Among the many things I’ve learned from traveling to impoverished countries is that daily life is a struggle for a lot of people on this planet – and with our ever-growing tent cities here in the U.S. you don’t have to travel far to make this observation. Aside from the White West, Japan, and a few marginal exceptions, the infrastructure that we take for granted with only rare interruptions – good roads, reliable transportation, adequate shelter, efficient utilities, plenty of food, social stability – is absent, in varying degrees, throughout the world. Decent jobs that provide a living wage are hard to come by, simply because too many people lack the intelligence to create and maintain the level of civilization that the White man has developed. It’s not their fault; it’s biological reality.
When there’s no steady work or no work at all to be had, for those with no skills and no source of income to buy the basic necessities of life, then pretty much the only options available are turning to a life of crime, begging, or selling goods and services. My dictionary defines vend as “to sell, especially by hawking and peddling.” The emphasis here is going to be on hawkers and peddlers, but I have all vendors in mind.
Before I ever set foot in the Third World I read The Great Railway Bazaar by the American travel writer Paul Theroux. This entertaining book is about his four-month journey in 1973, nearly all of it by train, from England to Japan through Europe and Asia, then back to England on the Trans-Siberian railway. It was my first look at Asia – India in particular, which takes up many pages – through the lens of an intrepid traveler. On one stretch, as an overnight train ride approached its destination, Theroux describes the scene:
The travelers on the Howrah Mail had a look of fatigued solemnity. They paid no attention to the hawkers and vendors who became more frequent as we neared Calcutta, getting on at suburban stations to make a circuit of the open carriages. A man gets on with a teapot, balancing a row of nesting clay cups on his arm. He squawks, urging tea on the passengers, waving the teapot in each person’s face, and gets off: no sale. He is followed by a man with a jar of candy and a spoon. The candy man bangs his jar with the spoon and begins a monotonous spiel. Everyone is shown the jar, and the man continues to pound his spoon all the way to the door, where another enters with a tray of fountain pens. The pen man babbles and, as he does so, he demonstrates how the cap is unscrewed, how the nib is poised, how the clip works; he twirls the pen and holds it for everyone to see; he does everything but write with it, and when he has finished he leaves, having sold nothing. More get on with things to sell: buns, roasted chickpeas, plastic combs, lengths of ribbon, soiled pamphlets; nothing is sold.
I read this nearly fifty years ago without the slightest emotional reaction. Since then I’ve seen God knows how many vendors all over the world, and my heart goes out to all of them. They try so hard, most of them, not committing any crime, not picking pockets or mugging people, not begging for a few coins, but just honestly working hard and earning so little. I respect them much more than I respect a lot of people I know, just like I respect some downtrodden Black guy with a shopping cart poking through trash receptacles and gathering cans and bottles for which he’ll be paid a pittance at the nearest recycling center.
I can’t explain why, of the thousands of vendors I’ve seen, only a handful have left on indelible impression on me. That’s just how the human brain works, I guess. In this composition I’m going to throw out some random snapshots, in no chronological order, to give you a flavor of places a long way from home.
Actually, I will begin, chronologically, with the first and most unlikely place I encountered a rather aggressive bunch of vendors: Salzburg, Austria, the home of Mozart. This was on my first trip to Europe in 1978, when I traveled around much of the continent on a 30-day rail pass. Ah, those were the days. You could just get on and off as you pleased, no reservations, just show the conductor your laminated pass, sleep in first-class compartments on overnight trips, all for $180 a month. Anyway, even though it was summer, it was a cool, rainy day in Salzburg, and seven or eight women – German women, not alien immigrants – stood in a plaza, bundled up and wearing rubber boots, with flower bouquets, badgering every passerby, including me. I didn’t see them sell any flowers, but I didn’t really feel bad for them: after all, this was Austria, and I knew they wouldn’t go to bed hungry. On that same trip, I was traveling through Greece, and as everywhere in the world, the train would stop for a few minutes in a small town to let off and take on passengers. In South America and Asia it’s common to see vendors walking along the stopped train hawking snacks. It’s less common in Europe but here and there you see it. At this little station in Greece I was standing in the aisle, looking out the window, and a man standing next to me bought a bunch of grapes from a vendor. I guess they were sour because he became furious. He couldn’t risk getting off and demanding a refund because the train might leave without him, so he threw them out the window at the vendor and cursed him out. It was funny.
