GLYNN WASHINGTON, HOST:
You're turned now to SNAP JUDGMENT live in LA, already in progress. Enjoy the show.
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WASHINGTON: Our next guest - she has been a regular on SNAP JUDGMENT providing a very special perspective, and you're going to hear from whence it came. She was a favorite to SNAP listeners. May I please present Ms. Gypsee Yo.
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GYPSEE YO: The summer of my 16th birthday, my best friend Magdalena (ph) and I made a pact. We would get out of our poverty-stricken country, Albania, and come together to the United States of America. So that summer, I got my first job. There weren't a lot of options to choose from. So one morning, Magdalena and I rode our bicycles to the edge of town, chained them against a rusted fence surrounding a former communist warehouse, where a thin man wearing thick glasses stared at us up and down, wrote our names in his yellow ledger and hired us to take apart bullets at the ammunitions dismantling factory. Now to say factory is slightly misleading. You'd think the man took us into some training program, showed us how to dismantle them safely. When in fact, I just walked in, a wide-eyed 16-year-old, wearing cutoff jeans and a Guns and Roses tank top, holding hands with my best friend. And we learned how to do the job simply by watching other women do it. Under one of the harshest communist regimes in the world, Albania had produced over 90,000 tons of these bullets.
Now that the Cold War was over and the communist government overthrown, our former enemies were now our allies. So the UN, the EU and the American government generously gave millions of dollars to the new Albanian government to get rid of the old stockpile from the Cold War. Instead of buying technology and hiring experts to do the job, the new Albanian government thought that the most cost-efficient way to do it was to hire a bunch of housewives and teenage girls to break each bullet apart by hand, for 16 cents an hour. Now my future depended on me being good at this job so I took it very seriously. I broke shells with pliers and used a piece of wire hanger to scrape the gunpowder on the inside. On my finger, my hand, my hand up to my elbow of the entire length of my arm to scrape the powder from shells that, sometimes, were even taller than I. I worked next to a bunch of other teenage girls who probably had the same dreams and hopes as I did - sassy, beautiful, quirky girls.
Among them all, the most beautiful one was my best friend Magdalena. In another life, she could have been a movie star in this town. To me, her most striking feature were her milky white hands. Even though she worked with gunpowder all day long, her nails were perfectly done, painted red every evening. Halfway through the summer, the job changed. We were dismantling less and now the man ordered us to repackage the old bullets inside new boxes. Rumor had it the Albanian government was now selling the old ammunition in the black market, even though it had been paid millions of dollars to destroy it. So I lined them up, 15 in a box like tubes of lipstick. And they went inside crates that at the end of the day, went inside the belly of a dark unmarked airplane parked in the field behind the warehouse. The loading of that airplane was our favorite time of the day. At the end of the shift, as teenage girls, we'll try to clean up the best we could from gunpowder and sweat and sit on the back dock, pretending to eat leftover lunches or smoke cigarettes. All the whiles, smiling and stealing glances from the teenaged boys hired to load in the creates in the airplane.
During those golden afternoons filled with flirtation and hope, not once did we stop to think - what's the final destination of this airplane? The purpose hidden in those crates? Instead, we just spoke of first kisses, visa applications, the senior year approaching. I never once stopped to ask myself what these things that I packed up so efficiently would do to somebody else's life. I was just a kid among other kids. And this job was just a means to an end. If not by the end of the summer for some, there would be new shoes or schoolbooks, bicycle tires. It meant, for Magdalena and I, we could save up toward our one-way ticket to America. It meant I could go to college, help out my parents. I was so naive that I wasn't frightened by what I did. But everything changed one unbearably hot August afternoon. The atmosphere in the warehouse had gradually deteriorated with the passing of summer. Temperatures would easily rise above a hundred degrees. Human beings and stockpile alike crowded the warehouse. It seemed whichever way I turned, I bumped into another sweaty body or a mountain of hot metal.
Ten minutes before lunch break, Reda (ph) backed up from her station carrying a heavy box full of nine millimeter bullets. Her thin frame started to cave in under the weight. Right before she stumbled, Magdalena stretched out a hand to break her fall, but it was too late. The box came crashing down to the floor and bullets started flying everywhere, sparking like a fireworks display as they came in touch with the concrete floor, the brick wall or the hot tables. A wave of screams and panics just took over the warehouse as women and girls rushed toward the one exiting door, pulling and pushing each other, limbs tangled like one massive body. I dove under a table. I placed my hands in my head and rocked back and forth paralyzed with fear. I heard the air getting sliced by bullets around my head. I kept my eyes closed because I didn't want to see the shape of my death. I prayed it would be quick and clean. I cried out Magdalena. She never answered back. I could hear screaming and sobbing. I was in such shock. I couldn't tell if I was the one doing it. The chaos lasted only a few minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. When the sparks subsided, I slowly crawled from under the table on my knees and hands until they felt wet. They were stained red. Right in front of me on the concrete floor, I saw two milky white fingers with ruby red nails stained in blood. And next to them, Magdalena, kneeling pale as a ghost, maimed hand wrapped inside her skirt. Help me. Help me. Help me put them back on, she said.
I couldn't stop staring at those fingers that so many times had braided my hair. Now pointing like a warning towards the one exit door. OK, I said. Let's get out of here. By God's miracle, I was not hurt in that accident, but others were not so fortunate. Reda was badly wounded in her face. Others had flesh wounds. Magdalena's fingers were gone forever so was her ability to work, her dreams. She never got compensated for any of her loss. Me, I couldn't go back working there. I couldn't spend each day afraid of getting killed by a bullet. Just the powerlessness of knowing you can't stop what's coming for you. The un-negotiable death. These things that I pretended were tubes of lipstick were not just a job. They had been shipped to the worst conflicts in the world - Afghanistan, Congo, Syria. To this day, I am shaken by the idea of my own fingerprints upon them. But a week after my graduation, I got a student visa to come to the United States of America. And I walked into a travel agency, bought my one-way ticket out. With my sweat and bloodmoney - my gunpowder money, I bought a life that I owe to every single girl that I left behind in that warehouse. A life I owe to my best friend to make it worth something.
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