Kelsey Timmerman's Blog, page 29

CrossFit looked like something I would pay NOT to do

CrossFit looked like something I would pay NOT to do, yet I’ve been doing it, and paying for it, for four months now.

Why? Because my buddy BJ McKay opened a CrossFit gym (aka “a box”), The Arsenal, here in Muncie, and the guy hasn’t heard a NO in his life that he believed. So that’s what got me in the gym, but what hooked me was the community that I saw.

I’ve been sharing my CrossFit journey over at The Arsenal’s blog.

Please check out my first post: How I got roped into CrossFit.

Here’s an excerpt…

We support our friends.

We buy their kids’ overpriced chocolate bars and popcorn for school fundraisers. We host their Tupperware parties.

But what if our friend is opening a gym, and not just any gym, but a CrossFit gym, or as the CrossFitters call it, a box? Do you sign up for an annual membership to be abused? What the heck is CrossFit anyway?

This was the dilemma I faced when my friend BJ McKay told me that he was opening a gym.

All I knew about CrossFit I had learned from my CrossFitting facebook friends. I watched a video of one of my friends staring daggers at a wood box, hesitating before jumping on top of it to the cheers of onlookers. It looked like some type of rah-rah sadomasochistic cult.

Hanging with teenage gold miners in Burkina Faso

(While traveling from Burkina Faso to Ghana in search of the parents of Solo, the slave I met in Ivory Coast, I spent the night conversing with a group of teenage gold miners. I included the experience in an early draft of WHERE AM I EATING? but space was tight, and it just didn’t fit. It seemed more like a sidebar. So, following this morning’s post on when child labor is necessary, I’m sharing it here.)

The bus ride that took me from Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, ended at a flooded road and a trip in a tiny dugout canoe where the oarsman joked about crocodiles. From the canoe I got in a cab that didn’t have brakes. The driver stopped the car using the “Fred Flintstone” method – i.e., sticking his foot out the door and dragging it along the road.

We arrived to the town of Poura, Burkina Faso, at dusk. There were no rooms to be had. The proprietor of the town’s only hotel had taken all of the keys with him on vacation. Fortunately, one of my cab co-riders – a man named Karim, decked out in a new hip-hop outfit complete with bling – took pity on me.

“Come with me,” he said

I figured he was relatively rich. Not many in Burkina Faso can afford to dress like he dressed. His bootleg Chicago Bulls baseball cap almost looked real enough to be worthy of the shiny “authentic” sticker still affixed to it.

“In here,” he showed me into his room a hot, dark room, without electricity, in a building that had seven other such rooms.

“Where can I use the bathroom?” I asked.

“Come. I’ll take you to my master’s.”

Master? Oh, no, here we go again.

As it turns out, the boy was a fifteen-year-old gold miner. He worked in his master’s mine and was returning from Ouagadougou where he made a run to sell his master’s gold.

Karim’s master looked me up and down, and I did my best to not look like a journalist. He offered me the floor of his guesthouse, which I gladly accepted. I stayed up with his child laborers that night and talked about their lives.

“My parents work in the cocoa fields of the Ivory Coast.” Karim said. “They can’t afford to feed and clothe me so they send me here.”

Karim hadn’t seen his parents in two years. He told me that while he thinks they live near Daloa, that is just an assumption at this point. He has worked here since he was thirteen.

We jammed to a stereo powered by a car battery. There wasn’t a light to be seen in the village — only distant conversations and the sound of animals and humans turning in for the evening.

“What happened to him?” I asked, pointing to the boy playing DJ at the stereo. He held his wrapped and slinged arm tight to his chest.

“This machine at his fingers,” Karim said, nodding to a steel machine on wheels that is used to clean the gold.

“This is gold,” I said, holding out my ring.

“No it is not!”

We argue whether or not my wedding ring was gold.

“If you want, tomorrow you can come [to the mine] to see gold.”

“Uh…wow!” I picture myself standing in a mine staring at child laborers slaving away for tiny pieces of gold. Suddenly my gold wedding band feels a little heavier. “I better not.”

