'When I was in Afghanistan ...' (Or How I Learned That Shopping Doesn't Help)
If you have spent any time working in poor developing countries and you come home to a rich developed country you will instantly notice yourself surrounded by a philosophy of life which clamours insistently that all problems must be solved by going shopping as much as possible and if that doesn’t work you should break for a latte and try again. This alone will confuse you for days. I have just come back from Afghanistan and I know this for a fact.
Life in the developing world has a kind of simple, desperate rhythm to it. There aren’t many options. You live from a suitcase, so your choice of shirts is down to three and of those you just keep wearing the most comfortable one because there’s no one to impress with your selection of fashions. Or you adopt the local dress code, and even if there is some sartorial hierarchy, to your unpractised eye they’re just clothes and they’ll do. When you eat, you eat the food they give you, and you carry around a small stash of what you think you can’t go without – chocolate, good coffee, any coffee, bits of cheese – and then those run out and you go without them, too. Your life is reduced, often to a few books, a guitar maybe, your laptop, the same clothes everyday, and a whole host of problems you’d never even dreamed of. You are not – unless you have had rare strength and grace combined with a powerful vision – as poor as those around you, and sometimes you’ve felt guilty because you see children in winter playing in mud puddles without socks while you walk by with warm dry feet in very expensive socks. You might be a dead broke college student nobody back home, but in the developing world you are a rich extravagant celebrity, which makes you feel special, and then guilty, and then glad you have the nice socks you do, and then guilty again. But while all this is going on, what you don’t notice is that you have actually pared your lavish life of back home down into a relatively few simple things. Your world has become quiet of advertising and stuff, and loud with something approaching reality.
This leaves room for all the revelations that you begin to have while you are in poor countries. You realize, Hey, I don’t need so much stuff, I can survive without it. It might almost be better. You find yourself thinking about such strange things as how to live as a rich person amidst poor people or how to pull off some impossible food distribution project or what you should give to beggars or why you don’t mind walking everywhere or what it means that someone of a different religion manages to be a better person than you with your religion. These things occupy your mind instead of what you should wear today to impress the world or where you should stop for a latte. Usually you don’t ever find the answers to these new problems, but the point is that your mind turns to them in the quiet spaces that have been opened by the enforced simplification of your life. You notice that the world has problems, and you notice that they have become your problems, and you notice that buying a new wardrobe for spring won’t help that much. Even if you come back without a crusader mentality and you aren’t hell-bent on hating all of our wealth and luxury and general ignorance of the dreadful state of the world and our responsibility to it, even if you don’t have constant and multiple urges to shake innocently blinking complacent bystanders and shout at them through your beard and your new vision of life, HEY WAKE UP! – even if you think that your perspective hasn’t changed that much, you’re still in for a shock at the mall.
When I came home from Afghanistan the first time, I looked in my closet and said, Wow, I’ve sure got a lot of shirts. So I culled through them, removed every last one that I didn’t really need and gave them away. It was the new freedom. Then I went to the mall and was instantly invaded with unsummoned urges to buy one or many of the new shirts that were hanging in store windows. Despite the fact that I knew I didn’t want them, I wanted them. The world was noisy again. Everyone was buying new clothes and everyone already had clothes that worked fine and the minute I started to wonder if we actually needed all these clothes, the new noise and all the advertisements rolled their eyes and said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course we do. It’s all very well for you to wear your one shirt in poor countries but here we need new clothes. And by the way, so do you. There are people to impress.’ I had been out of touch with the advertising, so my mind was not properly attuned to the new fall wardrobes that would be necessary for survival, happiness and the adoration of people I might meet at, say, the coffee shops I was also supposed to be going to. In Afghanistan I needed a willing attitude; here I needed several shopping bags and a latte. This wasn’t going to be as simple as I’d thought.
