The Village Part II

The "corner store" of the village center. Every other shop was closed because it was Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, but this general store remained open. There were probably four other shops, one selling wood furniture (not new).


This the homeboys and I. The children are especially inquisitive and love to show off for foreigners.


This is a very homemade toy that they were playing with. The metal on the back are wheels, and there is one more in the front. Another kid pushes from behind and this actually works pretty well, they were having fun when it didn't get stuck in the clay roads.


Leaving the village, these people have gathered to watch us leave. One of the captains of the boat lives in the village, so it was probably more to say goodbye to him. I guess I should have mentioned that earlier!


The Dhaka skyline. Imagine 13 million people living in a city that has few buildings over 6 stories tall.

The village

This is a middle class village because they have "assets" such as livestock, some crops and even a small town center. Most of the people living here are cousins (in the loose sense of the word), and we were told that there are Christians, Muslims and Hindu people all living in this area (though maybe not this specific village). Few of the people spoke English but they were all very courteous and friendly as we toured their village.




Two women playing a dice based board game between two shelters. Some buildings were tin, others brick and some concrete.


This is cow dung left out to dry. They use it for fuel.


Just about the cutest kids I've seen. These ones are posing for a picture from a blond woman (very exotic here!) and giggle uncontrollably when they see the picture on her display screen.


Me beside a squash crop. Because the rain is so violent here, crops that usually grow on the ground will rot. Contraptions like this one are used to grow such crops by letting them hang off the ground.



There landscape is soaked and the village land is about 4 feet higher than the drenched plains that surround it.

The Ride Out

The flood plain just outside of Dhaka. When the dry season comes we will have to travel miles further to get to the water.


Two fishermen. The bamboo apparatus holds fishing nets.


A silt ship. These transport silt from the bottom of the river to the shore, creating land for
development. As a result of this and other factors, the flood plain rises each year.


A home on the water...

We took a boat trip down a flood plain/river to a village about 1.5 hours by boat from Dhaka. We also sat on the top deck of this slow moving boat.

"Right and Wrong" in the Third World

I recently took my first Rickshaw ride. I did not know exactly where I was going, but had someone from the restaurant speak to my rickshawalla in Bangla so I would end up in the right place. I prenegotiated the price at 20 Taka (approximately 30 cents) and away we went. 30 minutes and several wrong turns later I had him drop me off on a road I knew was close (and only about 5 minutes from my apartment) and walked from there. As the ride had taken longer than he had expected, he wanted more Taka. When I resisted and tried to give him a 20tk bil, he would not take it from me, and insisted on at least 50tk. I was frustrated from the pointless wandering around Gulshan, and so I ended up basically putting the 20tk onto him and walking away.
Looking back, I realized that I had been unwilling to pay 80 cents for thirty minutes of hauling me around the streets. Was I justified? What makes a "fair price" in Dhaka? What makes a "fair price" on my conscience? This experience, and ones similar, sparked an interesting discussion with Jimmy and a couple other colleagues a couple nights ago that turned into a bit of a debate. The question at hand was whether because we had the means to do so, we should pay more for services rendered by poor Bangladeshis. There are a few major issues at hand:

1. People in Bangladesh have no money. Every foreigner I know is a extremely upper class in this society. We have surplus money and eat meat daily. Most Bangladeshis can no longer afford to buy much meat if any because the world wide price of rice has sky rocketed in the last 18 months. We can afford to pay more every time.
   
2. There is a market value for everything. To pay more than the market price is somehow counter-intuitive, just as it is to hold out on a poor person. There is a "worth" assigned to things here and when you live in a country it is arguably your duty not to impose your values on that society. Also, if the market value for foreigners is established as twice that of locals because some foreigners don't want to bargain with the impoverished, everyone has to pay more.
   
3. We foreigners have our own value of worth. Is it worth more than a dime to haul me in a bike for 10 blocks, certainly. There is an equation that I have used my whole life relating work to worth and it seems tied into a kind of morality of worth. Can I use this system at all in a place like Dhaka?
   
4. There is a phenomenon that occurs when foreigners overpay for services like Rickshaws. When rickshawallas realize that foreigners (obvious because almost all are white or East Asian) will pay three to five times more than a Bangladeshi person can, they will work less but only for foreigners, which can cut people who cannot pay those prices off from the services they need. Ergo, richshaws will abandon the people who need them as a cheap form of transportation for the higher profit ratios of foreigners. This is probably more applicable in a market, where if white people will buy fish for 20tk when it is worth 5, the owner will not sell to Bangladeshis for 5, especially when white people are around. Thus, though a foreigner may feel like he is being a "good person" by giving more money than is necessary, he may be a part of a system that has a devastating effect on the total economy of the country.
   

