Reply All - #28 Shipped to Timbuktu

Episode Date: June 15, 2015

An email to the wrong address sends us hurtling into the world of professional cookie advisors.  Leopold's website:  http://www.weihsien-paintings.org Cast Party Tickets:  http://castparty.org Sponsors:  Mailchimp http://www.mailchimp.com Stamps.com http://www.stamps.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want to listen to this podcast with impressionable children, I'm sorry, but you might be out of love. Because within this episode, there's explicit language. Yeah, PJ and Alex say foul, foul word. From Gimlet, this is Reply All, and I'm PJ Vote. So I've got this friend. Let's call him Dale. Dale has a Gmail address that's pretty generic, like D.Smith at gmail.com. and people who have email addresses like these

get a lot of emails that aren't meant for them, like email wrong numbers. And this happens to Dale all the time. Last time I saw him, he just got in an email written completely in Spanish from a kid somewhere asking if he could turn in an assignment late. Another time he got a letter congratulating him on the low interest rate for his two-door Chevy Cobalt. He doesn't have one.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, Dale's a nice guy, but he likes to mess with people. He likes to play pranks. So Dale answers these emails. Here's when he got a while back. I think it started off, hey ladies, to all Calgary area district commissioners and district cookie advisors. And then it started talking about how they had a bunch of stale cookies that they didn't know what to do with, and we got to move them off the shelves.

And if they're past the expiration date, then we can't use them in the next cookie campaign. The emails continue, and Dale learns that the world of professional cookie advising is surprisingly bureaucratic. At the top, there's a national cookie advisor, and then beneath her there are provincial cookie advisors to report up, and then beneath them, there are district cookie advisors. He's picturing a corporate office building with a lot of people in fancy business clothes talking about cookies all day. And Dale decides that what he should do is send an intentionally stupid email detailing all these asinine solutions to their stale cookie problem.

He says the advisors should sharpie over the expiration dates on the packages, or he says they could just eat all the stale cookies themselves. In my mind, I was thinking, no one's going to believe this. This is, what a stupid email to write to somebody? Who would hire a person with suggestions like these? Instead, Cynthia, who's the Calgary Area Cookie Advisor, responds to Dale's email with complete, polite, cheerfulness. She sends him a cookie freshness calculator

to help him sort his stale cookies from his fresh cookies. So Dale responds with even stupider messages. He was trying to make it more obvious. that he was just kidding. I said, what's the status on the cookies, y'ar, me so hungry, with a picture of Cookie Monster. And I think she responded something along the lines of

those orders were supposed to go in a month ago, or did I misunderstand your question? Rather than clarifying, Dale asks her, why are we even in the cookie advising business? He says his clients, they're all about chocolate bars now. And Cynthia responded, chocolate bars?

Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark. All of my other suggestions were met with like, oh, maybe I misunderstood or something. But this one was very emphatic. It was like chocolate bars. It actually seemed like Dale had maybe touched a nerve because after that, Cookie Advisor World went completely quiet. That was radio silence after that. I felt bad. I felt like I was in a little bit too deep, maybe.

The original email he'd gotten had been meant for a woman named Debbie. What if he'd gotten Debbie in trouble or even just made her look bad? I'm a little afraid. I'd like to think that, oh, they just got it sorted out, and now it's funny, and Debbie is in on the joke, and that everybody can laugh at me. And I hope that they're not laughing at poor Debbie. You know, just people try to do their cookie job. Hello? Hi, Cynthia?

Yes, it's me. Hi, it's PJ. How are you doing? I wanted to find out if Dale's prank had hurt anybody. So I tracked down Cynthia. She lives in Calgary. Cindy has multiple sclerosis, so it can be hard for her to talk. Her friend Sheila volunteered to help out, and I read them the emails.

And of course, the obvious solution is to eat them during our next member meeting. Please discuss with the rest of area, and I will forward your decision on to National. Thanks so much. Do you remember getting that? You know, I don't, but... We get a lot of questions all across Alberta at Cookie Time. Often they have suggestions that don't all... always fly. So we find a way to respond to them as best we can.

Cynthia and Sheila explained that they were part of girl guides. In the U.S., we have Girl Scouts, most everywhere else, they call them Girl Guides. Like the Girl Scouts, they wear uniforms, collect merit badges, and sell cookies to their parents' friends. Coordinating the thousands of underage cookie salespeople can be a logistical headache. And so some adults volunteer as cookie advisors. Those advisors frequently field confused emails, and they're used to handling them diplomatically. That's why Cynthia was so patient with Dale. It was her job. But she was also very patient with me. Even as for reasons that I don't quite understand, I found myself explaining to her the entire pattern of events that had led Dale to email her.

