After my second day of work with the Mikser House project here in Belgrade, I am really noticing the contrast the situation in Vienna. In Vienna, the railway station was constantly buzzing with the activity of a couple thousand people seeking refuge and hundreds of volunteers self-organizing and co-creating an emergent village. Here is Belgrade things are so quiet in comparison. There have rarely been more than a hundred or so people seeking refuge at the site with maybe 25 or 30 volunteers. Some say that these have been unusually quiet days and others have said that it has been a reaction to UNICEF having just opened a site in a nearby hotel.
What we lack in people here is more than made up for in stuff! My job these two days has been to sort and organize clothing. This involves opening bags and bags and boxes and boxes of donated clothes and sorting it into men’s, women’s, children’s and throwing out the unusable or inappropriate. The weather has begun to turn cold and wet so we are also on the lookout for any suitable winter clothing. As needed, clothes are moved out to the public area where people paw through them and select what they need. More often, they express their disappointment that what they need is not available.
By the end of the day, there were two large rooms filled to the ceiling with bags of sorted clothes with no indication of when, if ever, there will be enough demand for them to be put out for the public. In addition there are hundreds and hundreds of cases of pampers filling a huge room with more packages of diapers piled in every available space. Apparently, word had gone out recently that diapers were needed and the community responded with unbelievable generosity. Unfortunately, they did not respond as quickly when the word belatedly went out to stop sending diapers. They just keep coming and no one knows what to do with them all.
As I sorted clothes, my mood shifted between appreciation for the generosity shown by this community to provide so much and surprised irritation at the kind of stuff some people give. I was especially appalled by the skimpy, sexy, suggestive women’s clothing being offered to these largely Muslim women. Most of the women do not even want skirts, let alone thong underwear, low-cut blouses or t-shirts with sexual messages. To be honest, I could not even figure out what some of the pieces of clothing were or how someone would wear them and when I had it explained, I was embarrassed myself more than once.
In addition to the inappropriate clothing, there were also badly stained or torn clothes and random things like neckties. It appears that some people used this solicitation as motivation to clean out their closets and drawers (or attics) and to give it to “support the refugees”. An opportunity to get rid of what wasn’t wanted with the bonus of getting to feel generous and virtuous. That is probably a pretty judgmental perspective on my part but after dealing with so much of this stuff all day long, it is difficult to be more charitable. What these donors probably didn’t think about was how many hours have to be spent to sort this stuff and then to dispose of much of it and to store the rest.
In my imagination, I sense a river of people flowing from the Middle East to Europe. Multiple tributaries with damns at some borders causing some reservoirs. Meanwhile, I imagine another stream of stuff flowing from affluent Europeans to the refugee centers in cities like Belgrade and Vienna. There some of the stuff gets selected for offering to those in need. Some of it gets sent directly to the landfill, some gets put into storage and some of it gets sent to other charities to deal with. I wonder where it will all end up. Baled and shipped to India? There is some concern here in Belgrade that the Roma are coming in and taking the clothes meant for the refugees or that some of those seeking refuge are taking more than they need and selling it on the streets. So much energy and concern getting expended about all this stuff. What kind of world do we live in where some people can’t get the clothes they need, other people have way too much and we have bags full of inappropriate clothes to dispose of?
When I contemplate more deeply, I remember my own process of disposing of my stuff when I decided to become a nomad. I gave away a lot of crap and I justified it as being generous and as allowing others to sort out what was usable and to dispose of the rest. It bothers me to throw anything away; I can thank my parents for instilling such frugality in me. So, I would rather have someone else have to make the decision to throw something away and I convinced myself that it was an act of generosity to give away such garbage. When I recognize this in myself, I can better understand what we are dealing with.
One thing that I discovered in my own processing of getting rid of my stuff is that I felt lighter and more free every time that I disposed of something. I experience a joy in the lack of stuff that I own even though I continue to wonder why my pack is as heavy as it is and what it is that I could get along without. And I think of the ecological cost of all this stuff. And the human cost of all the cheap clothing produced in sweat shops. And my conclusion is that it would be a much more generous act to resist buying stuff than to buy it and give it away. How can we create a world in which everyone has what she or he really needs without producing and consuming so much more that really does no good and, in fact, does great harm to the planet? My fear is that this “refugee crisis” is just perpetuating our fixation on stuff (piles of plastic bottles of water piled higher than my head, unbelievable quantities of diapers) While still not providing the warm clothes needed by families crossing the mountains.
How do we connect the dots between our ecological crisis and war and the dislocation of people and our economic system? These are not disconnected issues but are all symptoms of our disturbed relationship to all of life.
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