I wanted to seem as disinterested in the workers and the gold as possible. I just wanted to leave this village, find Solo’s parents, and leave West Africa. I had seen more than I was able handle already.

Karim wasn’t happy with the DJs song selection so he plays music on his phone — first Akon, and then Chamillionaire.

I slept with an ear and eye open that night, afraid I was going to be abducted at any point. In the morning the master sent me on my way and even gave me a tiny pebble of gold worth about $6.

I have this gold nugget in my wallet to remind me of all of the untold stories I carry.

When child labor is necessary

Some folks think that child labor is the greatest evil we face. We don’t want kids making our clothes or farming our chocolate.

Child labor makes headlines; hunger doesn’t.

AllAfrica reports that students in rural Zimbabwe are dropping out of school because they don’t have enough to eat and need to work to earn money to buy food. Young boys are leaving school to work in illegal gold mines.

When you live in a region where 25% of deaths of children under the age of five are related to nutritional deficiencies, food is more important than school.

Before we take a stand against child labor, we need to take a stand against extreme poverty.

Conor Grennan speaking in Muncie

I let Conor Grennan’s book Little Princes take my blog hostage a few years ago.   Now Conor is coming to Muncie this Tuesday (9/10) to give a public talk at Emens Auditorium at 7:30! And of course, while Conor is on stage at Ball State, a short bike ride from my house, I’ll be on a stage at Marietta College.

Conor is an awesome fella who I’ve come to know through his writings over the past decade. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting him at a conference we were both attending.  If you live anywhere close to Muncie, you should come and laugh at (or with) and be inspired by Conor. I promise you’ll do both.

The details:

Conor Grennan, author of Little Princes, September 10, 7:30 pm

“In search of adventure, 29-year-old Conor Grennan traded his day job for a year-long trip around the globe, a journey that began with a three-month stint volunteering at the Little Princes Orphanage in war-torn Nepal. What began as a game became a passionate commitment that would transform the young American and the lives of countless others.”

Where am I . . . in September?

September kicks off a busy fall of corrupting the minds of students across the country.  Six schools have selected my books as common reading experiences (4 for WEARING and 2 for EATING).  Visiting a university full of students who have read (or were supposed to have read!) your book is about the best experience I’ve had as an author.

This month’s schedule is below.  If you are in any of these areas, I’d love for you to attend, or drop me a tweet or Facebook message and maybe we can meet up for coffee. 

9/6  Union City, Ohio  @ 6:30 PM (open to public)

I’m talking about WHERE AM I EATING? at the EUM church where my mother attended as a child and my in-laws attend today. It will be fun to talk farming on four continents with farmers I grew up with.

9/13 Marietta College @ 7:30 PM (open to public)

Marietta College used WHERE AM I WEARING? as a common read. The event is at Fenton Court.  Here’s what Dr. Suzanne Walker had to say about the selecting of WEARING on the campus website:

“Our common reading selection this year is the perfect book to reminds us of the lessons of last year’s theme, Leadership and Social Justice, in a new context of international perspectives as we explore the world through Kelsey Timmerman’s book,” Walker said. “As the committee worked to select the book for this year’s theme the following quotation from Timmerman’s book really resonated with us: ‘when it comes to clothing, others make it, and we have it made.’ The other aspect of Timmerman’s book that I think incoming first-year students will appreciate is the letter to himself as a freshman that he includes as an appendix to the book. It is a wonderful letter of ‘if I’d known then what I know now’ encouragement and advice that he shares with all of those getting ready to head off to college.”

9/18 Lehigh University South Mountain College @ 4 PM (open to public)

The event will be help at the Sinclair Laboratory. I hope to perform some science during my lecture. More details here.

Lesson from my stupid big bro: It takes courage to change

Kyle, either posing like a “scientist” or planning to takeover the world.

My brother, Kyle, always led my earliest adventures into imaginary realms. We fought trolls with wooden swords, goblins with clumps of dirt scooped from the field surrounding our club house.  (Once I was the goblin and Kyle made a throw that could’ve been on SportsCenter’s Not Top 10 as it connected with my face.)