In the end, some people were strongly opposed to paying more, where I, in the instance of the rickshaw, could stomach paying slightly more. My reasoning is that Dhaka is a city of 13 million people and probably about 10 thousand wealthy (read: always have some income) foreigners. There are probably 500,000 rickshaws in the city, and maybe 200-500 foreigners who regularly ride the rickshaws. I have ridden a rickshaw once in three weeks, and almost everyone who can afford to has a driver (only about $150 a month). Therefore there is no demand for rickshaws in the foreigner community, and foreigners certainly cannot support or even change the standards of the everyday rickshawalla. I have maybe seen 5 other white people on rickshaws in the month I've been here. There is already a "white tax," as we call it, on Rickshaws, so if you pay that then you've been generous on a relative (to their standards) scale. People who ride the rickshaws regularly and have the ability to alter the market standards are shrewd enough not to be overcharged, so only fools like me who occasionally ride will overpay.
Also, there is practically no tourism, so the Dhaka markets are not riddled with foolish tourists who overpay and alter the dynamics of the economy. This can be and is a serious problem in some parts of the world that are impoverished but have a decent tourist industry. The economy of a nation should serve the locals more than foreigners, and too much foreign money spread unwisely can disrupt this balance.

Pictures Sara took

These are of the men working on the apartment below us, they are removing the stone floor with sledge hammers. Transporting the stones in baskets on their towel-padded heads, one man walks the basket down one flight of stairs and so on forming a work line out to the street. This has been very LOUD. Everything here is hand done, there are probably 20 men working on this job. It is amazing to consider that the entire building in which I live was constructed by the hands of men such as these.
When I came home one day the elevator was out so I walked up the stairs as they were coming down. By the time I got to our top floor, I had a mouth coated in dust, I can't imagine what it is like for them.

The Ballad of Rehana, our ex-maid

In other big news, we fired out Maid/cook (called a "bearer" here, a holdover from Colonial Britain), Rehana. She is a short, dark Bangladeshi woman who can be smiley but has hard eyes. She is not skinny and seems to have worked in nice homes before ours. This has been a difficult process for the three housemates, because there is no sugar coating putting someone out of a job in the third world. However, in grotesquely strict economic terms, we are in a "buyers market" and she had steadily made herself less and less of a luxury and more of a liability.
Specifically, she lied about how much money she needed for the rickshaw for groceries, assumedly pocketing some for herself. Now it was really only a little more than a dollar that she fudged, but when someone is in your house all day without you, you want to have a trusting relationship.
Also, we were paying her more than any other new hirees, yet she was not satisfied. Could we have afforded to pay more? certainly, but we were also aware of how much more she was making than the other cooks, and that we were paying her double what a Bangladeshi family would. Because of translation issues we asked the "General Services" director, Mr. Zaman, to talk to her and make sure everything was set at 9000tk a month. He assured us that she was ok with 9000, but when we got home she said that Mr. Zaman said we would pay 10,000. Again, there was a sense that she was trying to take advantage of us.
She also gave Sara a lot of attitude despite Sara being the most ready to help and try to communicate with Rehana. Sara is an exceptionally kind person, and Rehana's defiance of her modest wishes would be unnacceptable in any boss-worker relationship. In short, things that should have been easy requests often turned into negotiations made impossible and illogical by our distinct language barrier.
The last straw for me was when I came home after a long muggy day and hopped in the shower, only to find that my bar of soap was missing. Afterwards I checked around and found it in the guest bathroom that we let Rehana shower in after cleaning. This was gross. I can only hope that she hadn't been previously putting it back after use. Also, she left the guest bathroom wet from the shower (which has no curtain), so that if we actually had company the toilet would have been drenched and unappealing.
Although we were not too pleased with her, we also understood that we were putting food on her table. It is hard to pull the plug on that kind of relationship. Our guilt was strong, but we also had to consider that someone who could make us happy for the same price and spoke English also needed work, and would it be fair to deny her an opportunity? Is it appropriate to even ask these questions? It feels disgusting to do so. However Rehana again transgressed our wishes and overspent on food we didn't need after we gave her a budget, so we decided to let her go.

Today she showed up to our apartment seeking her job back, and a dress she had left here to dry. Luckily I was not yet out of my room so I didn't have to deal with it. When I came home today she was still here, talking with our guards. This made me very uncomfortable but I just said hi to her and walked by, planning to get after the guards later. I learned later on tonight that she had accosted a teacher who lives next to me and demanded (and I don't mean asked) for money. Seeing her made my heart sink because I knew she needed the job, and I had trouble with the knowledge I had helped to take it away.