I gave the mall a pass, escaping without buying any shirts, much to the disdain of the big glossy ads, and went instead to the grocery store, thinking it would be safer. Nope. In Afghanistan I ate what the cook gave me. It almost always involved too much rice and too much oil and I soon got sick of it and sick from it and lost a bunch of weight I didn’t really have anyway. But there was the meal, everyday at the same time. It eliminated choice. Supermarkets are not like third-world cooks, except that they do have too much of things. The cook, bless his soul, only had rice and oil to go overboard with. Safeway can go overboard with everything. I stood in the pasta section for several long minutes, trying to decide which brand of noodles to buy before finally leaving the store without any. In Afghanistan, if you’re lucky enough to find noodles, they are just themselves, just noodles there in a box and those are the ones you take. Douglas Coupland, in his novel Generation X, made up a name for when you walk into a store full of noodles, wanting noodles, and then walk out again with no noodles. He called it ‘Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.’ So if you come home from Zambia or Cambodia or Argentina and find yourself staring at several different cans of soup for awhile, trying to discern the difference between them (hint: there is none) before finally going home with no cans of soup to sit and stare at your walls and go hungry, don’t worry. There’s a name for that.
The thing to do is reduce your options. Do it like this: Go to someone’s house and look at their pasta. Memorize the brand and convince yourself that this is the only brand for you. Return to the store, rejecting all other brands of pasta, bee-lining for your brand, and buy it without thinking further. Ignore the shirts on display. What are shirts doing in a supermarket anyway? Ignore all other shirts, clothing, and especially I-pods. The voices in your head are wrong; you don’t actually need them. What’s that you’re wearing? A shirt. It’s working fine, hang on to your pasta and keep walking. Walk all the way home.
After you get the hang of dealing with material things, you will have to deal with social issues, which mostly have to do with people saying things like, ‘Wow, how was Afghanistan?’ and not really wanting to know the answer. Treat them gently. You don’t really know how to answer that question anyway. A friend of mine offered me some advice on this, which I thought was as good as any and quite culturally astute. He said when people ask how it was, just say ‘Sweet!’ People like this sort of thing. It comforts them. Think of how many times you’ve heard or participated in this exchange:
- How’s it going?
- Fine.
It’s a pleasant fiction. Make use of this social phenomenon as my friend suggests:
- Wow! How was Afghanistan?
- Sweet!
- Cool, man!
And you’re done. You’ll also have to remember not to keep starting sentences with ‘When I was in Afghanistan … ‘ People get really tired of that. Remember that most people can’t relate to what you’ve just gone and done. They’ve been back here, impulse-buying new wardrobes and sorting out which noodles to get before going for a latte. You’ve been in stinky, dirty places with poor people, wrestling with issues. Accept that your lives have been different. If you’re one of these people that wants to shake people out of their luxurious complacency and tell them to redistribute their wealth because their cup of coffee just cost a month’s wages where you came from, try to compose yourself first and recall that A, people won’t get it, and B, in two months you’ll have that beard off and you’ll be deciding if you want soy milk or cream in your own latte. Because no matter what you’ve seen, lattes still taste good. It’s just the way it works.
That’s not to say there’s no good in all your revelations and new perspectives. You are after all, correct. No one needs that many shirts. I-pods are sleek and fashionable, but so was your CD player and now you don’t want it even though it works fine. So calm down and don’t buy them. Eat simply if you want. It makes shopping easier. Live simply, too. Give your car away and get a bus pass. Ride your bike. Drink tea. Help people. Yes, there’s too much noise and too many options in your re-entered culture but remember that you get to choose how much you buy into it all. You can find your balance again. When I first came back from Afghanistan I bought no shirts, when I came back again I bought too many. Then I gave most of them away. I liked simpler better, and I eventually came back to it. I found some recipes, mostly involving beans, and learned to make them. I read a lot. I’m learning to play guitar. I turn on the TV and then turn it off. I go for walks instead. I have a car because my uncle gave it to me, but I know I could do without one. Considering the state of the car I might soon have to. But it won’t matter. I rode in minivans held together with string and chewing gum, stuffed to the gills with way too many people going breakneck speeds on bad roads. I can take a bus. Three shirts will do, my CD player works fine, I like these noodles. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. There are more important things. You know that now. Consider what they are. Live accordingly. We don’t need everything, shopping won’t solve all or any of our problems, and one day maybe we’ll all understand that. For now, stick with you.
