Excerpt from Disposable People by Kevin Bale
“What’s it like being an Indian farm laborer in debt bondage? You can get a sense of their daily life by trying the following experiment at home.
“In the kitchen, find a bag of rice, or even better some plain, un-ground wheat. Fill up a coffee mug four times with the rice or wheat. Now feed a family of five for one day with the grain you have measured. For every meal you’ll need to give each person only one-third of a coffee mug of grain so that it will last all day. If you are having wheat, you’ll need to grind it into flour and mix it with water to make soft unleavened bread. If it’s rice you can just boil it as usual. Repeat this recipe every day for the rest of your life.
“There are some possible variations. Once every two weeks replace half the grain or rice with beans or lentils. From your backyard find some dandelions or clovers and add the greens to the rice when you boil it (believe me, after a week or so, even weeds will begin to taste very good). And while you’ve still got some strength, grow some peppers or onions or some more beans. Then work even harder so that you’ll have enough onions to trade for some cooking oil and salt. This work will continue for twenty or thirty years.
“If you were really going to make the experiment realistic, you’d carry it out in the right conditions as well: you’d need to live in a one-room mud hut with a dirt floor and carry the water for cooking at least half a mile before using it. In addition, cook your food and keep yourself warm by burning cow dung in one corner of your room. When one of your children develops a lung infection from the smoke, sell your grain instead of eating it and use the money to buy some medicine. For those days eat nothing.”
Disposable People by Kevin Bale, Ch. 6
This is probably the most eye-opening book I’ve ever read. Each chapter goes into detail about a country and the particular sort of slavery that exists in it. Mr. Bale’s undercover research is thorough, methodical, and shocking. And I could have hardly located Mauritania on a map prior to reading this, let alone tell you anything about it. Who knew that it’s still stuck in the slave-society we thought the world had eradicated centuries ago?