On the bright side, our new cook is great. A little Thai woman named Anna, she speaks and writes more English, and understands better what we want. She also doesn't fold my ironed shirts (a pet peeve). She is older than Rehana, who is probably in her late 20s, and far more motherly. I think we have found a keeper, but I was afraid a confrontation might have ensued when Rehana was down in the parking lot and Anna was leaving. Luckily Jimmy and Sara went with her to the market to help show her what we want to buy. Hopefully this is the end of our relationship with Rehana and she will find another job soon, maybe one in which she will more clearly understand what her bosses want from her (just writing that last line is too weird, but it is what it is).

My First Class

I recently taught my first class as the "lead teacher" (my mentor lurked in the shadows, interjecting occasionally with pointers for me and the students). I am teaching a Speech class, which is presenting difficulties that a traditional English class would not. Specifically, speech is largely about performance, and I am more comfortable with literature, things you can study on the page. To ease into things (for me anyways), I gave a lecture on Aristotle's "On Rhetoric" in which we discussed his theories of ethos, pathos and logos, as well as his personal view of the power of rhetoric. I trimmed the selection down significantly to the most essential elements to make the reading more accessible. (Another issue I am running into is that the majority of these kids are forgoing more difficult English courses because they are ESL or simply not very strong English students). Why, you may be asking, would I put these kids through such dense material on the second class in an elective? Well I was surprised by their level of engagement, they are well behaved and attentive for the most part, and I tried to get as much discussion going as possible. The second part of the class was far more enjoyable, we watched selections from Thank You for Smoking and discussed how Aristotilian theory relates to the rhetorical magic of Nick Naylor. I was happily surprised by how well they connected the two works, and I hope they learned something because I am giving them a quiz on Wednesday! Haha, it is strange thinking about how to make this quiz, and as we reviewed for it today in class I had a hard time not saying "write this down, it will be exactly what's on the quiz!"
We are outlining the course and the syllabus as we go, so it's sort of stressful, but at the same time my mentor is endowing me with plenty of excellent teaching tips, tools and advice.

Some Writing

This is a thing I wrote, it's about 1000 words (I wouldn't call it a story and I won't call it a piece). The narrator isn't me per se, although various elements in the story have happened to me. Watch for irony, hope you enjoy!


Out the window, which faces south, there is a deep, moody cloud marching in. It is the tail end of monsoon season, but I haven’t seen anything that has matched my expectations. The blackened steel bars that crisscross the window have unsettling effect because they are driven into the inside of the sill. I can reach my arm through to open or close the window but that’s it. The cloud is probably tall and it certainly covers the sky, maybe this will be the last big pour I have been told to expect. It’s morning, I think about remembering to take my umbrella when I go outside.
I’m sitting at a real dark wood table. Not the wood that I would buy back home, this wood is heavy, it came from a heavy tree. This is the dining room table, the chairs are also sculpted from the dark reddish wood. In a real home this would probably be a beautiful set, but it juts out in the stark, sterilized marble tiles on which it currently stands.
I am eating cold papaya that was sliced in cubes last night by my bearer, she hasn’t showed up yet today. It is easy to get used to finding prepared items in the refrigerator. Already a colonial attitude, dormant in my native land, has been yawning itself awake. It’s true though, Dhaka is in many ways a disgusting place, there are bars on the windows of the unreachable sixth and highest floor of my apartment building. They are on the inside.
I scoop the unfamiliarly textured papaya (something between a banana and an apple) into my mouth without looking at the bowl, but I can tell I have almost exhausted my supply. I am reading The Great Gatsby and taking notes in a small notebook evidently made for science students because instead of line paper the book is filled with graphing paper. I found the good ones yesterday, but I have already started taking notes and want them all in one place. Already I have forgotten that this is a book about failure, about impossibility. Somehow those last pages make you believe, I guess that’s the trick.
I read with my left hand pressing down on the pages to keep them open, my right hand attentively awaits instruction, pen at the ready. Just then, to the left of the left page I see one of the tiniest bugs I have ever seen. He (are insects “its”?) explores the table’s surface, I don’t know if they smell food or just travel randomly until they stumble across a crumb that fell from my mouth last night. As I said, the bearer hasn’t arrived yet so there is bound to be something to eat on the table. The bug is so minute that it must be eating things that I cannot even see. It pauses occasionally and seems to dip its head, perhaps for a microbe of rice. When things are that small it probably doesn’t matter what it is.
I relieve my left hand from page-holding duty and bring it down upon the bug. I saw a roach in my bathroom when I came home last night so I can’t take any chances. This tiny scavenger could be the first coming of an infestation, I can’t be too careful. My hand quickly snaps back up as to avoid having anything stick and the bug is neatly left on the table. I go back to my reading but before I can finish absorbing another elegant sentence I see another crawly thing out of the corner of my eye. Scanning the tabletop I realize there must be eight or nine bugs patrolling for scraps. I wasn’t looking for them when I sat down and did not notice the moving dust. I shake my head and decide to clean the table better after dinner and to make sure that the bearer takes care of whatever is happening. I have never had an infestation of any kind anywhere. I guess there were little white mice in my chapter house, but a mouse is an animal not an insect. I don’t understand insects, I don’t think I ever will make peace with them. And I certainly will not negotiate a truce today, I kill two more specs in my immediate vicinity. I do not intend on getting up.
The business of killing the roach last night was unpleasant. It hid against a wall almost behind the toilet and when I scared it out it ran in circles until I halted it with the bottom of my shoe. I tried not to make too big of a mess but inevitably whatever was inside him ended up on the outside, and on the tile. Luckily nothing on my rubber sole, I am an expert already. I stared at it for a second and wondered what it was up to before I found it. I got some toilet paper and scraped him up into it, trying not to feel what was in my hand, dumped him in the toilet and flushed.
Today’s crushing goes far more smoothly, there are no visible alterations to the state of the bugs post mortem other than that they are no longer moving. Another bug foolishly ventures within the reach of my sinister hand, which descends with controlled force. This bug did not instantly die. I have merely maimed it, and now it travels in a clockwise circle around a useless set of right legs. Its feelers are still active, though I suspect only for a second and so I continue to read. “I must have stood there for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and he two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”
When I looked off the page towards the spot where the bug had been suffering so valiantly nothing was moving. However I could not confirm whether the bug had died or been able to struggle off my table, over the edge.

