Last month

The last couple of weeks: swimming in rivers and oceans, eating fruit, drinking rum, climbing up trees, jumping down from waterfalls. Listeing to Devendra Banhart and Iron & Wine. Falling in love. Touching the soft skin with my own. Talking. And life has never seemed more simple …

Somebody has touched my soul.

I am sick of blogging. I may call it a day.

What happened?

Yeah what the f*** happened? I was sooo going to this Zeitgeist international event. I was so willing to participate. So many good intentions, so many questions to ask, so much to discuss. So much. So what happened I don’t know. I took a bus from San Jose to Heredia where the event in question was supposed to take place. The spot was called D&C house and that was it. No address on the website, no phone number nothing but D&C house and the e-mail of some Shiva dude that did not answer my message. I spent 10 $ on taxi around the beautiful village of Heredia. For less then 10 $ I could cross the border and go the beach in Panama. The funny fact was than nobody knew where this D&C house was, nobody – shopkeepers, policeman, young and old. Nobody had a clue. I was running in circles around the village like a crazy person trying to find some international event that is taking place in HEREDIA. Damn it. I am crazy in indeed. Because no single Tico (a person from Costa Rica) will do what I did – spend the lovely Sunday summer evening in looking for a Zday. So I ve been thinking – its supposed to be an international event right? And everybody is invited, right? Not only that everybody is invited – the more the better, its for the cause!!! People have to know, people have to be invited. If its some rpivate event than damn all that noise. Moreover, why did these people decide that Heredia, some D&C House with a questionable existance is the right spot to gather people and talk about the world, the system and the revolution of consiousness and stuff like that? Why Heredia, when 30 min away in the very cosmopolitan capital of Costa Rica – the lovely home of mine called San Jose- there was a huge art/hippie/music/literature festival. Why Heredia if the majority of the intelligent, creative, capable and willing yougn people of this nation are all over the centre, the parks, the main squares? Many questions and no answer. So instead of becoming part of this movement Camie ended up sipping cas juice at Super Burrito in the hot sumer night of some Costa Rican village, starring at El Mayor de los Anillos (Lord of the Rings).

Oh well, I hope I sound pissed off! :DDD cause I am. My own Zeitgeist – I have found an organization in San Jose that will recycle waste from various primary and secondary schools. I guess we all have to find our own way to boycott the system.

Zeitgeist day

15 March 2009, Sunday.

Internationally, young intelligent people will gather in order to see instead of watch, hear instead of listen. The voice of thousands will be spread around the world. To boycott the system. I hope you have seen Addendum. I hope you have thought bout it at least a bit. I hope something deep inside you has screamed and rioted and quietly unconsciously turned upside down!!!!! And finally, I hope you have made up you mind.

By chance.. if there is such a thing like chance… I opened the official web site of the Zeitgeist Movement and discovered the following:

1. One of the primary official languages of the website is Bulgarian
2. On the 15 March 2009 thousands (I hope millions) of people will unite in cities all over the world and will become part of the movement. They will watch,read and discuss, whatever…it does not matter at all to me!
3. From the Central American countries only two will participate. The Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Way too many coincidences

This is the website where you can check out the reunion spots.

I am posting this blog with an appeal to all of you. Please, if you have time, go to one of those meetings. Nobody will ever ask you for money. Everybody is welcome and that’s the point. It has to start from somewhere. I know it sounds unrealistic, naïve, too positive and whatever you may call it. But it has to start somewhere. Those of you who know me well enough -you know that I am not a way too positive person all the time, I am not naïve and I don’t fall for ideologies. This is not an ideology.

Nothing, nothing else has made so much sense. Nothing else has touched me like that. It’s not about how much the world has f**** us up! It’s about tomorrow. It’s about us. It’s a long way to go, but the destination is here- heart and mind.