I guess the email was meant for Debbie, but it went to it Dale. Oh, now it's starting to make a little bit of sense. The thing about talking to Cynthia and Schill on the phone is that they had this tone of voice. It'd been in the emails too, and I was starting to think of it as Girl Guide Voice. Girl Guide Voice is cheerful and patient, unrelentingly so. Is there like a cookie general? Cookie General? No. We have advisors and commissioners, but that's about the extent of the military terms. And when I started reading about Girl Guides, I found out that that helpful, sunny tone

is actually hardwired into their original mission statement, which reads, quote, a guide smiles and sings under all difficulties. So, all difficulties. When I first read this, I'm thinking that this is hyperbole. Hello? Hi, can you hear me okay? I can hear you? Can you hear me?

It is not. I talked to this woman named Janie Hampton, and she told me about this thing that happened that I literally found unbelievable. So a few years ago, Janie decides to write a book, making fun of the Girl Guides. I have to admit, when I started writing the book,

I thought, you know, I'm going to make this a bit of a satire and laugh at them. Honestly, it was sort of a Dale thing to do. And Janie says most people think about Girl Guides the way she did. They're not considered cool. What we call NAF nowadays? What's NAF? But those sort of unfashionable, nerdy...

Right. Do you use the word nerd? Oh, we absolutely use the word nerd. I've had it applied to me. Right. So Janie sets out to tease some nerds. But then she starts researching. And one day she's deep in the Girlguides archive in their London headquarters,

and she finds this old notebook. It's small, 7 by 10. And the book is a handwritten log of everything that one Girl Guide troop did years ago. And it said we did skipping and we did knots and we did all sorts of jolly things. And then I came across this song that they'd written. And it said, we sang our song. yesterday and it went, we might have been shipped to Timbuktu, we might have been shipped to Kalamazoo. It's not repatriation, nor is it yet starvation. It's simply concentration in

chafoo. And I thought, what on earth does that mean? Concentration in Chifu. Janie does not know where chifu is, but she's sure it's not in England, so she looks it up. Chifu is, was a place in China, a coastal city. It's a good 7,000 miles from London. According to the guide's logbook, the song had been written and performed by a group of Girl Guides for a concert on Christmas Day, 1942. The Christmas concert, Janie discovers, was held in Chi Fu, but not at a school. The Girl Guides sang their song in a concentration camp. Janie was baffled.

Why would a concentration camp in China have a singing girl guide troop? So Janie starts digging, and she finds another more complete log of what happened to these girl guides. It's a website run by an old Belgian man named Leopold. Leopold Pandeur. So the good news, Leopold was an actual witness, who was born in China, ended up in the same camp as these girl guides. The bad news... I tried to remember something that nothing comes back to me. He has absolutely no memories, except for this nightmare he used to have when he was a kid.

At the time, it hadn't made sense to him. But later, he thought it must have taken place at the camp. What was the dream that you would have? I'm there in the hot sun, the blue sky, it's a brown slope, it's a brown earth. There are big stones next to myself. Dirty earth and people running all over the place. Are there sounds? No sound.

Absolutely no sound. Somebody picks me up, and then I wake up all I remember. The problem is, or the problem, the curiosity is that that dream came back very often. Leopold grows up, and as an adult, he wants to know about this place that he used to dream about. And so he builds a website. He invites people to write in with memories of the camp. And the story he learns is pretty crazy. Japan's latest invasion of China, which has already lasted two years, is war on a huge scale.

So I did not know this, but during World War II, when Japan occupied China, they built concentration camps that were filled with American and British and other European civilians. Civilians had been living in China. One of those camps was called Wei Shen. That was Leopold's camp. And among the inmates at Wei Shen were a group of children. They were American and British. They were mostly the kids of missionaries.

And they'd been studying at a boarding school called Chief of the camp. Japanese troops invaded Chi Fu, and they captured the kids and eventually brought them to Wei Shen. With their teachers, but no parents. So about 150 children who for four years were in this camp, and the teachers had very sensibly taken with them, books, paper, musical instruments. And of course, one more thing. Brownie uniforms, guide uniforms, all the things they thought, we're going to need this sort of thing to keep the kids occupied. In the Japanese camps, there was very little food. Prisoners died of starvation. Take away shed. In prison monks would smuggle in eggs, and then everybody would share them.

