Greed. Greed by major corporations is the reason so many of our clothes are being made by Bangladeshis who may not even have a 2nd outfit or a pair of shoes. Greed keeps them from investing to keep buildings from collapsing, or paying their workers a decent wage. But we can't lay all the blame at the corporations feet. Greed is also what keeps Americans shopping in malls, always looking for something new, when nearly every American has more than much of the world can even imagine. Greed for status keeps parents buying their kids the name brand shoes. Greed for popularity has teens buying the latest cool brand this year, though their closet is full and overflowing with last year's cool clothes, and the year before that.

Maybe a solution would be that we, who have so much, would stop snatching up more from over there, and instead start giving something back in that direction.

Kohls and Gap and Target have more than enough. They should gladly give up a little extra for the good of the world, right?

So should we.

The Taste of Cow Brains, and Writing What You Know

The following is published in Southern Writer's Magazine this month. In case you don't read that magazine, this is for you!

            Most writers out there will likely never have a scene where a character tries eating cow brains. So why am I bringing it up?

            Because I have. I lived in Bangladesh for two years, and during those years I got to ride rickshaws, take pictures of goat heads lined up for sale at the market, wear six yards of silk in equatorial heat, and yes, eat cow brains (and bone marrow in case you’re impressed). I also got to experience a new culture and learn that the way I think isn’t the only way to think, and the way I view the world isn’t the only way to view it. Branching outside myself into that new world has broadened my horizons significantly as far as writing possibilities—not just topics, but in creating multidimensional characters utilizing the vastly different perspectives people can have.

Cow brains on a plate, from the chicken tikka stand. Why cow brains instead of chicken brains? I don't know. Maybe the chicken brains were too small.

            They say you should write what you know. I’m not sure who “they” are, but it is wise advice. You can write about tasting cow brains using only your imagination, but if you’ve never done it, you probably wouldn’t think to say that it was the texture that was the hardest to get down—something akin to eating a grainy kind of play-dough.  Not fun.

            I have never had the inclination to write a book in a European setting, or a Latin American setting. I don’t know those places. I could research, but it wouldn’t be same. Because I lived in Bangladesh, however, I came to know some of the Asian way of thinking. How it felt to try to remember not to point my foot in anyone’s direction or ever use my left hand or in some places never look a man in the eye. I know what it felt like to travel in a rickshaw through the haze of smoke and congestion of the city, what it felt like to see a robbery at knifepoint, or the swarm and clutter of over 130 million people cramped into a country not much bigger than North Carolina.

            It’s what I know, so of course, when I was ready to write my first series, Christian suspense/romance novels on international human trafficking, I set them in South Asia. My character experienced the new culture firsthand, just as I did. And because it is what I know, I was able to express her feelings and reactions in a very real way.

            Real is powerful. Powerful makes for a good story.

            That’s not to say you can’t ever branch out. There are multitudes of writers out there who do excellent research and can weave a story that takes readers to places the author has never been, or into situations and feelings the author has never experienced.

            However, I think the most powerful books I have read, even if they are fiction, seem to delve deeply into the author’s own personal experience—either through their own memories, or the subjects they are most passionate about, or the things they themselves are struggling with.

            So what are you meant to write? If you’re feeling stumped, here are a few questions to ask yourself: What experiences have you had that would resonate with people? (Have you lost a spouse? Survived cancer? Traveled the world? Been mugged? Felt writer’s block?—ha, had to throw that one in there!)  What are you most passionate about? (What makes you most angry? Most excited? What topic gets your heart rate up every time it comes up?)

            You have your own unique voice. Your experiences and goals and struggles and heartaches all combine together into something you can share with the world. Maybe your non-fiction story will help people deal with things. Or maybe your fiction story will entertain them while also resonating with their deepest struggles.

            Whatever it is, it is you. Your most powerful writing will come when you write what you know, and what you care about, because that is who you are.



Related Posts: Why Do You Write? 

Writing What I Know 

The Stranger You Married

            It was my first experience seeing an arranged marriage.  The Asian bride was beautiful: her hands and feet painted with intricate red designs and flowers around her neck.

            She sat solemnly, face covered with heavy layers of white makeup.  Her groom sat nearby on the stage—thin, lanky, and obviously nervous.

 

            Who wouldn’t be?  I could not stop the questions that came to mind.  What would it feel like to marry a stranger?  What would you say to a man you just married but never really met?

            “So, what do you like to do on the weekends?”

            “Um, what’s your favorite color?”

            “Do you think I’m pretty?”

            “Who are you?”

            The two marrying that day had actually spoken with each other on two or three occasions and, because of this nebulous period of time, their marriage was deemed a “love match.”

            The ceremony concluded, not with a kiss, but with his hand grasping hers—a touch that seemed uncomfortable to both parties.

            As the new couple walked back down the aisle, I wondered at their future.  Would he love her?  Would they become friends?  How does it work in places where marriage comes before love, and possibly without love altogether?

