vitalwholeness

As the dog walked me in the early morning dark, I started listening to the sounds of our feet on the ground. Even though I try to walk lightly and quietly, my age and weight makes silence a near impossibility. The repetitive scuff and scrape of my sandals on earth took me back to other scuffing and scraping in the dark.

In the distant past of my young adulthood I spent a summer in Bangladesh, visiting the work of an NGO and shadowing their staff. I travelled everywhere by any means – walking, bus, the back of a motor cycle, rickshaw, river boats, crossing over rice paddy rickety bridges. And I ended up in a combination of locations difficult to describe. Small villages, leper hospitals, disaster recovery programs, tiny retreat centers, literacy programs in the shanty slums.

Our base camp was Dhaka, the capital city. Like so many others, we lived in a walled house inside the city. You can hear the flurry of activity on the street outside those walls at all hours. By 2 or 3am it gets quiet.

More than once, as I lay dreaming in the pre-dawn dark, I heard the scuff and scrape of a silent procession on the street. It was like a muted percussion section. This was the sound of the sandaled feet of Bangladeshi women walking to work in the shirt factories.

Factory work was one of the few plentiful jobs in the city. They always needed cheap labor. Bangladeshi women could provide that for pauper wages. Their hours were long, the conditions dirty and cramped, and every so often a factory would collapse on them. The owners never protected them or improved those conditions. Inspectors were routinely paid off. But that wasn’t the most important factor that kept the wages deplorable and the conditions marginal.

Large multinational corporations like Walmart came in with shirt contracts that the owners couldn’t say no to. The offers were rock bottom, making it almost impossible for the manufacturers to make a profit, improve their buildings, and pay their labor force. These contracts insured low costs for people like me, when I look for a shirt at Walmart or some other multinational chain. My cheap shirts require cheap labor and poor conditions elsewhere. As the end of the supply chain, my demands for low prices make that what it is.

The scuff and scrape of feet comprise a symphony of sorts. It is the unending song of those who must walk for their lives, inside their inhumane cities, or across miles of terraine to escape the spectre of despair. Every time I hear the sound of my feet in the dark, I remember them.

I also imagine the sound of feet and hooves of another young family escaping the disaster that loomed over them. So vulnerable were they, what with the young child in their care. They fled under the cover of night, escaping harm on the way to safety, from Galilee, down south through Gaza, across the border into Egypt, where the migrant family would wait, try to survive, and hope for better days to come.

Scuff-scrape, scuff-scrape, scuff-scrape.