A Priceless Lesson

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If there is one thing I love about travel, it’s shopping. And if there is one thing you know about me, you know I am being facetious. Shopping is the last thing on my list. But as a visitor in Bali, I quickly learned that my raison d’etre was to spread my money around as quickly and broadly as possible.

It began at the airport and $25 USD for a visa. I handed the guy $40 and got back a handful of Rupiah, the local currency. As I got my bag, a money changer was waving at me from behind her plexiglass window. Outside, I was offered any number of rides with unofficial taxis, at 20 percent off.

Everything, Amy and I discovered, is for sale. And negotiable. Arriving in Ubud, away from the hardcore tourist beach, we were hardly out of our taxi before guys sitting on stoops offered us ‘transport.’ Amy and I both quite like seeing places on foot or bicycle which goes against the grain of cheap and easy taxi rides. But even walking, we were solicited at nearly every storefront we passed.

There’s a desperation about that kind of commerce. When I was trying on a $4 shirt, the woman told me I was her only customer that day. And would I please buy two, because an extra dollar would enable her to feed the little boy playing at her feet. Otherwise, they might not have dinner. So after the obligatory bargaining, I bought two.
She thanked me and touched the bills to the other clothes. “For good luck,” she said. For $4, I erred on the generous side, but there’s no way for me to assess whether her claim to hunger is a genuine need or just a sales ploy.

“It’s entirely possible,” said Liz Sinclair, an Australian/American travel writer I met in the Bali Spirit Kafe. “Most of the shops are owned by people in Jakarta or other non-local people. They hire locals to run the shops, but most of the profits go elsewhere.” Liz had come to Bali a decade earlier and noted the difference. Rice fields that had once been near the center of town were now growing apartments and homestays to house tourists.

The government of Indonesia, Liz said, having likely been counseled by international lenders, decided to make Bali a tourist destination. And things were going great guns, till 2002 when people claiming that God blesses them blew up a bar and killed 200 people, mostly locals. Things were recovering when they did it again last October. This year, with the season approaching peak, people were wondering where the tourists were. The paper said room occupancy was running at 40 percent. And they were cheap. Our homestay cost less than $10 a night, with breakfast included.

That made consumption easy and I returned with all manner of shirts, sarongs, coffee, spices and foods. We ate well and enjoyed $10 massages. But the sales pitches were relentless. And there is a limit to how much stuff I could carry back to Shanghai. A bigger concern though, and one voiced by Michael another traveler I met, was how the money we were spending was affecting people’s lives. Certainly putting food on the table is good, but were we also fostering an initiative-stunting dependency, a kind of capitalist welfare system? For Michael, it raised questions about the whole fair trade movement.
We spoke about it in a store called Threads of Life, a weaver’s cooperative that was selling fine, hand dyed sarongs for $200. (www.threadsoflife.com) It was set up by a couple ex-pats who discovered that destitute weavers were selling traditional ritual textiles for $20. They intervened to contract with the weavers, pay them a fair wage, then sell the fabrics to the same art and culture-conscious foreigners.

“Women would work on these pieces for six months,” Liz said. “They were desperate. And traders would come up river with a handful of bills. They were the only buyers. And the works would go to places like New York where they were sold for a huge profit.”
The fair trade concept, she said, is just an attempt to share the wealth.

But what happens, Michael wondered aloud, when people who now get by with so little start to get more? Do they then aspire toward and live a more middle-class existence? And instead of growing their own food, do they end up standing on corners, smoking cigarettes and saying ‘taxi?” to every foreigner? Not that he would deny anyone basic education, food, shelter and health care, but is Western-style economic development really a solution? The question he seemed to be asking was: Is a social policy based on consumption of goods from across the planet really workable? We are all uneasy about that idea and none of us had an answer.

Meanwhile, the stores in Ubud are chock full of T-shirts, rayon sarongs, machine stamped batiks, stone Buddhas and wooden masks. The back alleys are overstocked with canvases painted by people who nearly all seem to share the same artistic eye. In the words of my sister Diane, a beautiful culture that started as “everything we do is art” has turned to creating ‘Balicrap’ for foreigners.

But it’s not all bad and a strong culture remains behind the markets. Every morning, we saw women placing woven grass flower offerings on everything from Ganesha statues to motorcycle seats. Our first home-stay hosts invited us to attend their son’s wedding, a multiple day event of ritual, pagentry and feasting. Nyoman and Rai’s approach was that since there is no stopping tourism, the locals may as well embrace it and ensure people get an authentic experience. And we did. We watched the bride endure the ritual teeth filing rite of passage and learned that she would spend the rest of her life living within her husband’s family compound. Beyond the wedding, we saw kids, still unplugged from gameboys, fishing, flying kites and playing World Cup football. We noticed that Balinese people laugh often and every morning on the street we exchanged smiles and hello’s with passers by. The marketing might be relentless, but beyond the increasing complexity involved in just getting by, local people offered us constant reminders to appreciate what we have, rather than grumble about what we don’t.

On a walk one afternoon, Amy and I asked a man for directions. He was building a bamboo fence around the 12’x16’ concrete slab he called home. Although he’d worked in a bar, he said it made him sick. He quit when he realized he was spending his meager salary on medical care. Poor as he was, he invited us to come back and spend time with him. “Why is it,” Amy remarked later, “that wherever I travel, in Africa or Asia, the people who have the least are always the most generous?”

Maybe they realize that the most precious things are those that can’t be bought and sold.

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Back in China now…hardly a day goes by, still, when nothing strange happens. Today it was a birthday cake. One of the women in the office turned “sixteen again” and someone bought a big old round cake, covered in sliced kiwi, peach, cherries and crushed pineapple. Receiving my slice, I found a round red fruit. I kinda knew what to expect, but I had to confirm it for myself. Let me state now, for the record, that while they may grow on vines, cherry tomatoes ARE NOT FRUIT!

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Comments

[Karen Wilhelm]

Fruity tomatoes
You'd have to ask Mom, but seems like she told me once that they put sugar on their tomatoes back on the farm in Nebraska. Dad used to put salt and pepper on cantaloupe. Next time you go somewhere that you can buy handcrafts, see if there are any beads for sale. I've been making jewelry using improvisational beadwork techniques. Love from your sis, Karen