“The real revolution is the revolution of the consciousness. And first of all each and every single one of us must eliminate the divisionary materialistic noise that we’ve been conditioned to think is true while amplifying, discovering and aligning the signal coming form our true empirical ones. It’s up to you!:

The March of the Zapotec

Aaaahhhh. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It’s painful to know that HE will be in Amsterdam and Brussels the coming May and I am on the other side of the world. There will be Gulag Orchestra playing out loud my favorite songs, there will be those Elephant guns shooting with millions of brass melodies, there will be Sunday Smiles and Postcards from Italy. And I will not be there to sing along ….. “What melody will lead my Lover from his bed”. Anyways “The March of the Zapotec” the newest of Beirut is a FACT. They did not split. Zach is Zach again successfully recovered after his crisis last summer. I just don’t understand why there is nothing about the album on 3voo12 or Myspace?!!! Why are you torturing meeee!!!!

I have to see them live before I die! I have to immerse myself in this ingenuous oblivion called Beirut – hypnotized by this music, intoxicated by this voice. Sing for me “March of the Zapotec”!!! Sing for me in the following spring months as your ancenstor “The flying Club Cup” sang for me last seasons under rain and snow. Sad and joyous. I will catch up one day. He is still 22.

Could somebody tell Zach Condon that he is the bestest!

The end of poverty?

You have probably noticed that the majority of the clothes that we buy in those modern boutiques such as GAP, H&M, Zarra and the like were made in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh. I don’t know what kind of thoughts are being evoked by the etiquette on your new H&M shirt but I have always imagined thousands of impoverished women sitting in front of sewing machines. Treated like dogs. Paid less than enough to feed their numerous skinny children. Even though I have these thoughts every time I buy a product created by this booming garment industry, I normally burry them somewhere deep down this dusty basket case called consciousness and head for the counter. This is a term called a “compassion fatigue” (to put it simply: the Stress of Caring Too Much – no joking here this is a serious contemporary syndrome but I would dedicate a post to this curious phenomenon some other time). Interestingly, I came across a book that had a chapter on this very topic – poor Bangladeshi women working in the garment industry- and apparently I was right and I was wrong. Yes indeed –they are paid little; yes indeed – they are treated like dogs. But may be there is another side of the coin. If you have time and want to read something interesting from the catalogue of this big bad world of ours take a look at this excerpt.

Sachs, Jeffry. D, “The End of Poverty: Economic possibilities of our time”, Chapter 1: A global family portrait, page 26-30, Penguin Group Inc, New York, 2005

“Bangladesh was born in a war for independence against Pakistan in 1971. That year, it experienced massive famine and disarray, leading an official in Henry Kissinger's State Department to famously label it an "international basket case." Bangladesh today is far from a basket case. Per capita income has approximately doubled since independence. Life expectancy has risen from forty-four years to sixty-two years. The infant mortality rate (the number of children who die before their first birthday for every 1,000 born) has declined from 145 in 1970 to 48 in 2002. Bangladesh shows us that even in circumstances that seem the most hopeless there are ways forward if the right strategies are applied, and if the right combination of investments is made.

Still, Bangladesh is not out of the grip of extreme poverty. Although it has escaped the worst of the ravages of famine and disease in the past generation, it faces some profound challenges today. A few months after my visit to Malawi, I was up at dawn one morning in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to see a remarkable sight: thousands of people walking to work in long lines stretching from the outskirts of Dhaka and from some of its poorest

neighborhoods. Looking more closely, I noticed that these workers were almost all young women, perhaps between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. These are the workers of a burgeoning garment industry in Dhaka who cut, stitch, and package millions of pieces of apparel each month for shipment to the United States and Europe. Over the years, I have visited garment factories all over the developing world. I have grown familiar with the cavernous halls where hundreds of young women sit at sewing machines, and men at cutting tables, where the fabrics move along production lines and the familiar labels of GAP, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Wal-Mart, J. C. Penney, and others are attached as the clothing reaches the final stages of production. There is nothing glamorous about this work. The women often walk two hours each morning in long quiet files to get to work. Arriving at seven or seven-thirty, they may be in their seats for most of the following twelve hours. They often work with almost no break at all or perhaps a very short lunch break, with little chance to go to the lavatory. Leering bosses lean over them, posing a threat of sexual harassment. After a long, difficult, tedious day, the young women trudge back home, when they are again sometimes threatened with physical assault. These sweatshop jobs are the targets of public protest in developed countries; those protests have helped to improve the safety and quality of the working conditions. The rich-world protesters, however, should support increased numbers of such jobs, albeit under safer working conditions, by protesting the trade protectionism in their own countries that keeps out garment exports from countries such as Bangladesh. These young women already have a foothold in the modern economy that is a critical, measurable step up from the villages of Malawi (and more relevant for the women, a step up from the villages of Bangladesh where most of them were born). The sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty. They give lie to the Kissingerstate department's forecast that Bangladesh is condemned to extreme poverty.