And then they'd also have the kids eat the ground-up eggshells just to get some extra calcium. And the camp had almost no infrastructure. The prisoners had to build their little world from nothing. Their own kitchen, their own laboratories, they're in hospitals, and their own girl guide unit. The logbook, Janie had found, was the record kept by one of the Girl Guide's leaders. The leaders were called Brown Owls. This one was a woman in her 20s. And the tone of her writing was the exact same

cheerful, impervious to bad news tone that Dale's cookie advisor email threatened had. This is the entry from the day they were marched into the camp. Hello, what's this? Behind bars? Yes, it's Wei Shen Camp. Well, I guess there's a good deal of fun

to be got out of this. Just the place to earn some badges. According to the logbook, the Brown Owl ran the troop as if it were any other girl guide unit, concentration camp or not. They were all told, it doesn't matter how disgusting the food is, we still want good table manners. It doesn't matter how hungry you are, you're not going to steal. You're still going to do a good deed every day and help other people. Obviously, the grim sadness of life in a concentration camp should have overpowered this miniature world.

that the brown owls were trying to build for their young girls. But according to Janie, that's not what happened. Instead, it was the girl guides who started to exert an influence on the adults around them. They led by example. It made a difference to all the adults in this camp and kept them going. The whole atmosphere was better because they had this very strong promise that they wouldn't stop smiling, they wouldn't give up. They would carry on singing songs.

would insist on everybody washing. This is the point where I wondered, was this true? I didn't think that anybody was necessarily lying to me. I just thought probably the brown owl had left the bad stuff out of her logbook. I figured she'd put the best possible spin on an awful situation. That's what Girl Guides do, right? Fortunately, there's a woman who's still alive and remembers Wei Shan. It's the first time I think I've been right on time for things.

She's time that out. I mean, from New York. Her name is Mary Prevety. She lives in New Jersey. I visit her with my producer, Fia Bannon. Oh, by the way, can I pour you some tea? I am so bad. Mary Prevety is a small, beautiful, 82-year-old woman.

She's also one of the happiest people I've ever met. I don't know if anybody I've interviewed has ever fully broken into song, unprompted. Mary did. Seven times. She's like a real-life Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp. Also, unlike Leopold, Mary has a phenomenal memory. She told me about the day that Japanese troops arrived at her boarding school.

The day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Japanese showed up on the doorstep of our school. They put seals with Japanese writing on everything. The tables, the chairs, the pianos, the desks. Everything belonged to the Great Emperor of Japan. And then they put armbands on us. Everyone had to wear an armband. A for American, B for British, whatever our nationality was. The girls were eventually transferred into Wei Shen,

and Mary became a concentration camp girl guide. This was over 70 years ago, but when Mary talks about the camp, it sounds like she's still there, like she's 12 years old again. She's had this story about the brown owls insisting on good table manners. Absolutely true. So you're eating some kind of glop out of maybe boiled animal grain because Gaoyang is a broom corn that the Chinese feed to their animals was often what they fed us. And you're eating it out of a soap dish or a tin can. And here comes Miss Stark up behind us, one of the first of. our teachers. Mary Taylor, do not slouch over your food while you are eating. Do not talk while you

have food in your mouth. And there are not two sets of manners, one set of manners for the princesses in Buckingham Palace and another set of manners for the way she had in concentration camp. Mary was separated from her parents, unsure of when she'd be released, surrounded by attack dogs and men with guns. She says that she spent a lot of her time just thinking about earning merit badges. In the winter, it would get cold, freezing, but no heat was provided to the prisoners by the guards. Instead, Mary and her friends had to go collect leftover coal shavings from the guards' quarters. I remember now the ritual of going to Japanese quarters to get the coal dust and carry it back.

Like making a new pencil from old pencil shavings, except the coal was heavy. It had to be passed bucket by bucket in a line of girl guides. Then the shavings had to be mixed with dust and water and dried into balls of coal. It was long, hard work. And then at the end of it, you still had to go use that recycled coal in a pot-bellied stove and keep the stove lit so that everybody would be warm. It sounded horrible, like a childhood from a Charles Dickens novel. Except Mary remembers it as being surprisingly fun.

A game she could win. I and my partner, Marjorie Harrison, we won the competition in our dormitory. of which stove-lighting team made the pot-bellied stove in the winter turn red-hot more times than any other girl in the camp? Well, you know, here I am 82 years old, and what do I choose to tell you? Well, he turned red more times with me and Marjorie Harrison than any other girl in our dorm. When you describe it, it sounds like you're describing summer camp instead of describing like a concentration camp. Did it feel like summer camp?

