Globul Merket

During college, I have written essays on just about everything. I've entered competitions and won but only in the campus level because I can't stand the pressure of competing outside the school. The outside world is too violent a place. Here's a shorter version of an essay I wrote for one of my exams. I used myself as a subject in some of my writings. Like a self-portrait of some kind.

Globul Merket

The everyday things that we take for granted often connect us to faraway people and places. Consider, for example, the typical routine of a very old student in Davao City on a Wednesday afternoon. After waking up too late in the day and showering, he puts on an Abercrombie shirt and a pair of khaki cargo pants. He drinks a cup of coffee and eats a banana before heading off to school. Each of these products followed a complex path from a different part of the world to take its place in this young man’s typical routine.

Let's start with the shirt. Its story begins with the cotton crop growing on the plains of Cai Lay, Vietnam. There, cotton farm workers chop or shred the stalks with machines. At a Vietnamese factory, workers loads cotton into a processing machine, spin the wool into yarn and dye it and then use the yarn for cloth. However, before cotton can be spun, mill workers must dry it, fluff it, blend it into an even mixture, and clean it. The yarn traveled to another factory in Northern Mariana Islands (U.S.A.), where workers sewed the shirt according to a pattern produced by an American fashion designer. From, the Mariana Islands the shirt traveled to a warehouse in Manila, then to the mall in Gen. Santos City, where this young man bought it.

The khaki cargo pants began as cotton in a field in Korangi, Pakistan. The cotton was harvested and ginned in a nearby town and then transported to Karachi, where workers at a factory spun, wove, and finished the khaki cloth. In an Indonesian factory operating under contract with an Filipino retailer, a woman sewed this cloth into pants, which then traveled first to the retailer’s Manila warehouse and then to another store at the mall in Davao, where they caught this young man’s eye.

The coffee beans grew on a plant in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Brazilian farm workers harvested the coffee “cherries” and then dried and hulled them to produce raw coffee beans for shipment to the warehouse of an importer in Virginia. From there they traveled to a plant in the Philippines, where workers roasted the beans and packed them which then traveled for delivery to a retailer and then to sari-sari store from which this young man bought them.

The banana that this young man ate…grew in a tree in their backyard (I think this one doesn’t count).

Before he has even left his house, this young man has used products that tie him to hundreds of workers on six different continents. Although he may not be aware of it, (of course, he is aware of it!) the jeepney he rides and his activities at school during the day will link him to hundreds of other people working in different parts of the world—people he may never meet but whose lives are tied to his own in the complex web that is our global economy. Yeah…

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Learning to be still.