On one visit to Bangladesh, I picked up an English-language morning newspaper, where I found an extensive insert of interviews with young women working in the garment sector. These stories were poignant, fascinating, and eye-opening. One by one, they recounted the arduous hours, the lack of labor rights, and the harassment. What was most striking and unexpected about the stories was the repeated affirmation that this work was the greatest opportunity that these women could ever have imagined, and that their employment had changed their lives for the better. Nearly all of the women interviewed had grown up in the countryside, extraordinarily poor, illiterate and unschooled, and vulnerable to chronic hunger and hardship in a domineering, patriarchal society. Had they (and their forebearers of the 1970s and 1980s) stayed in the villages, they would have been forced into a marriage arranged by their fathers, and by seventeen or eighteen, forced to conceive a child. Their trek to the cities to take jobs has given these young women a chance for personal liberation of unprecedented dimension and opportunity. The Bangladeshi women told how they were able to save some small surplus from their meager pay, manage their own income, have their own rooms, choose when and whom to date and marry, choose to have children when they felt ready, and use their savings to improve their living conditions and especially to go back to school to enhance their literacy and job-market skills.

As hard as it is, this life is a step on the way to economic opportunity that was unimaginable in the countryside in generations past. Some rich-country protesters have argued that Dhaka's apparel firms should either pay far higher wage rates or be closed, but closing such factories as a result of wages forced above worker productivity would be little more than a ticket for these women back to rural misery. For these young women, these factories offer not only opportunities for personal

freedom, but also the first rung on the ladder of rising skills and income for themselves and, within a few years, for their children. Virtually every poor country that has developed successfully has gone through these first stages of industrialization. These Bangladeshi women share the experience of many generations of immigrants to New York City's garment district and a hundred other places where their migration to toil in garment factories was a step on the path to a future of urban affluence in succeeding generations. Not only is the garment sector fueling Bangladesh's economic growth of more than 5 percent per year in recent years, but it is also raisingthe consciousness and power of women in a society that was long brazenly biased against women's chances in life.

As part of a more general and dramatic process of change throughout Bangladeshi society, this change and others give Bangladesh the opportunity in the next few years to put itself on a secure path of long-term economic growth. The countryside that these women have left is also changing quickly, in part because of the income remittances and ideas that the young women send back to their rural communities, and in part because of the increased travel and temporary migration between rural and urban areas, as families diversify their economic bases between rural agriculture and urban manufacturers and services. In 2003, my colleagues at Columbia and I visited a village near Dhaka with one of the leaders of an inspiring nongovernmental organization, the Bangladeshi Rural Advancement Committee, now known universally as BRAC. There we met representatives from a village association, which BRAC had helped to organize, in which women living about an hour outside the city were engaged in small-scale commercial activities— food processing and trade—within the village and on the roads between the village and Dhaka itself. These women presented a picture of change every bit as dramatic as that of the burgeoning apparel sector.
Wearing beautiful saris, the women sat on the ground in six rows, each with six women, to greet us and answer questions. Each row represented a subgroup of the local "microfinance" unit. The woman in the front of the row was in charge of the borrowing of the whole group behindher. The group in each line was mutually responsible for repayments of the loans taken by any member within the line. BRAC and its famed counterpart, Grameen Bank, pioneered this kind of group lending, in which impoverished recipients (usually women) are given small loans of a few hundred dollars as working-capital for microbusiness activities. Such women were long considered unbankable, simply not creditworthy enough to bear the transaction costs to receive loans. Group lending changed the repayment dynamics: default rates are extremely low, and BRAC and Grameen have figured out how to keep other transaction costs to a minimum as well. Perhaps more amazing than the stories of how microfinance was fueling small-scale businesses were the women's attitudes to child rearing.

When Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and one of the world's leading experts on reproductive health, asked the women how many had five children, no hands went up. Four? Still no hands. Three? One nervous woman, looking around, reluctantly put her hand in the air. Two? About 40 percent of the women. One? Perhaps another 25 percent. None? The remainder of the women. Here was a group where the average number of children for these mothers was between one and two children. Rosenfield then asked them how many they wanted in total. He again started at five—no hands. Four? No hands. Three? No hands. Two? Almost all the hands went up. This social norm was new, a demonstration of a change of outlook and possibility so dramatic that Rosenfield dwelt on it throughout the rest of our visit. He had been visiting Bangladesh and other parts of Asia since the 1960s, and he remembered vividly the days when Bangladeshi rural women would typically have had six or seven children.

The jobs for women in the cities and in rural off-farm microenterprises; a new spirit of women's rights and independence and empowerment; dramatically reduced rates of child mortality; rising literacy of girls and young women; and, crucially, the availability of family planning and contraception have made all the difference for these women.

There is no single explanation for the dramatic, indeed historic, reduction in desired rates of fertility: it is the combination of new ideas, better public health for mothers and children, and improved economic opportunities for women. The reduced fertility rates, in turn, will fuel Bangladesh's rising incomes. With fewer children, a poor household can invest more in the health and education of each child, thereby equipping the next generation with the health, nutrition, and education that can lift Bangladesh's living standards in future years. Bangladesh has managed to place its foot on the first rung of the ladder of development, and has achieved economic growth and improvements of health and education partly through its own heroic efforts, partly through the ingenuity of NGOs like BRAC and Grameen Bank, and partly through investments that have been made, often at significant scale, by various donor governments that rightly viewed Bangladesh not as a hopeless basket case but as a country worthy of attention, care, and development assistance.”


(And still somewhere deep inside the above-mentioned basket case I know it all just stinks of hypocricy and desperation)

Standing next to me

When I found out that Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane from The Rascals joined forces to create the “The Age of The Understatement” it was like a dream-come-true.

Battles

Our guns
we shot them in the things we said
ah we didn't need no bullets
cos we rely on some words instead
kill someone in argument
outwit them with our brains
and we'd kill ourselves laughing
at the funny things we'd say

And bombs
we had them saved for special times
when the crew would call a shakedown
we break down a party landmine
women that so sexy
they explode us with their looks
ah we blowing up some speakers
jumping round till the ground shook

And battles
they happened in these dancehalls
see we'd rather fight with music
choosing one the rhythm war
battle at these shakedowns
and we battle at these gigs
we do battle in our bedrooms
made some sweet love to the beat

Then our allies grew
wherever we would roam
see whenever we're together
any stranger feel at home
in a way we are an army
but this army not destruct
no instead we're doing simple things
good loving find it run amuck

This be a declaration
written about my friends
it's engraved into this song
so they know I'm not forgetting them
see maybe if the world contained
more people like these
then the news would not be telling me
about all that warfare endlessly



("The Chariot" by The Cat Empire)

Buenos

I believe I meant this place...

La Esquina

is the first single from Panamericana kindly presented to us by the German-Argentinean Frederico Aubele. Hm...somewhere out there is a big, dangerous and seducing city called Buenos Aires. A blend of music, races, styles. The descendent of European families escaping from their mid-20th-century governments. Someday… I want to be walking down its streets, among its blue, green, yellow and red houses. Wasting my time in a pub, drinking, listening to nu-jazzy tango. Not too different from now though. (:-D)