No, I never was in a summer camp, so I can't give you a depending. No, no, no, absolutely not. When you had guard dogs, bayonet drills, electrified wires, barrier walls, pillboxes with armed guards in them, you know, you weren't in a summer camp. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying this was fun city. I'm telling you, we lived a miracle where grown-ups preserved our childhood. There's reference in the logbook to the trouble the adults were having keeping it together, but she'd have to know to look for it.

A scout leader writes one entry that reads, Dear me, what a tragedy. Brown owl had an attack of neuralgia. Let's hope she's better for her meeting. Neurologia is a nerve disease, but what that actually meant was that the brown owl was having a nervous break down. Years later, Mary went and tracked down one of the grownups. I said, Miss Carr, what were you feeling when we were in a concentration camp? Well, all the grownups in the camp

knew about the rape of non-king, the atrocities that the guards, that the soldiers had done when they came to the southern city of non-king. Japanese soldiers went door to door, systematically, raping and killing tens of thousands of Chinese civilians. So they knew what could happen. The teachers knew what could happen. So I said to Ms. Carr, what were you feeling? She said, well, I would pray to God that when they lined us up along the death trenches and they were outside the camp, when they lined us up to shoot us so our bodies would fall into the death pits, that I would be one of the first so I didn't have to see it. So there were two sets of prayers.

At night, the grown-ups, many of them not much older than the kids themselves, prayed grimly for a fast death. And then they woke up in the morning and they sung psalms with the kids, set to bouncy camp melodies. It was like you weren't going to be afraid if you could sing about it. We would sing, day is done. Gone the sun from the sea, from the hills. from the sky, all is well, safely rest. God is night. How can you be afraid when you're singing about all is well, safely rest, God is night? How could you be afraid of that? So we were constantly

putting things into music. Often, you know, there was a little bit of a twist of fun to it. One of the songs that we sang was, We might have been shipped to Timbuktu. We might have been shipped to Kalamazoo. It's not repatriation, nor is it yet stagnation. It's only concentration in chie-food. There probably aren't many places on earth where you have less reason to be cheerful than a concentration camp.

But it turns out, in a place, like that, being able to be cheerful to have a positive outlook, it's not dopey or silly. It's how you survive. How you tell the story matters. I can still, for example, one of the things that we sang when the Japanese were marching us into concentration camp was the first verse of Psalm 46. God is our refuge, our refuge and our strength. And on it goes in trouble, we will not be afraid.

All of these words just sung into our hearts. That sticks. It's like you've got a groove sticking in the gramophone record. I am safe. I am safe. I am safe. That was just profound. The first Chifu Brownies warded off despair for four years.

Until finally, on August 17, 1945, they were rescued. It was a windy day. Mary remembers the American plane flying low over. the camp. Then the parachutes falling from the sky. All I knew was I was running to find whoever was dropping out of the sky beyond the barrier walls. I'm there in the hot sun. The blue sky, it's a brown slope, it's a brown earth. And the people went berserk. People running all over the place. People were crying, screaming, dancing. picks me up, and then I wake up.

Leopold says that the nightmare that used to haunt him is just his memory of that day, of being a four-year-old, lost and wandering around a riot of freed concentration camp survivors. Most of the people who were there on Liberation Day are now dead. One of the dormitories at Wei Shen's a memorial, but mostly this place exists as a footnote in some books, on a website designed by a Belgian man, and in the memories of the remaining survivors. It's a half-disappeared world with a strong pull on the people who do still remember it. A couple weeks ago at the grocery store, I watched a gang of Brownie Scouts rushed down the pet food aisle.

They had their uniforms on, covered in merit badges for public speaking and backyard astronomy. They were happy and safe in their own world, well-fed and rich, and a million miles from Wei Shen. I wondered if they knew what they might be capable of. After the break, it's been a long time. We've gotten a lot of requests. Yes, Yes, No. Returns. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, where our boss, Alex Bloomberg, finds the most inscrutable stuff on the internet and comes to PJ and I to explain it to him. Yeah, because you guys, you guys, that's what you know how to do.

It's basically all we know how to do. Well, you do it so well. So today I have this thing, normally I come to you with like a specific tweet. And today is an entire Twitter feed. It's a feed called at Reichert Googling. And what's weird about it is that he has almost 50,000 followers, 49,000 followers. Just like two Alex Bloomberg. I know, which is twice as much as me, five times as much as you guys.

