"What's not to love?" And his baseball cap, worn backward, has a big
"S" written in front.
More importantly, on the inside of the baseball cap, someone--the mom
of its first rightful owner undoubtedly--has inscribed with a blue pen
the name: "Sean Aylward." In fact, this Kinois impersonator of Sean
Aylward is wearing from head to toe second-hand gear imported from the
U.S.
Second-hand clothes, shoes, bikes and an array of other
junk--including, oddly enough, in-line skates in paved-road-challenged
cities of the Congo--are imported from the U.S. in huge bundles that
are sold to Congolese retailers by Lebanese and Indian or Paki
wholesalers.
Second-hand clothes are called in Lingala "tombola-bwaka" (often
shortened as "tombola") or "pick 'em up-drop 'em down"-- an expression
that conveys the typical gestures of tombola shoppers who'd take up an
item, inspect it closely and thoroughly, then drop it back on stalls
where it was on display or buy it.
These "tombola-bwaka" are discarded clothes that American households
would drop for free at their local Salvation Army stores or some other
drop-points for charities dedicated to clothing the poor, the needy,
and the wretched of America. (In the D.C. area a charity run by
Vietnam vets ask donors to put clothes in trash bags to leave them by
the front doors for pick-up.)
But it seems that somewhere between the Salvation Army store and the
intended targets of charity, these clothes get somehow sucked into the
whirlpool of global capitalist markets.
Yesterday I watched on TV an opposition MP who was blaming the
government for the DRC's backward trend in the just released PNUD's
2010 Human Development Index. He keenly bemoaned the government's
indifference in the face of the steady impoverishment of the Congolese
who can no longer afford to properly feed their tombola-clad kids!
Well, I beg to disagree with the MP's take on tombola-bwaka. First,
these tombola-bwaka are sturdy. For instance, the tank-top worn by
Sean Aylward impersonator above would outlast any pirated brand new
GAP version of this kind of shirt sold in Lebanese stores downtown.
Second, almost every single Congolese-- including this Honorable MP, I
suspect--has tombola-bwaka jeans or t-shirts in their wardrobes.
But otherwise I also feel the pain and the anger of the MP. According
to PNUD's Human Delevopment Index the Congolese of 1970 were better
off than those of today.
DRC got the penultimate world ranking of 168, preceded by Burundi and
followed by Zimbabwe--the neighborhood of little trolls walking
backwards.
If this trend isn't urgently reversed, our Sean Aylward impersonator
will be 48 when he dies his natural death--to be exact, life
expectancy is 48.006--after spending about 4 years in a run-down
school (the mean years of schooling is now 3.758 here).
These staggering figures give indeed its full meaning to the economics
concept of "worth of life": by the time the real Sean Aylward reaches
college age, his parents' investment into his upbringing would be at
least one million dollars or more, whereas the life of his
impersonator in Kinshasa would be, well, worthless.
Also yesterday, I heard on Radio France Internationale (RFI) DRC
Communication Minister Lambert Mende bristling at PNUD for its
out-of-context-Congo-bashing Index--the proper context being,
according to him, that from 1970 to the late 1990s, the Congo was
under a Western-imposed dictatorship that sucked life out of the
country; then from the late 1990s to the present the same Western
predators hatched, planned and had their proxies carry out successive
invasions of the Congo and its plunder. Little wonder then that the
DRC would be worse off on that Index concocted by the very same rogue
entities who'd conspired to plunge this country into the abyss!
Well said, Your Excellency The Communicator, though you didn't even
start addressing the awful case of Sean Aylward Impersonator!
***
(Sent via BlackBerry)
0 comments:
Post a Comment