He was the best big brother an annoying little brother looking to prove himself could have.  He never whooped me. Not once. I tried like hell to fight him and he would figuratively and sometimes literally hold out a brotherly stiff arm atop my head as I swung at him with my much shorter arms.

Kyle refused to be a follower growing up. I followed him.

If I had been the older brother, without having the advantage of his example, I would’ve been trouble. I would have tried to fit in.  I probably would have joined a fraternity, studied business, and joined the family business.  Not that there is anything wrong with these things, but that was not my path, and I have enjoyed my path.

Kyle is the writer. Always has been.

At Miami University he studied journalism for three years, and then he did something kind of crazy: he changed his major to exercise science. I have never told him this, but I thought he was a chicken for changing his major. He is a really good writer and I thought the excuse, “I probably can’t get a job with a journalism degree,” wasn’t a good one.  I’m not even sure that was his excuse or if I just saw it as such. 

Three years later he graduated with nearly three bachelor’s degrees. A few years after that, he earned his master’s and a few years more his PhD. I’d visit Kyle in his lab and he would show me all the equipment — the lasers, the sphyignomonometers (I can’t even spell the stuff), the flux capacitors, or whatever.   It was when Kyle excitedly tried to explain things that I could barely understand that I understood how courageous his decision to change his major from something that he was good at to something he was passionate about.

People often think I was the brave or crazy or stupid one for graduating and traveling and writing.  I’d like to make the case that Kyle was the brave, crazy, or stupid one for looking at his first three years of undergrad and admitting that they hadn’t taken him in the direction in which he was meant to go and then switching majors.

Now he’s back at Miami teaching students and doing research. I hope the students realize how lucky they are to be led by him.  I hope they courageously pursue their academic interests, not because they are just good at something, but because they are genuinely interested in it. Curiosity trumps proficiency in the long run.

Today is Kyle’s birthday. If it weren’t for him, I would’ve taken the easy way.

So a big Happy Birthday to my stupid big brother, Kyle!

 

 

 

Speaking about EATING in Ft. Wayne Tonight

Midwest Writers’ Workshop Video

I’m honored to be a committee member of the Midwest Writers’ Workshop. The annual conference celebrated its 40th year last month. That’s 40 years of volunteers working to put on a conference for one reason: they love to help writers.

The workshop, located in my hometown of Muncie, is where I met Caren (Johnson) Estesen who sold WEARING to Wiley. It’s where it all began for me, so I love the chance to give back to it and the awesome group of writers who attend each year. Many of them are like family now.

When folks ask me about how to get into writing, my second tip after the obvious and often forgotten first tip (WRITE!) is to attend a conference.

Matt Shouse put together a video (see blow) of the 2013 conference. I’m featured quite a bit in the video. I promise that I didn’t bribe him. It’s just the price I have to pay for having such a camera-friendly face.

If you want to see what a conference looks like, give Matt’s video a watch. I’d love to see you at our 2014 conference. If you want to keep up to date on all things Midwest Writers, sign up for our newsletter.

Or to find a conference near you, I recommend perusing Shaw Guide’s extensive list of writers’ conferences in the United States and around the world.

Interview by Stephen Terrell on Indiana Talks

Stephen Terrell is the author of Stars Fall, a lawyer, and one of the many writing friends I’ve made through the years at the Midwest Writers Workshop. He’s also a the host of JUST US at  Indiana Talks.

I recently joined Stephen to talk about how my label chasing adventures began and my new book EATING.

Listen to the Podcast  (My interview starts at around 24:30)

Interviewed by U.S. News & World Report

Kimberly Palmer, author of Generation Earn, recently interviewed me about our crazy, global food system over at U.S. News & World Report.

Looks folks, when it comes to food, ignorance isn’t bliss, sometimes it means your supporting slavery or consuming deadly chemicals.

Read the interview: Surprising Facts Where Food Comes From