And the number of people that he's following is three, which is, I think, pretty odd, right, for somebody who has that many Twitter followers. And then you look at the tweets and they're just utterly inscrutable. So, like, for example. There's one that says Arrested Development Season 85 Next one Real Housewives of Kardashian

Next one Phaser Setting dry clothes I added punctuation that was not there Another one GQ good beards Evil beards So do you want to know

what this is about So Alex Goldman do you understand What this Do you understand this Twitter account? Yes PJVO Do you understand

this Twitter account Yeah I don't like understanding it, but I understand it. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this Twitter account? No. All right. Let's start at the very beginning.

Okay. Do you know who Riker is? No. Commander Riker of the Starship Enterprise? Got it. Okay. He was the second in command in Star Trek the next generation, played by a guy named Jonathan Frakes. I didn't know you were this kind of nerd.

I thought you were a slightly different kind of nerd. And wait, this is a Twitter account of his... search terms? This is a Twitter account of Commander Riker's 25th century Google searches. So it's like...

Oh my God. If Commander Riker were around today, what would he be Googling? No, it's not if he were around today. Oh, it's Google, if Google were around when he was around. Yes.

Yeah. So evasive maneuvers, Wikipedia makes perfect sense. Phaser settings, dry clothes. Right. Right? Good beards, evil beards. In Star Trek,

When they turn evil, they get evil facial hair. But, I mean, Raker already has facial hair. Got it. Got it. Now that you know what it is, how do you feel about it? This is a long pause. I surprisingly have a lot of feelings about it. Really?

Well, I feel like so much ingenuity applied to something so meaningless. but also can't argue with 50,000 followers that's sort of the internet right? Yeah here's the main feeling the mystery of it was better than the answer of it

yeah I mean it was very satisfying the moment like I was like oh and then I was like oh the moment the comprehension clicked in the place was exciting and then it was like oh right

it reminds me of this time that one time like probably the highest I've ever been was on spring break in college. And, you know, we ended up back in the hotel room. We were just watching TV, and there was this movie on. And, you know, like when you're high, it's like everything seems really mysterious.

And it was like, it was the most amazingly mysterious movie I'd ever seen. I was like, what is going on here? I can't understand. I can't believe this movie. And then finally, like, as we were watching the movie, it finally, off and then I was like, oh, it's Highlander. I think that's a pretty profound movie. It was, but it wasn't, it was really depressing to know.

That sort of happens. I don't know. I mean, you know. I can hear your brain scanning Highlander references to make a bad joke. I am scanning. I am scanning. I am scanning. I am scanning.

I think there are some things that are best left on said. Unfortunately, you like burned me so much harder than I could have done myself. I love that. I fucking love that movie. Oh, yeah. I love it so much. Yeah. Fuck you for calling me a nerd.

You know every fucking thing about Star Wars. You corrected me today about the Sarlack Pit. Yeah. Tim was like reaching for a Star Wars reference. He was like, what's the name of that monster? And Alex was like, oh, Sarlac Pit. But the pit is where the Sarlack lives. So that's like if I said that Alex's name was Alex House.

All right, I think I have a way to end of this segment. I'm going to just be like, thank you guys, and you guys keep arguing about Star Trek. And you can hear the door closed behind. Bring up the music. Reply all is me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Fia Bennon, Sruthy Pinnemanani, and Alex Bloomberg.

Our intern is Sylvie Douglas. We had additional production and editing help from Jonathan Minhivar, Joel, Lovell, Zoe Chase, Ira Glass, Sean Cole, and Emily Condon. Thank you. guys. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is your friend's swimming pool. He said it's okay if you come by. Janie Hampton's book about the Girl Guides is called How the Guides Won the War. Another great book on this is by Tammy Proctor. It's called Scouting for Girls. Special thanks

this week to Meda Campbell Harris, Tammy Proctor, and Michelle Harris. Our theme music and additional scoring this episode is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. Horns by Michael Lennhart. find more episodes of our show at iTunes.com slash replyall, or if you use a different podcatcher, you can visit our website, replyall.com. Our site was designed in partnership with athletics. You can also find bonus materials from this week's episode on dig.com. If you are still listening this episode, you really, really like our show. And if you'd like to do something small that can help us a bunch, leave us a review on iTunes. It does a lot to promote the show, actually.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.