4/15/11
What I did while I was here– realize that I am alone, hike in the rain and fall in love with my love of rain, learn more about rain forests and love that I love having this strange knowledge of flora and fauna, and meet people who I would later on run into continuously and invite to live with me. And have these thoughts...
Thoughts of broken heartedness, letting go, and mortality have been swirling around my head all day. Almost all the women I've met here are traveling alone, and they have that glint in their eye of recovery, of love lost and love for themselves found. I found it difficult today to get through the whole day. To ease the pain, a woman told me that although the hardest part is letting go, it is also the most rewarding. I began to see her point, to look around and see that everyone here has had those moments where they have had to let go of something, either a lover, a friend, a parent, a concept or a thought pattern. Something within them has decided to change. But not very many people look at that and use self-soothing as a way to erase the pain, they just wait for that one morning where they wake up and see that the pain is gone. I can't do that anymore....all those mornings when I've woken up and thought, “maybe this is the day, maybe today I won't feel the pain” have just turned out to be that slight physical euphoric moment before the hangover of yesterday's trauma sets in. Now, though, I feel like I am healing. Like no matter what happens, I have to learn to be ok. I am definitely not there yet, but I am gaining knowledge from these women by talking to them, by looking at their bravery and envying it, by asking what hurts them and what makes them better. Although they always say the thing that motivated them was this desire to experiment with themselves, to see how far they will go, I think what their real desire is is to have that moment where they can let go – and then have that feeling become addictive and unstoppable. Letting go of heartbreak, accepting it as heartbreak and walking through the pain, then leaving it and realizing that you love yourself more when the pain isn't there – that's a beautiful yet cold and lonely iceberg to be at the tip of.
I found something that ignited a lost passion inside of me.
Plantations. I went to the tea plantations that have made the Cameron Highlands notorious and was stunned by their beauty; then profoundly moved by the sight of the Indonesian and Bangladeshi men and women working in the fields. These people make little to no money, depending on how many tea leaves they can cut...almost exactly like the impoverished migrant banana workers in Costa Rica. Something boiled within me as I saw them and watched myself watching them on a tour I booked and paid for with other people who remarked on the impeccable views and delicious tea. I asked the guide, “what happens to the leaves after they get picked?”. They get sorted by hand, part of the “8 hour work day” of the laborers, and then carried on their backs to the bottom of these gigantic hills. Then they go to a factory, where the leaves get rolled and dried and then I stopped listening. I got filled with disgust, filled with heat and passion, filled with a desire to learn more about what happens here and why the tour guide gently glossed over my tons and tons of questions. Where are the other factories? Where are the real factories? Where do these people live? Who does the contracts? How do they get paid, once or twice a month? We went to the factory and I felt like I was at a zoo, only watching people. I wanted to cry. I saw a man, a small, Indonesian man, there behind the glass and he looked at me and I looked at him and he had this look of pure despair in his eyes, pure sadness. I can't even begin to explain the guilt that bubbled up within me, the fire that I felt had been stamped out after my passionate love affair with banana plantation workers' rights years ago. This man kept his gaze locked on me. I felt like a dog with my tail between my legs as I walked into the next room and the group of tourists swelled to watch him work. I came back when they left and looked at him again through the glass. He opened the door for me to come in, to enter into his world, to walk into his factory but I couldn't bring myself to do it (mostly because of the security guards). I motioned to him that I wanted to take a picture and he nodded, and looked at the camera, then looked down, and back up at the camera. I will never forget this man, his eyes, the way they go back for years to tell me how much he probably misses his family and hates watching tourists watch him like a caged animal imported into in a foreign country, putting tea into a machine to be drunk millions of miles away in sidewalk cafe.
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