Thai t-shirt project

Thai T-shirt Project
       The t-shirt project started as a way to justify my addiction. In my hometown there exists one of the best second-hand (vintage or consignment if you like) stores, Village Discount Store. The great thing about the store is not only the price, with articles of clothing going for as little as 50 cents, but the selection. There are literally thousands of T-shirts to choose from, each one different. And being in an out-of-the-way-place like Youngstown, Ohio,  the real gems are often overlooked by the locals who don't go in for strangeness, or don't notice how strange some of their own local messages might be, like the T-shirts for the pork specialty restaurant that says, "you croak 'em, we smoke 'em". The patient shopper is rewarded at irregular intervals with surprising gems, which is exactly the same mechanism that makes addicts out of casual gamblers, the thrill you know is coming if you just try one more time. So it's understandable that I started making regular visits and buying lots of t-shirts, more than I could possibly use. But then, what to do with them? That's when the t-shirt project was born. I could give t-shirts away to friends and take their picture and thus have a record of both the t-shirts and the friends. But a key element of the T-shirt project was the matter of choice. Since I had so many shirts, I could give each person a choice of 5 or 6. When they choose, I learn something about the person and perhaps I see the T-shirt in a new way. Then I would take their picture. It was particularly effective when I brought T-shirts from the USA to other countries abroad such as Korea or someplace I was traveling. In Korea they love T-shirts with English legends but more often than not, they don't make grammatical or semantic sense, like the one I saw,"My giant rabbit ate your grandmother."
       When I decided to go to Thailand I brought a big bag full of T-shirts and stuffed animals for people that I might meet there.  I quickly got tired of lugging that extra bag around. It became quite a burden. Of course, I was hoping to meet some nice locals I could bestow my treasures upon, but it wasn't as easy as I thought. The Thai workers in the tourist district of Bangkok were so fed up with obnoxious tourists that they were not very nice, in fact most were downright icy. So how to get rid of the stuff? I carried some shirts and animals around everyday. Sometimes I would meet a cute toddler on the bus, subway or restaurant, and if we had a friendly moment, I could magically produce a stuffed lion or hippo from my bag and make a special hero moment. The T-shirts were harder. There were the cute young girls at the tourist information office that I visited almost daily, they each got one. Then there were the masseuses at the massage parlor. I gave away a nice blue Jean jacket there and a T-shirt. But one of the workers just looked at me and said, "You know, we all have good jobs and money. Why don't you give the clothes to someone who really needs them?"  From her point of view she had a good job making perhaps 10 dollars a day giving hour long massages to tourists. I had looked at them with pity but it all depends on your perspective, and I was about to receive a life lesson.
      I didn't really understand. "Who are you talking about? How do I find them?". I was thinking some shelter or organisation.
     "Just look around," she said, and then I understood. She was talking about the beggars on the streets, the people sleeping on the streets. There weren't too many of them, but they were there. What to do about beggars, how do we react to them?  It was easiest just to ignore them, or you could give them something, say 5 baht, but she was suggesting that I actually engage them; talk to them, give them a choice of a T-shirt, take THEIR picture. I realised then how I had dehumanised the street people, even when I gave them something, it was just putting something in their cup, not talking to them, asking them how  their day was?
     So I started really looking at the street people, looking for people the right size. I met an old woman sleeping on the street and she must have wondered when I stopped and opened my bag and took out a few T-shirts and a sleeveless blue jeans jacket. She choose the sleeveless jacket. It was quite stylish and I felt a little strange helping her into it, but for her it was something that would keep her warm on chilly nights and maybe make the pavement a little less hard. She was tickled pink. She happily let me take her picture. Whenever I passed her after that, she would always smile and give me a peak at her new jacket. A young mother sat nightly behind her sleeping 5 year old son. I never saw him actually awake. I pulled out some animals and a few small T-shirts, one with a Japanese animation picture on it that was popular in the USA. She choose that one. The next night I saw her again in the same place, as soon as she saw me, she pulled the cover from her son and showed me he was wearing the shirt on top of his other shirt. It was way too large, but she was very thankful. Over the next few nights i gave away all my tshirts to poor people living in the streets of Bangkok, and in the process i got to know them just a little. These were people that had a gentleness born of no hope. Their only goal was to somehow make enough money to feed themselves another night. Where was their life? What did they live for? Perhaps they found some happiness in their dreams. What could be done for them?  The t-shirt project lives on, always changing with new people and new t-shirts, and always changing me.