[GiftEconomy] Giving labour

[Robin Upton]

[Inspired slightly by the thread on ownership]

Today while wandering around town I took my seedbox and was planting
seeds (mainly papaya, as usual) on spare bits of unused land, which,
even in Dhaka, abound. I was surprised to hear some remarking that I was
doing other people's work for them. This actually took me some time to
figure out, though it's obvious really - since it was "someone else's"
land, it was "their" job to plant things on it. I didn't get this
straight away since I'm relaxing my thinking about whose land is whose.
As far as seed planting, I don't care whose land it is - only whether it
looks suitable for seeds, and if so which. I've gotten a purposeful
habit of just going about my business planting seeds ignoring
signs/security guards etc. Seems to work so far. If I meet some who
gives me a quizzical look, as if they think it's their land, I ask
whether they'd like me to plant/give them seeds, sometimes ask a few
questions about the land and they always tend to be up for it. Maybe
they're just surprised to see a foreigner (quite uncommon here), or
maybe their too polite to ask me what I think I'm doing on their land.

Another good one has been pushing carts/cars/buses etc. I randomly got
onto this (usual when in a particularly good mood) in Korea. I saw
someone unloading boxes from a lorry, so since I had nothing to do I
started to help unloading. This went down so well, he gave me a reward
in the form of some socks from the boxes I was unloading. Here in
Bangladesh, a lot of stuff is moved about on wheeled carts, and the
roads condition is often very poor, so it is common to see a couple of
skinny guy struggling to push some vehicle over a bad bit of road,
either with or without a queue of other vehicles behind. I'm trying to
get the habit of immediately joining the team and putting my weight
behind the joint effort as if I belonged there. As a foreigner (=very
high status here) it would typically be seen as infra-dig to do physical
work, so challenging that kind of concept is another reason to do it.

Robin
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