Speaking of Paul Theroux and Indian trains, on which I traveled for a month in 1987 on a $100 rail pass, a vendor got on with a plate of vegetable fritters. You have to be careful about what you eat in India, but they looked like they were fresh off the griddle. I remember this only because it was the most delicious snack I’ve ever eaten – golden brown and stuffed with cauliflower, potatoes, peas, and delicate spices. This takes me back to 1980 when I rode the Trans-Siberian railway the full length, duplicating the second half of Theroux’s journey. The meals on that train were horrible, the worst food I’ve ever eaten, and I welcomed the brief stops in Siberia where I had a chance to get off on the platform and stretch my legs. At each of these stops there were peasant women, babushkas, allowed a little free enterprise, loudly hawking pickles, pine nuts, cole slaw and such to hungry riders. The pickles and cole slaw were served in cones of old newspaper. Compared to the slop on the train, this food was delicious and I ate a lot of it, but I became terribly ill – the second sickest I’ve ever been while traveling – and it ruined the rest of my trip.
The Trans-Siberian was completed before the rule of Joseph Stalin, who vies with China’s Mao Tse-Tung as history’s bloodiest mass murderer, and trains were used extensively to transport equipment, soldiers, and prisoners of war during World War Two. Stalin was from Georgia, one of the provinces or oblasts of the old Soviet Union that became an independent country with the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. I visited Georgia, which is in the Caucasus region, in 2018, including the small city of Gori, where you can see Stalin’s birthplace, the railway car in which he traveled as Soviet dictator, and the Stalin Museum which, while not glorifying him, reveals nothing about his genocidal crimes. Outside the museum, there are vendors with tables selling souvenirs – Stalin coffee cups, Stalin ashtrays, Stalin matchboxes and so on. Again, there was nothing to suggest that he was a beloved leader, but nothing negative either. The unspoken feeling I got was, we’re proud of our hometown boy who made it big. Very strange. Those vendors were among the very few I didn’t care for.
There are several ancient churches in the distinct orthodox style scattered throughout Georgia. Across the road from one there was a strip of seven or eight stalls selling handicrafts. Business was slow, and the vendors were just sitting there passively as they do almost everywhere. I wondered then, as I’ve done a thousand times before and after, and which is the whole point of sitting down and writing this, how do you make a living this way? My eyes rested on one woman with a kind face, and I thought I’d make her day. She was selling these whimsical figurines meant to sit on a ledge, three of which caught my eye. One was a smiling girl with a big bowtie in her hair, and the other two were smiling cats, one wearing a pillbox hat and reading a book, the other with a top hat and a pocketbook slung over its shoulder. They all had long strings for legs that dangled down, and shoes for the girl, paws for the cats – cute objects that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I bought all three for $20 total and they’ve been sitting on my bookshelf and smiling at me for the last six years.
The one scene that made the most forceful impression on me, and actually inspired me to write this piece, was in Lima, Peru way back in 1985. In a large outdoor market there were about a dozen women, milling among the large crowd, selling “loosies” from open cigarette packs they held high in the air, crying “Cigarillos! Cigarillos!” No one was buying. Back then one cigarette probably went for a nickel, and even if you sold a few, Jesus Christ, what would that buy, a loaf of bread if you were lucky? I had to admire these women, especially since Peru is the most thief-ridden country I’ve ever been to. Very little in the way of violent robbery, at least when I was there, but pickpockets and daypack slitters were a constant menace – I saw many travelers wearing their packs in front of them – and I heard and read stories of backpacks lifted up to be secured on the tops of buses, only to be handed down to someone on the other side, or disappearing in the blackness of a train tunnel. You really have to be vigilant in Peru.