Author getting a wedding makeover

            Yet, most arranged marriages last for life, while American marriages are falling apart at alarming rates.  Why?  Shouldn’t “love” marriages and “choice” marriages last longer?

            It has been explained to me a few times since that curious day.  Our marriages, they say, are based on feeling and infatuation, with high expectations of lasting love and

romance.  If the feelings falter or the romance fades, we feel cheated and are tempted to give up.

            Their marriages, on the other hand, are based on cultural expectations and another’s choice, usually the father’s.  Often, even in a horrible situation where one might want to escape, separation is not an option.  The shame of family, the inability for women to survive independently, and the lifetime ingraining of purpose and duty all keep marriages together regardless of circumstances.

            I read once that since they go into marriage with so few, if any, good expectations, they see any small act of kindness a great gift.  We tend to go into marriage with so many expectations, we see any lack of them as if our rights to happiness have been infringed.

            Where do expectations come from?

            Every person comes into marriage with different family-cultural expectations.  How did you celebrate Christmas growing up?  How did your parents divide household chores? 

            How do expectations affect our marriages?

If we let them, expectations can drive a wedge that buries itself deeper and deeper, forging rifts between you that affect your child rearing, your time alone, your sex life, your desire to keep trying.

What can we do about our expectations?

1.  Figure out what they are. 

Every time you feel yourself getting upset about anything your husband is or isn’t doing, there is an expectation involved. 

2.  Express some of them.

 “This is important to me,” might be all he needs.  He doesn’t know how important something is to you until you say so.

This is not the same as nagging or manipulating.  It’s communicating.  It’s unfair of me to assume “If he really cared. . .” he would instinctively know what I would like. 

3.  Realize your husband has expectations too. 

Find out what hour husband expects and hopes.  Find out what shows

love to him and what doesn’t.  Then start giving, even if your expectations are not being met yet.  Let God change you first, then watch with delight as God changes your husband.

4.  Fill in the cracks with commitment.

Before God, you promised to love and honor until death.  When you feel unfulfilled, that promise is still a promise.  There will be times when your expectations are not met.  Whether or not your marriage survives depends on how well you allow the commitment you made fill in all the cracks of your unfulfilled expectations.

Fortunately, unlike so many in arranged marriages, we do not have to do this alone.  God is always there to comfort and help.  We can take our unfulfilled expectations to Him, and He will carry them.  We can feel loved and valued, despite our circumstances, because the One Who loves us most is the same “yesterday, today, and forever.” (Heb. 13:8)

            I did not have to marry a stranger.  I had the wonderful freedom of marrying my best friend.  That is not something I take for granted. 

May God bless my husband with a wife who is loving and giving for Christ’s sake, allowing him to be the same.  

            That’s what a true “love” marriage is all about.

This post linked to Wifey Wednesdays, Beautifully Imperfect!

Letter 40: Married at age 12--can you imagine?

Dear Elizabeth,

            When I arrived in Bangladesh in early 1998, e-mail had just arrived there as well.  It had been big in America for years by then, but it took awhile to get all the way to Bangladesh.  The missionaries thought it was great.  I didn’t blame them, since they were used to sending letters which took two weeks to arrive, if they got there at all and didn’t get accidentally rerouted to Thailand or some other country.

            I’m not sure why, but my mom printed out the e-mails I sent her when I lived in Bangladesh and saved them in a drawer.  When I returned, she gave them to me.

            Most of them were full of the boring drivel that we call small talk, so I threw them away, but I did weed out some good stories and funny stories.  Like the day I traveled to a village and met a woman who had married at age 12.  I’ll let my e-mail tell the story . . .

            Wednesday, 8 April 1998

            A lady and I went to visit a family in a neighboring village.  We walked through the village with our heads covered and had a parade of children following us by the end of the day.  We got to the mud house (not as unsturdy as you’d think) and went in for tea—everybody has tea time here, that’s another great one when it’s hot, drinking hot tea. 

            Get this, the lady was married when she was twelve.  She now has seven daughters and a little boy.  Three of her daughters are already married, the oldest one being my age!  Yeesh, makes me feel like an old maid!

This wasn't the girl married off at age 12, but this was an arranged marriage--from the look on her face, you can get the idea that they're not exactly fun.

            I still remember that day and that woman, who looked so aged, though she couldn’t have been much older than me.  I was staring at her as if she had dropped from another planet until I realized that she was staring exactly the same way at me!  Guess it’s all about what you’re used to.

            Life Lesson:  Be thankful, Elizabeth, that you live in a country and culture that allows you to make choices, instead of one that will marry you off when you turn twelve years old--and likely to someone you've never even met!

So what do cow brains REALLY taste like?

In case you were wondering, from the trip-to-the-market post (deleted chapter from Book 2), the market was based on a real market I used to take visitors to in Bangladesh, and yes, it did have goat heads in a line for sale.  I thought about posting the picture I had of that delightful scene, but decided to spare you!  =)  Also true is the water buffalo walking down the road to market, the statistic about Bangladesh having 150 million people, and the cow-brains eating experience (and they really do taste like Play-dough).  Uuck.

