My International Closet

So, the night before I left for Valpo, as I was packing up all my clothes, I checked the tags of most of my wardrobe.

Why you may ask? Well, I've meaning to do it ever since I got back from Nicaragua. While I was there (with the Social Action Leadership Team from VU), we met with workers from a free trade zone where businesses like Kohls, GAP, etc have large factories to produce clothes cheaply without fair labor conditions. It presented a really interesting conundrum of how to ethically shop in a globalized world.

If you knew that the adorable shirt that hung on the GAP sale rack was made by someone who made 17 cents a day, worked in a factory with unsafe working conditions, was prevented from organizing to demand better conditions and at the end of the day still couldn't provide for their families...would you still buy it?

The answer is probably yes, because at the end of the day as Americans we still have to buy clothes and there arn't that many alternate options that let us buy what we need for the money available to us. And, when we do buy that shirt, the money does go to the employer of the worker, and the money eventually does filter down to the workers who might not otherwise have a job at all.

And yet, at the same time, isn't buying that shirt still participating in the exploitation of others?

It's a conundrum. And one very relevant today as globalization continues to spread rapidly...which is clear everytime we open our closets.

For example...my closet brings together garments from Sri Lanka, Honduras, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, USA, Australia, Taiwan, and Mexico. And that's just shirts...

Add in jeans and pants and you add a bit more of a cosmpolitan flavor: Madagascar, Moldovia, El Salvador, Jordan, Costa Rica, Kenya, India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Turkey.

Oh and those two adorable jackets that I couldn't leave the store with out? The two big players in the world economy of late, China & India.

It's just interesting you know? I have no solutions to this...and in some ways it's not a problem. And yet, at the same time there is a sense of responsibility to make sure that our livelihoods don't depend on others' pain and suffering, is there not? There is a sense that if we take on the godly responsibility to be good stewards of our resources then we have to deal with the nexus between being a good steward and being a consumer. How to deal with it is a larger question.

Of course, can I do anything about this today? No. It's a longer process. A process of adjusting oneself into just living, to quote my friend Kat Peters.

Or, as someone wise told me..."You do as much as you can each day to effect change, but recognize that as a broken and sinful people we will always struggle."