Lima has nothing going for it, but Cuzco, the gateway to Machu Picchu, with its Spanish baroque architecture, is one of South America’s most beautiful cities. I met an Australian guy there named Dan, a real fun character, and we had dinner at a local restaurant. As in much of the Third World, both children and adults will wander into restaurants where tourists eat and go from table to table trying to sell things until the manager comes along and shoos them out the door. In this place a boy of about ten walked in offering postcards, which neither of us were interested in. Dan had a fair amount of chicken and rice on his plate which he couldn’t finish. He pointed to it and the kid nodded. Then he pulled out the bottom of his t-shirt, and Dan, laughing in disbelief, scraped the food off his plate. The boy folded the bottom of his shirt back up and walked out with a big smile. Some things I’ll never forget.
Bangladesh, next door to India, is hurting. Aside from the ubiquitous poverty, I don’t think any other country gets pounded as hard by cyclones, with great loss of life. in Dhaka, the capital, I saw people, as in Indian cities, scrabbling through huge rubbish piles looking for something to eat. I also saw something unique in the taxi category – bicycle rickshaws, in contrast to the three-wheeled tuk-tuks common throughout Asia. There are hundreds and hundreds of them in Dhaka, like flitting bats, ringing their little bells and looking for passengers. Few find any. How do they survive? Where do they get the energy to pedal all day?
Throughout southeast Asia and in other tropical regions, you’ll see vendors by the roadside sitting next to mounds of coconuts. Coconut water is delicious and refreshing in these hot, humid climates. The vendors lop off the end of a coconut with a machete and hand you a plastic straw. For less than a buck. You can’t go wrong.
In Cambodia I took the bus from Battambang to Siem Reap. It stopped for ten minutes in a large town called Sisophon. A woman wearing the black pajama attire common in that country boarded the bus with food of some kind wrapped in banana leaves. She walked down the aisle, offering them to each passenger. I think she made one sale. I was sitting in the back and really wanted to take a video of this with my little Canon PowerShot because it captured so well the feeling of traveling in these countries, but I just didn’t have the heart to point my camera at her. It had something to do with how much these people had suffered, first from years of American aerial bombing during the Vietnam War, then under the barbaric Khmer Rouge regime, which killed off one-fourth of the population.
The Angkor Wat temple complex is far and away Cambodia’s biggest draw, and just a few miles away is the small city of Siem Reap with plenty of hotels and restaurants to choose from. It’s where all tourists stay when visiting Angkor Wat. I went for a walk there and saw four men, propped on their stumps, playing traditional stringed instruments. Their legs had been blown off, either from land mines planted by the Khmer Rouge, or more likely from bombs dropped by our air terrorists during the Vietnam War which got buried just below the earth’s surface without going off. To this day, they pose a danger and are occasionally detonated by peasants in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, usually by accidentally striking them with their farming tools. It’s called UXO for unexploded ordnance, and on the internet you can find a great deal of literature about this subject, particularly in regard to Laos, about which so many Americans know nothing.
The musicians had produced some CDs which were stacked on a blanket on the ground in front of them. As I remember they were selling for $10 each. Whatever the price was, it seemed way too expensive in a country like Cambodia where the dollar goes a long, long way. Later I regretted not helping them. Cheap bastard. But I did drop a one dollar bill donation on their blanket.
After the North Vietnamese won the war and reunified the country, they changed the name of the South Vietnamese capital from Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, but everybody still calls it Saigon. Saigon is a culinary paradise. There are many restaurants around the city with luscious dishes on the menu posted outside, where you can have the meal of your life for five bucks. Often there’s a friendly hostess outside trying to lure you in, but the word vendor betterapplies to the postcard sellers making their rounds. When they come to your table and you say “No thank you” they just smile and move to the next table.
Somewhere, I forget where, I was approached by a woman walking around with an armful of small, rolled-up color prints of pastoral Vietnamese scenes. I looked at one or two, then a lot more. All of them were beautiful, and I ended up buying four at $2 each. They’re hanging on my wall behind me as I write these words.
Somewhere else in Vietnam I saw a woman standing alone holding a baby in her arms and a bunch of bananas on the ground. It struck me as such a poignant portrait and although I use my camera much less often than most travelers, I wanted a picture of her. Travelers disagree about offering people money to take their photos. The holier than thou types think it’s degrading. I don’t, at least not in most circumstances. There’s a wide spectrum of opinions about people pictures. Anyway, I showed her my camera, said “Photo okay?”, and she nodded. I took a picture, which came out nice, and bought some bananas. We were both satisfied though she never smiled.