Life in the developing world has a kind of simple, desperate rhythm to it. There aren’t many options. You live from a suitcase, so your choice of shirts is down to three and of those you just keep wearing the most comfortable one because there’s no one to impress with your selection of fashions. Or you adopt the local dress code, and even if there is some sartorial hierarchy, to your unpractised eye they’re just clothes and they’ll do. When you eat, you eat the food they give you, and you carry around a small stash of what you think you can’t go without – chocolate, good coffee, any coffee, bits of cheese – and then those run out and you go without them, too. Your life is reduced, often to a few books, a guitar maybe, your laptop, the same clothes everyday, and a whole host of problems you’d never even dreamed of. You are not – unless you have had rare strength and grace combined with a powerful vision – as poor as those around you, and sometimes you’ve felt guilty because you see children in winter playing in mud puddles without socks while you walk by with warm dry feet in very expensive socks. You might be a dead broke college student nobody back home, but in the developing world you are a rich extravagant celebrity, which makes you feel special, and then guilty, and then glad you have the nice socks you do, and then guilty again. But while all this is going on, what you don’t notice is that you have actually pared your lavish life of back home down into a relatively few simple things. Your world has become quiet of advertising and stuff, and loud with something approaching reality.
This leaves room for all the revelations that you begin to have while you are in poor countries. You realize, Hey, I don’t need so much stuff, I can survive without it. It might almost be better. You find yourself thinking about such strange things as how to live as a rich person amidst poor people or how to pull off some impossible food distribution project or what you should give to beggars or why you don’t mind walking everywhere or what it means that someone of a different religion manages to be a better person than you with your religion. These things occupy your mind instead of what you should wear today to impress the world or where you should stop for a latte. Usually you don’t ever find the answers to these new problems, but the point is that your mind turns to them in the quiet spaces that have been opened by the enforced simplification of your life. You notice that the world has problems, and you notice that they have become your problems, and you notice that buying a new wardrobe for spring won’t help that much. Even if you come back without a crusader mentality and you aren’t hell-bent on hating all of our wealth and luxury and general ignorance of the dreadful state of the world and our responsibility to it, even if you don’t have constant and multiple urges to shake innocently blinking complacent bystanders and shout at them through your beard and your new vision of life, HEY WAKE UP! – even if you think that your perspective hasn’t changed that much, you’re still in for a shock at the mall.
When I came home from Afghanistan the first time, I looked in my closet and said, Wow, I’ve sure got a lot of shirts. So I culled through them, removed every last one that I didn’t really need and gave them away. It was the new freedom. Then I went to the mall and was instantly invaded with unsummoned urges to buy one or many of the new shirts that were hanging in store windows. Despite the fact that I knew I didn’t want them, I wanted them. The world was noisy again. Everyone was buying new clothes and everyone already had clothes that worked fine and the minute I started to wonder if we actually needed all these clothes, the new noise and all the advertisements rolled their eyes and said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course we do. It’s all very well for you to wear your one shirt in poor countries but here we need new clothes. And by the way, so do you. There are people to impress.’ I had been out of touch with the advertising, so my mind was not properly attuned to the new fall wardrobes that would be necessary for survival, happiness and the adoration of people I might meet at, say, the coffee shops I was also supposed to be going to. In Afghanistan I needed a willing attitude; here I needed several shopping bags and a latte. This wasn’t going to be as simple as I’d thought.
