natalia ilyin

I've put up a blog for The SisterScarf Fund, which is really a relief, since it has been on my mind forever. Right now the blog is about how to organize yourself into starting a project for social action. Seems so many people have such good ideas, but put things off because they don't know exactly how to get started.

http://sisterscarf.blogspot.com

I do hope you'll take a look at it and comment and follow it and everything so that I know who's reading, and so I can tailor thoughts to what you need.

As you know, Burma is the country currently known as Myanmar. It is called Myanmar right now because its military dictatorship knows that you associate the word "Burma" with the words "human rights abuses," and so, in a nice branding coup, they changed the name a few years back. Now if you see "Made in Myanmar" on a sweatshirt you're buying, well-- where the heck is that and who cares? Which is what they want. I needed to say this first, so you'd be reminded about Myanmar. But this post is really about something else.

It is hard to think that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the jailed pro-democracy leader who has been living under house arrest for fourteen years in Burma, faces a sentence of five years in a disgusting Myanmar prison because a sprightly young American named John Yettaw decided what a fine thing it would be to swim across the lake that acts as a moat to keep people away from her. True, he was arrested, too. But I have little pity for him.

This thoughtless action provided just the pretext the Burmese military dictatorship was looking for, and it promptly arrested Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi for violating the terms of her house arrest, some say in order to lengthen her imprisonment, since her house-arrest term was coming to an end in a very few years.

As a person involved in refugee relief on the Burmese border, I am often astounded at the continuing smiling naivete and thoughtless actions of my fellow Americans when it comes to involving themselves in the life of another country, the politics of which they do not understand. We've been accused of this ever since "The Quiet American" came out. But really. How long must we not grow up?

This charming capacity for ignorant blundering is not only the province of the odd swimmer. I recently had a smiling software executive assure me that her company is selling their "people-tracking" software in Burma. "Oh, yes," she twittered, "We have a growing presence in Myanmar." Does she get that she is saying, "We're thrilled to be a part of the largest crack-down on human rights the world is currently enjoying?" No. She doesn't get it. She's swimmin' across the lake. She's beaming as she backstrokes. She's causing causing real, human misery and she's masking it as market share. She knows not what she does.

In our world, ignorance is not bliss. It is a refusal to respect other people's rights. It is a left-over colonial attitude, and I don't care how "innocent" you are, if you blunder into Myanmar without doing your homework, or worse, not caring to do your homework, you are reenacting the worst of colonial imperialism mixed with the worst of our American refusal to grow up. There is little more repulsive than an aged virginity : our naive ways do not excuse our irresponsibility.

Well, to make a long story short, it was fabulous. Country Capers got the music going early as people arrived in full regalia-- I have to say that men, always nice to have around, really look especially good in evening clothes. Fleece, although it has many merits, does not hold a candle to a cut-away.
In flowed women in ball dresses and we got a full look at everyone's ensemble during the Grand March, which dissolved into a bit of a Conga line at the end.
King of the Ball: Eight Fingered Dick, (normally a very nice guy who runs the local art store, but something quite appealing happens to him when he lets his hair down and wears all black and little tiny dark glasses.) Queen of the Ball: one Kate Ebert, whose bustled gown of chartreuse green mattress ticking combined with orange silk collar, red and white striped stockings and bloomers made her costume not only amazing, but, darn it, flattering as heck.
Even though this is the recession of all recessions, we made almost twice what we made the last time we did this party. And all of that money goes to microgrants for Burmese living on the Thai Border. Double success-- double happiness. Pictures to follow.

Three days left until the Old Settlers' Ball, and because I have an unrealistic view of my powers, I have said yes once again to making too many other people's ball dresses. So here I sit, thinking thoughts about what I am going to teach next Fall in terms of design history and criticism, and sewing the bejeebers out of yards and yards of taffeta. The balanced life is the life we strive for. Histories and hierarchies, who did what when-- that's one side of the story. The other-- that unheralded long stitch of repeated experience that snicks through life like a machine needle, the continuing tale that folds in upon itself, that starts over and ends and starts over-- the sea swell of the unconscious upon which we plant yardsticks and measuring tapes and wonder why they never reach far enough, why they sink down out of sight. How shall I teach that?

I am a woman of many hats.

