Bead for Life on TV Tonight

Tune into NBC Nightly News this evening for a short but sweet segment on my favorite repurposed trash team, Bead for Life.

Photo from the Beader’s newsletter.

cause on a string

Check out these bracelets featured on Great Green Goods, made in Ghana from recycled plastic. They’re right up there with the Ugandan paper beads made from old magazines on my list of favorite gifts-that-double-as-political-talking-pieces.

Which reminds me:

Last week I received another political bracelet, a string of Kenyan grass beads, as a party favor at a fancy gala. To make up for missing my birthday party, a friend rigged an invite for me as a “young leader” to this evening honoring dogooder causes. As a New Yorker and nonprofiteer, it’s not in me to turn down a free drink, let alone an open bar, so after work I threw on a party dress and caught a cab uptown to [an event venue I will not mention here for fear that my labor organizing friends might disown me].

The highlight, for me, was when someone announced that Russell Simmons was in attendance and the eighty-something woman to my right leaned over and asked her son if he was the one who got people moving. “No, that’s Richard,” replied the son.

I’ll spare you details on the speeches, except to share the bizarre and, I found, disturbing fact that the whole event was underwritten by a very large diamond company. Did I miss something, or now that Hollywood has condemned blood diamonds is it ok to fund nonprofit work via their sales?

trash coincidence and continuing violence in Northern Uganda

I forgot to tell you that on my way to Amersterdam (leg one of a long journey to Malawi), I was sitting next to a member of the Ugandan parliament who represents a northern district. She had been in New York trying to raise awareness at the UN about the violent crisis in her region, which she claimed was worse than Darfur. I raised my wrist to show her that I was wearing a couple Bead for Life bracelets. It turns out, she knows the group and is one of their biggest supporters. She lifted her chin to show me she had on one of their necklaces. This little encounter has inspired me to do several things, one of which is host a bead party.

beads

I have discovered what I believe to be the most politically correct items on the face of the Earth: jewelry from the Bead for Life project. Bead for Life is a community development program that allows women from Northern Uganda to earn a living for themselves by making beads out of old magazines and stringing those beads into shiny strands to be sold to yuppie Westerners. Nothern Uganda, in case you haven’t heard, has been plagued by civil unrest for years now. Also, the HIV rate is very high, in no small part because of the violence and instability, including rape, domestic abuse and all the other side effects of war. So, this little project of recycling old paper into profit benefits women who are either refugees, living with HIV or raising AIDS orphans or some combination of the three. You, too can feel good about yourself by buying beads.

This is a blog about trash.

This is a blog about Oscar the Grouch. It’s about the smoke of burning trash piles wafting through every developing country in the world. It’s about the billions of dollars a year spent exporting garbage from one state to another. It’s about diving into a dumpster and coming up with a still-warm burger and three packets of mustard. It’s about detonating landmines with old truck tires and building bookshelves out of milk crates. It’s about barges. It’s about battery acid. It’s about paying sixty bucks for a change purse made of soda can tabs because the label says a women’s group in Latin America glued them together. It’s about sorting plastics. It’s about beaches built on landfills and landfills built on beaches. It’s about the “away” in throw away and the “out” in toss out and the “rid” in get rid of it. This is a blog about the art, money, power, politics, people and literature of garbage. It’s a subject that shocks and amuses me nearly every day, which is about how often I imagine I’ll be posting. I hope you’ll share in the fascination.