I gave the mall a pass, escaping without buying any shirts, much to the disdain of the big glossy ads, and went instead to the grocery store, thinking it would be safer. Nope. In Afghanistan I ate what the cook gave me. It almost always involved too much rice and too much oil and I soon got sick of it and sick from it and lost a bunch of weight I didn’t really have anyway. But there was the meal, everyday at the same time. It eliminated choice. Supermarkets are not like third-world cooks, except that they do have too much of things. The cook, bless his soul, only had rice and oil to go overboard with. Safeway can go overboard with everything. I stood in the pasta section for several long minutes, trying to decide which brand of noodles to buy before finally leaving the store without any. In Afghanistan, if you’re lucky enough to find noodles, they are just themselves, just noodles there in a box and those are the ones you take. Douglas Coupland, in his novel Generation X, made up a name for when you walk into a store full of noodles, wanting noodles, and then walk out again with no noodles. He called it ‘Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.’ So if you come home from Zambia or Cambodia or Argentina and find yourself staring at several different cans of soup for awhile, trying to discern the difference between them (hint: there is none) before finally going home with no cans of soup to sit and stare at your walls and go hungry, don’t worry. There’s a name for that.
The thing to do is reduce your options. Do it like this: Go to someone’s house and look at their pasta. Memorize the brand and convince yourself that this is the only brand for you. Return to the store, rejecting all other brands of pasta, bee-lining for your brand, and buy it without thinking further. Ignore the shirts on display. What are shirts doing in a supermarket anyway? Ignore all other shirts, clothing, and especially I-pods. The voices in your head are wrong; you don’t actually need them. What’s that you’re wearing? A shirt. It’s working fine, hang on to your pasta and keep walking. Walk all the way home.
After you get the hang of dealing with material things, you will have to deal with social issues, which mostly have to do with people saying things like, ‘Wow, how was Afghanistan?’ and not really wanting to know the answer. Treat them gently. You don’t really know how to answer that question anyway. A friend of mine offered me some advice on this, which I thought was as good as any and quite culturally astute. He said when people ask how it was, just say ‘Sweet!’ People like this sort of thing. It comforts them. Think of how many times you’ve heard or participated in this exchange:
- How’s it going?
- Fine.
It’s a pleasant fiction. Make use of this social phenomenon as my friend suggests:
- Wow! How was Afghanistan?
- Sweet!
- Cool, man!
And you’re done. You’ll also have to remember not to keep starting sentences with ‘When I was in Afghanistan … ‘ People get really tired of that. Remember that most people can’t relate to what you’ve just gone and done. They’ve been back here, impulse-buying new wardrobes and sorting out which noodles to get before going for a latte. You’ve been in stinky, dirty places with poor people, wrestling with issues. Accept that your lives have been different. If you’re one of these people that wants to shake people out of their luxurious complacency and tell them to redistribute their wealth because their cup of coffee just cost a month’s wages where you came from, try to compose yourself first and recall that A, people won’t get it, and B, in two months you’ll have that beard off and you’ll be deciding if you want soy milk or cream in your own latte. Because no matter what you’ve seen, lattes still taste good. It’s just the way it works.
That’s not to say there’s no good in all your revelations and new perspectives. You are after all, correct. No one needs that many shirts. I-pods are sleek and fashionable, but so was your CD player and now you don’t want it even though it works fine. So calm down and don’t buy them. Eat simply if you want. It makes shopping easier. Live simply, too. Give your car away and get a bus pass. Ride your bike. Drink tea. Help people. Yes, there’s too much noise and too many options in your re-entered culture but remember that you get to choose how much you buy into it all. You can find your balance again. When I first came back from Afghanistan I bought no shirts, when I came back again I bought too many. Then I gave most of them away. I liked simpler better, and I eventually came back to it. I found some recipes, mostly involving beans, and learned to make them. I read a lot. I’m learning to play guitar. I turn on the TV and then turn it off. I go for walks instead. I have a car because my uncle gave it to me, but I know I could do without one. Considering the state of the car I might soon have to. But it won’t matter. I rode in minivans held together with string and chewing gum, stuffed to the gills with way too many people going breakneck speeds on bad roads. I can take a bus. Three shirts will do, my CD player works fine, I like these noodles. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. There are more important things. You know that now. Consider what they are. Live accordingly. We don’t need everything, shopping won’t solve all or any of our problems, and one day maybe we’ll all understand that. For now, stick with you.
posted by rjs | 10:02 PM
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