Many people content themselves with a owning a business hat and a personal hat, changing from one to the other in a fairly regulated way. But my hat tree is loaded, and their wearing is not a daily routine. Upon said tree hang the branding hat, the design critic hat, the trade-book memoirist hat, the business-owner hat and the nonprofit refugee relief co-director hat.

Aside from the business-owner hat (a large Fedora, suitable for dodging bullets in a film noir alley, which I wear daily) the rest find their places upon my head seasonally.

Like many writers, I prefer to write in the Winter, when it is cold, and publish and tour in the Spring, when it is warm and I can fly without dragging along a big coat. The fact that I don’t actually tour two out of three years does not keep me from thinking that I will and planning accordingly. If you write, this makes total sense to you. If you do not write, this will explain why perhaps you should not take up the profession.

Anyway. I wore my writer’s hat for a time a few weeks ago, but now suddenly I must also don my nonprofit co-director hat and throw a large fundraising extravaganza. Putting a sensible, ladies-who-lunch pillbox on top of a Fedora may look strange but, hey. Of such is life.

Eight years ago now, a friend of mine and I started a very small refugee-relief program. We do one thing. We give micro-grants to stateless Burmese who have been pushed over the border into Thailand. Since it’s not in Thailand’s interest to acknowledge the fact that huge numbers of people have fled the military dictatorship in Burma, in Thailand these people are “non-people,” have no papers, and therefore do not have access to healthcare or any other basics of citizenship.

The Thai tolerate their squatting on the border, and provide camps for some them, which is a strain on the Thai economy, but not as much of a strain as a confrontation with Burma would be. So things are rough for these refugees. Many don’t know where their parents are, where their kids are.

For years, my friend came back from her stays in Thailand, wondering aloud how we could help these women up there on the Border who were giving people medical care, or creating orphanages, or helping homeless kids during the day.

At the same time she’d often say— “Oh, and here’s a scarf from the markets in Bangkok,” and I’d tie some gorgeous piece of silk around my neck and continue wondering what we could do to help these women with projects they had started up.

It took us a long while to put two and two together-- to figure out that we could sell these Thai scarves in America and put 100% of the proceeds into micro-grant programs. But that’s what we did: We started SisterScarf. (Sister is a term of endearment used for close friends in the Cambodian. It seemed appropriate.)

We sell scarves. We have a couple of angel donors. And we throw a big bash once every two years, just to blow the carbon out of the engine.
No, we do not have a website, we’re not on Facebook. We do not want the Burmese government to be able to trace blog entries or any of our services to any of our recipients. (That’s how they cracked down on the uprising last year. They tracked blog entries, picked up everyone who had complained, and threw them in prison. Security equals safety for our recipients. More important than we Americans remember to think.)

So all this to say, I am balancing my co-director hat on top of all other hats and am in the throes of preparing for the fabulous Old Settlers’ Ball, our fundraiser, to be held Saturday, April 25th, at the Island Center Hall on Bainbridge Island. (Email me for an invitation, it is private and there won’t be any announcements of it. Email pronto because it sells out.)

Why, you ask, is it called the Old Settlers’ Ball? Why, you ask, is it a costume party a la 1870’s at which the women wear vintagey ball dresses and the men look like all those good-looking Riverboat toughs in HBO’s Deadwood? Why not just have an auction and drive up the bids for blown glass bowls and expensive cakes while people eat your salmon, chicken or vegetarian entrées?

Because I hate auctions. I am forced to attend them for various friends’ nonprofits, but I find them teeth-meltingly dull. So why should I host one? Instead, we do something that involves eating desserts, dancing to the sounds of fiddles and mandolins, yakking with friends, and just generally retiring the fleece for one night and stepping back into a time that may not have been easier, but was certainly more rustling, given all the taffeta.

Why do we call it the Old Settlers’ Ball? Because there’s a well-known folk song around these Northwestern parts that is called “The Old Settler's Song.”
(http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiOLDSETLR;ttROSINBOW.html) It’s about a guy who went up to Alaska to seek his fortune in the gold rush, but through various travails made no money, got to feeling lower and lower, and finally, in his misery, happened upon an island in the Puget Sound, where “surrounded by acres of clams,” he realized that he had found the perfect life. I can relate. And so can many here. So email me for details and come to the Ball. Cinderella has nothing on you.