But the Vietnamese vendor I remember best was a man who was pestering me to buy something out of a wooden box he was carrying, and here I’m going to digress to tell you a story I hope will touch you. It’s very rare that I hire a car and driver to take me on a day tour, but after coming across an outfit called annamtour.com, run by a guy named Vu who offered customized trips to battlefield sites of the Vietnam War, I did just that. (Vu spoke excellent English and his father had been a soldier in the South Vietnamese army who was briefly held in a re-education camp after the war ended.) As a young teenager I remembered the intense North Vietnamese bombardment of the remote air base in Khe Sanh from the surrounding mountains, where many Marines died, and I requested that we visit that site, now quiet and peaceful with grass covering the old runway, and reconstructed, sandbagged bunkers the Marines used to give visitors a feel for the war. Anyway, I was the only person there and this guy was walking around with his box filled with odds and ends – old coins, North Vietnamese war medals, and other trinkets. Out of curiosity, I took a few moments to poke through it and noticed there were some dog tags worn by the Marines; one name in particular stuck with me. But this guy was so persistent, tugging at my sleeve to make me buy something, that I became very annoyed and refused to deal with him.
When I returned to my hotel in Hue that night, I went on the computer in the lobby and logged on to virtualwall.org, which shows personal details of each of our more than 58,000 servicemen who died in Vietnam, and occasional reminiscences of friends and relatives. They’re listed alphabetically by name and also by their states and hometowns. I clicked on the name I’d seen on the dog tag. He was the only one with that first and last name, so it had to be him. I won’t mention his name here, other than to say that he was from California and was 19 when he was killed. I scrolled down and saw the words “Remembered by his niece.” She had posted that six years earlier along with her name and email address. I thought, what a wonderful memento that would’ve been to send her, and cursed myself for not buying it.
This thing kept gnawing at me to the point where, two years later, I emailed Vu and asked him if he could locate that vendor the next time he was at Khe Sanh to see if he still had that tag, and if so, if he could mail it to me. I gave him the Marine’s name and told him I would pay him for it. He replied that his government was very sensitive about American relics from the war years, and that customs would probably inspect his package and confiscate it. He told me that another American would soon be taking a tour with him and visiting Khe Sanh, and suggested that I contact him at his email address which he provided. This seemed like an excellent idea so I emailed the man. He was a Jet Blue pilot from Minnesota who, though nine years younger than me and too young during the war to have been emotionally affected by it as I was, still had a keen interest in it. We spoke on the phone a few times. He was a very nice guy and said he’d do his best to get that tag.
When he returned home from Vietnam he mailed me three dog tags. I unwrapped each one with anticipation, but to my great disappointment, none was the one I wanted. I looked up their names on the virtual wall site and none of them had even been killed in action. I assume they either threw them away or gave them to a local when their tour of duty ended.
I thought about writing to the Marine’s niece and telling her the whole story in detail but I kept putting it off. Finally, two years later, in 2017 – four years after my trip to Vietnam – I emailed her. In the heading I wrote “About your uncle who died in Vietnam,” and began with “Hello. I have a story to tell you that I should have told you four years ago. I wish it had a different ending, but I hope you’ll appreciate it just the same.” I went into detail about everything, including my own memories of the war and how much my feelings about it had changed as I grew older. She replied the next day, emotionally overwhelmed. She told me a lot. She mentioned that the family members of the 26 Marines in her uncle’s unit who had been killed in the vicinity of Khe Sanh that day in 1968 – the year of the most American losses – had become a tight-knit group and that she had shared my email with all of them. She said that her uncle, who died before she was born, was one of only two of the 26 whose body was never recovered, and until his dying day, her grandfather held out hope that his son would walk through the door. I told her that I too had a small hole in my heart from never knowing my own uncle, my father’s older brother, who was killed in combat in World War Two. We shared other thoughts. It was a very nice exchange for both of us and I’m so glad that I wrote to her. I gave her my phone number and asked her to call me but she never did.
