Of Silence, Fear and Feats of Strength

 
Yes. This is my first blog post of 2010. Well, first post here anyway. I've done plenty for TechCrunch and I've written more than 35,000 words from my book since January 1. I've also -- not surprisingly-- been traveling. I spent a few weeks in Sao Paulo, Brazil came back to San Francisco for about 23 hours then hopped on a flight to Delhi. I spent a few weeks in India traveling between Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and half a dozen villages. I flew back to San Francisco for about 22 hours then went to Hawaii for a speaking gig and interview with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar-- an unassuming billionaire who has pledged to give 90% of his wealth to charity, much of which is flowing towards entrepreneurs in the poorest parts of the developing world. (One of my favorite days in Sao Paulo was spent taking a graffiti tour of the city, which is where I took the photo above.)

I've been home for a few weeks now, long enough to get over my jet lag, lose a few travel pounds and get a long-needed haircut, but not quite long enough to get as wrapped up as I'd like in some exciting new projects at TechCrunch. It's not nearly long enough to do as much book writing as I'd like and not nearly long enough to see my husband and friends.

But it's time to hit the road again. My book is due on August 1, and I've got tens of thousands more words to write and seven weeks left on the road. Up next is a place I can't disclose, followed in May by South Africa, Indonesia and my final trip to China.

I can barely contain my excitement about the things scheduled for these final trips. But at the same time, travel is getting harder. For one thing, I'm physically tired. I've lost exact count, but I know I've spent more than 30 weeks in other countries in the year-plus I've been researching this book. Eating in hotels, packing the same suitcase over and over again and navigating through security in hundreds of domestic airports, trying to gain trust of sources when I only have a few weeks in a country, negotiating cabs and public transportation in more than a dozen languages I don't speak-- it's all weighing on me.

Worse is the idea that it's all almost over. The last year on the road has changed me as a person. I've done things I never thought I could. We all live such coddled lives in America and yet live in such a fear-based culture. This book has utterly changed my relationship with fear. Riding an elephant through ancient ruins, hiking amid a family of silverback gorillas in Rwanda, weaving through Beijing traffic on a bike, or even just waking up to find a spider crawling on you and merely smashing it and going back to bed-- these are all things I never saw myself doing with ease. I've become a great problem solver in my home-life because doing business in emerging markets is a constant game of problem solving. Everything is a negotiation: Every hotel booking, every cab ride, every meeting and as the outsider I am *always* at the disadvantage.

But the biggest reason the travel is getting harder is that my head and notebooks are so packed with phenomenal stories of entrepreneurship and human strength that I'm not sure I can absorb anymore. That sounds really pandering and cliche, but when (hopefully) you read my book you'll understand exactly what I mean. You could make twenty movies out of the various stories I've found. We're so used to thinking of emerging markets and the chaotic push from poverty to middle class-- or in some cases poverty to extreme wealth-- as a story of desperation, but it's really the story of strength.

Over the past few months, I've read about 20-or-so books on politics, history, economics and culture about the countries I'm visiting and this morning I started "Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China" by Leslie T. Chang. It sums up what I'm trying to say about strength better than I can. China has more than 130 million migrant workers-- the largest migration in human history. Chang writes about these women working in factories:

"But suffering in silence is not how migrant workers see themselves. To come out from home and work in a factory is the hardest thing they have ever done. It is also an adventure. What keeps them in the city is not fear but pride: To return home early is to admit defeat. To go out and stay out--chuqu-- is to change your fate...

...Earning money isn't the only reason people migrate. In surveys, migrants rank 'seeing the world,' 'developing myself,' and 'learning new skills' as important as increasing their incomes. In many cases, it is not crippling poverty that drives migrants out of homes, but idleness."

That kind of strength and life-changing determination puts my journey-- as hard as it's been for me-- into stark and humbling perspective. And as I process all I've seen and done and turn it somehow into a book, I guess that realization is a big reason I've been so quiet the last few months. Anything I can tell you about my journey just pales next to the journeys of those I'm writing about, so a big part of me would rather just wait until you can read that.