And now, this week, yet another yard sale. Though, of course, this one, like the last one, didn't actually take place in my yard but rather in my living room...and dining room...and driveway, which was new.
This sale was considerably crazier than the last--last time around I only invited friends and friends of friends, but this time I threw the net open a bit wider and invited people from some Facebook groups I'm a member of, even though I don't really know very many of the members. In the end, this tactic resulted in lots of people, which was good, but perhaps too many people all at once and some not so honest folks who most likely walked out with some free stuff, but it couldn't be helped! My boys and the husband were outside in the driveway selling all the toys (I knew that would be a big draw) and I had a friend inside with me selling in one corner of the great room while I tried to manage the exit, only partially successfully. I would have taken pictures, but I was busy from the moment I woke up until the sale began at 8am and then from that moment on until well after our official shut down time of 11am.
A funny thing occurred this time around, though. I was selling clothes, kids', men's, and women's, for 5 riyals a piece, about $1.35, and while some folks were shopping, they kept saying "I'm going to send my maid or nanny over later to look through these, alright?" And, of course, it was alright, but then throughout the afternoon and well into the next day, these women kept showing up and buying the seemingly most random collections of clothes and toys, things not in their sizes and not for the ages of kids they are minding here, so I finally asked one of them what she planned to do with the things she had bought. "Oh Madame," she says, "I will send all this back to the Philippines to my family." "Doesn't that cost a lot of money," I asked. "Yes," she said, "but with your prices it is cheaper to send things than for them to buy them there or for me to send them the money to buy them." And then I had a crisis of conscience and offered to give them the clothes and every single one of them refused, saying they must pay and would not take them otherwise, and suddenly I felt like a very small part of a global narrative of poverty and privilege and power dynamics and my head started to spin. We had bought almost all of the items we were selling in the US, though 99% of them had been made outside the US, in third world countries. Then we carried them here, to Qatar, where we sold them to women who had also come from some of those same third world countries to try to escape the same poverty that cannot be combatted by working in clothing factories in their home towns, and who work for rich expatriates from yet more countries who have also come here for financial reasons by and large, but reasons of a completely different type. And now those same items will be making their way back to those same countries. And there are even more factors at work here that I'm not smart enough to tease out, additional levels of exploitation and desperation and invisible hands I can't parse but were all at work in my living room. It's sobering to realize you are an active and willing participant in all of the above. Not my usual reaction to counting my yard sale cash!
On a brighter note, in the end, through the yard sale itself as well as selling all our personal furniture online, we made almost enough to cover the cost of shipping the items we want to back to the US, so there's a silver-lining for us. And since it turns out that we have to pay for our shipping costs in cash (because OF COURSE we do; this is Doha after all!), they will be getting a pile of small bills from us--hope they have a big bag to put it in!