So now let me wind this down with a few stories from my most recent trip, to Afghanistan, where there were many, many vendors – and I’m not even counting the uncountable stall holders one sees in the bazaars of all the countries in this part of the world selling everything you can imagine that can be carried away by hand. They just sit there doing nothing – “spiders waiting for their fly customers,” as one traveler, visiting Zanzibar in the 1960s, irreverently put it. These good folks are vendors too, of course, but I feel more for those who are out there really trying. With that said, how can I forget this hatchet-faced man in the capital city of Kabul, trying to sell pint-sized containers of water? He was the most aggressive vendor I’ve ever seen. In fact, I saw him two days in a row, in the same congested traffic circle where for a minute or so cars could barely move. He was threading his way through the creeping traffic, shouting the Dari word for water as he held up a container, sometimes shouting right in the faces of drivers who quickly rolled up their windows. And again, the container he was hawking sold for fifteen cents in Afghanistan, so as I’ve asked myself over and over and now ask you, how do people survive this way? And like the vendors walking through the rail car that Paul Theroux wrote about, I didn’t see him make a single sale.
Even out in the street, away from the bazaars, there were so many vendors selling different things that I can’t do them justice without writing a book. The economy is a wreck in Afghanistan and many people go to bed hungry. A few times boys of nine or ten selling eggs accosted me. I remember buying hard-boiled eggs as well as coconut slices from street vendors in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic – in fact the egg sellers there even had powdered spices you could sprinkle on – but here I’m sure the eggs were raw so I had no use for them. Still, it was nice to know that these boys had a plentiful supply of Nature’s perfect food for their families in case they didn’t sell any. I asked one boy who I didn’t buy from if I could take his picture, and he was fine with that. I gave him some American coins as a souvenir, which made him happy.
We were driving along the road on the outskirts of Kabul and in a one-mile stretch we must have passed fifteen vendors selling sunglasses hanging from A-frame sign boards, behind which they sat in the shade that the boards made. Fifteen of them, for crying out loud – and not one vehicle had stopped.
The group of eight I was with was sprawled out in the grass, eating a picnic lunch near an historical site, when children approached. One boy had a little sack and a brush. He pointed at my ankle-high boots and I nodded – they needed a sprucing up. He took a small jar of liquid polish out of his sack, stuck his finger in it, daubed my boots, and went to work. He did a good job. I asked our guide how much I should pay him and he suggested 20 Afghanis, which is what the local currency is called – the equivalent of thirty cents. I gave him a 100-Afghani note instead, a buck and a half, glad to know that he’d be eating one square meal that day.
The most poignant scene I took home from Afghanistan was that of a little girl of five or six sitting against a building on a busy street in Kabul. She too had a brush and a little sack. My guess is that her parents told her to do this in the faint hope that it would put a little more food on the table. Pedestrians walked past her without even looking down. She just sat there expressionlessly, showing no interest in life. I can still see her angelic little face. Some things are impossible to forget.
But of all the vendor scenes that left a permanent impression on me, for whatever reason, and I can’t begin to explain it, the one that I can still see and hear so clearly, almost forty years later, is those women in that crowded market in Lima, holding up their open cigarette packs and crying, “Cigarillos! Cigarillos!” What, maybe a nickel for selling one loose cigarette? Goddamn. There are eight billion people on this planet, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from traveling, it’s that life is a struggle for so many of them.
So here’s to all you vendors, who put in so much time and effort to earn your daily bread, with little reward. I salute all of you. Well, almost all of you – not the guys in Gori selling Stalin souvenirs.
* * *
I really should’ve ended this essay with that last sentence, but I couldn’t resist writing a postscript and a confession: I was a vendor twice myself, and even though I’m going to embarrass myself here, I’ll tell you about it.