Tomorrow I'm posting a sneak peak at Book 2, Stolen Child (which is due for release this Christmas!).  This chapter is based on a real arranged marriage ceremony I attended during my first weeks in Bangladesh, and it, too, was considered a love match because the couple had spoken 3 times.  I remember sitting there wide-eyed, wondering what it would be like to marry someone I did not know (I was single at the time and marriage in itself was scary to me--this was beyond comprehension!).

So join me tomorrow (or rather Asha and Mark) and experience a wedding like you've never seen before!

Trip to Bangladesh--Part 3 of 3

I stood outside the airport in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, looking out on a scene I could never have imagined.

Different, I had expected.  Surprising, yes.  Even a little shocking would not have been too out there.

I was not, however, expecting to arrive just as the second largest Muslim festival in the world was letting out, right there near the airport.  Muslim men, in their long shirts and prayer hats, were as far as the eye could see, filling in every conceivable space, creating a sea of humanity--male humanity.

The largest Muslim festival in the world: Mecca 

(Those are all people down there)

And there I was.  White.  Female.  Wearing American clothes.  Practically begging to be stared at as the foreign curiosity I was.

Fortunately, I was not alone.  People from our company were there to meet me, and as I said I had been joined by others along the trip--two visiting couples and one daughter.  We were all herded through the chaos--beggars, street kids, way overhelpful men wanting to take my every piece of luggage for me (for a small fee of course).  It was quite the challenge just to keep from being "helped!"

When we had all piled into the van, the real adventure began.  Imagine trying to drive through a sea of hundreds of thousands of men heading home.  Like the traffic when you leave after a ball game, except take away the nice orderly lines of vehicles, the defining yellow and white lines on the roads, blinkers, and traffic lights.  Instead picture hundreds of rickshaws inching between golf-cart sized baby taxis, a few cars, the van we were in, all pushing and prodding trying to gain any forward movement.   Make sure your imagination has every window rolled down, exhaust so thick you can see the black fumes, horns blaring from every possible direction, oh, and of course people wandering through all of this, the walkers traveling faster than any of the above.

If we got too close to another vehicle, the nearest passenger would simply reach out and bang a few times on the side of the van.  That was rather startling . . . the first ten times or so.  People were yelling, shoving, merging--if you could call it that--in and out of spaces so small you would never believe anything could fit.  But somehow they did.  It was stop and go, and stop, stop, stop.

I was enthralled.  What a great way to begin this amazing adventure!  Well, except for being stared at the entire time, choking on the pollution, and having a tendency toward motion sickness.

The one visiting couple, who had served as missionaries in Hong Kong for many years, were sitting near the front of the van.  The man muttered, "I have never seen anything like this."  Well, it felt like he muttered it, but likely he was shouting and a mutter was all I heard over all the other competing noises.

The first time he said it, I felt a sense of pride that this fascinating place was my new home.  By the sixth or seventh time he said it, however, I was starting to feel a bit nervous.  Was I ready for someplace so "interesting" that even a veteran world traveler was this dumbfounded?

What should have been a fifteen minute ride to the guest house took over three hours.  THREE hours. (My memory may not have perfectly accurate numbers, but I'm pretty sure those are correct.)  At one point we were on a road that was equivalent to a four lane, with a median in between.  We were on the left side of the road, of course, when we looked ahead and noticed that oncoming traffic had found a break somewhere, and flooded over to our side, trying to get an edge forward.  So now not only were we in bumper to bumper traffic--or rather bumper to rickshaw wheel to baby taxi door to pedestrian traffic--now we were facing that same mess coming right toward us.  Obviously, this resulted in a game of chicken less than rousing because no one was going over one mile an hour!

Eventually we arrived at the guest house with relief.  Our trip, however, was far from over.  Next up was our final jaunt, from the capital city to Chittagong.  At the time, there was no flight to that city, so we got to ride on a bus.  A swerving, horn-blaring bully that charged toward Chittagong without fear, passing into oncoming traffic with a bravado that it probably should not have had, and that I certainly did not share.

I remember that we rode through the night, not a pleasant experience for a first-timer.  I watched down the middle aisle and through the front windshield as the bus again and again passed over into the right lane, did not slow even when oncoming headlights barreled right toward us.  I seriously doubt I slept at all that night.  But I didn't throw up, despite all the swaying and swerving, so that was a plus.

After the six-hour bus ride through the night, I was in Chittagong, the place that would be my home for the next two years.  I was tired, but happy.  I had made it on my first across-the-world trip.  I had endured.  I had survived.  And I was excited about whatever would come next.

Just so long as I got a good night's sleep first.





Next Up: Come with me on a tour of Chittagong--to the market (goat-head soup anyone?), via a deleted chapter from Book 2 of the Stolen Series, Stolen Child!