Elsewhere on this site, in “Sad Sequel to Alcohol’n’Me,” I wrote about my disastrous marriage and the ordeal of going through a very rough divorce. That episode is worthy of a book, but since my only intention was writing an article, I left a great deal out. One thing I didn’t mention was that, beginning some time in 1998, to find a little joy in life, I began writing a humorous book about my 24 years as a baseball umpire, mostly at the high school and college level, which I titled Please Don’t Kill the Umpire! I would get up around 5AM on most weekdays and write for two hours before going to work. I foolishly had 5000 copies printed in May 1999 – my father paid for it – and quickly learned that selling them was a lot more difficult than I imagined, and that I had to resort to anything, anything, that might work. So I got creative. I made a sign out of a big piece of plywood, on which I scrawled, “For 24 years they abused me. Now read my book. Only $5.” I put my uniform on and placed the sign against my car in a vacant lot at a busy intersection in East Haven, Connecticut where the traffic light changed frequently, so that every minute five or ten cars were stopped for the light and easily could’ve pulled in to buy my book. To attract attention I repeatedly made “safe” and “out” calls. The cover price was $14, and here I was trying to sell it for five dollars. The printing cost came out to $1.85 a copy, so I was still making a profit, but really, what a joke. But you gotta do what you gotta do.
I stood out there for more than an hour, making safe and out calls without letup. I could see big smiles each time cars were stopped for a red light, so clearly people were amused. You’d think that even people who weren’t baseball fans would want to reward me for my efforts, but you’d be wrong. God, I felt like such a jerk for what I was doing, but like I said, you gotta do what you gotta do. I did sell seven books. Out of, I’d say, five or six hundred drivers who could’ve pulled in, four did. One guy bought four copies, saying, “Boy, you got some balls doing this,” as he handed me a twenty dollar bill. Well, I suppose it was a lesson in human behavior, but not something I wanted to repeat. On my next trip to the town dump, I took the big sign with me.
In 2012, back on Long Island, I met up with a former co-worker, a really good guy, and over a few beers I told him I was thinking about trying my hand at a mail order business, selling inexpensive gifts that had a humorous or Western accent. One idea led to another, and he ended up putting me in touch with his son-in-law, who he thought might be interested in partnering with me. I’ll call him Larry, since that’s his real name, and I’m tempted to mention his last name as well, but being a prudent man I don’t want to start shit. Larry’s wife, my friend’s daughter, was expecting their second child, and she ran a nice business selling hand-painted dolls to people all over the world, working mostly from home. Larry helped her. He was about 25 years younger than me, one of those Generation X kids who grew up in a time of more technology and less character. But as someone with expertise in creating websites and using the internet as a marketing tool, and years of experience with the ins and outs of packaging and shipping – areas in which I knew nothing – he seemed like the perfect guy to work with. We met, got along, and made a handshake agreement to split the tasks and the later hoped-for profits down the middle. He already had plenty of storage space in a building which his wife used for her dolls. I came up with the name bluecollargifts.com, he made the website and a Facebook account, and I wrote up entertaining descriptions for each of the thirty-odd items we hoped to sell, which he posted. With Christmas three months away, I was thinking that if we were lucky we could earn fifteen or twenty grand each. I decided to purchase a solid amount of inventory to start off with, $8000 worth, anticipating future purchases as Christmas drew closer. He did not lay out a cent.
In mid-October he sent me an email telling me he had found a full-time job and was no longer interested in this venture. In addition, his warehouse lease would expire at the end of the month, and I had to take all my stuff out before then. He had never mentioned anything about looking for a job or a lease. The son of a bitch – I couldn’t believe it. I exchanged a couple of scathing emails with him, and was taken aback by his bizarre logic, telling me that he was the one losing out, not me, for all the wasted time he had put in, whereas I could still sell everything I had bought. God, how I despised him. I still do. I had no choice but to rent a van and make two trips to remove all the inventory, which I stored in my father’s basement. I ended up throwing some of it out, giving most of it away, and giving some things to my sister to sell on e-Bay.
I did save seven or eight of the smallest items, with the dim hope of selling them and recouping maybe five hundred dollars. In December I went to a sign shop and had a small A-frame sign made that read “Great Stocking Stuffers – $5 And Under.” To comply with the local ordinance, I paid a small fee for a peddler’s license. I borrowed a long folding table. A week before Christmas, I set everything up at the roadside, right near a T-junction where drivers turned left and right, and going slowly could easily read my sign and pull over. There was a decent amount of traffic – a few cars every minute.
I sat there in the cold for two hours, a spider waiting for some fly customers. Guess how many people stopped? Nada. Not one.
But unlike so many of the vendors I’ve dedicated this composition to, I ate well that night, so you don’t have to feel sorry for me.