Prepping for School August 7-11

The last week has been spent getting ready for school to begin. Meetings, meetings, meetings, and more meetings-- assemblies abound as we get ready for the students to arrive. I have been prepping the Great Gatsby which has been a great experience, my limited but increased life experience has certainly enriched my enjoyment. I am helping out with a couple IB courses and it looks like I will have a large part in the Speech elective. It is not a largely important class in the course of things but it will be populated (I believe) primarily by students who need to learn to speak better for IB and school presentation purposes. (For those who don't know, the IB is the International Baccalaureate, learn about it here.
Last week I went to a happy hour at the Australian Club which was a lot of fun and surprisingly cheap. The "Country Clubs" as they might be called appear to be the main gathering places besides house parties, so I look forward to exploring the Dutch, Nordic and British Clubs as well as the my home American club.
Our maid has been a bit of a strain recently, and I think that she may have taken my bar of soap from my bathroom (it is missing either way) to use in the guest bathroom in which she showers after a day's work. Unfortunately I am out of the house when she is home so I haven't had an opportunity to confront her, although our communication difficulties might make it a moot point.
One of my house mates, Sara, came down with a stomach bug during this time and has since decided to eat far more western foood after being gung ho about the adventures of Bangladeshi food. So far so good for me, although I would love a nice turkey sandwhich.

August 4, Doom and Gloom

We visited a hospital in the area called Golshon II today that is the world headquarters of water born illness treatment and research, popularly referred to as the Cholera Hospital. It's true title is the ICDDR,B (yes that comma is supposed to be there) and it is a clinic funded in equal parts by the Bangladesh and American Governments. Water born disease (viruses, bacteria) account for more child deaths world wide than AIDS and many other diseases, and this clinic sees 110,000 people for free every year.
We went there to register with the travel clinic also operated by the same people so that we could receive vaccinations for travel abroad and any minor treatment for anything we might catch from the water supply (although everyone takes plenty of caution never to imbibe local water). However, confused by construction of the new research facility, instead of entering the travel clinic entrance we accidentally walked straight through the treatment center full of sick and impoverished Bangladeshi people.
This came as quite a shock to many of the faculty that were not prepared to be confronted with such a scene, and it was quite surreal to see what amounted to 300 unpartitioned beds on either side of us all occupied with sickly people hooked up to IVs. Outside the clinic they had set up a tent to accomidate the overflow, and there was a line of more people waiting to see the triage nurses just inside the building.
We had seen some poverty and disfigurement in the streets of Dhaka before this visit, but for some reason I think that many people had not truly come to grips with the realities of these people's lives. Indeed the patients were lucky to have such professional and highly skilled care (every overseeing doctor was trained in the states of UK), but even within the bright and clean room we passed through there was an air of desparation and hopelessness that we had not yet encountered.
We met with the head of the clinic, which really spends the majority of its funds for preventative research, and learned all about the various ways to prevent water born illness. He assured us that common sense was all that was necessary, and that he and his wife had not had any major illness in the 5 years they had lived in Dhaka.

The second half of the day (after downing some cafeteria lunch) was spent in a meeting with the Regional Security Officer of the American Embassy. Essentially he is a law enforcement officer who protects Americans their interests within Bangladesh. He has a girl at AISD so it was reassuring to know he had a vested interest in the school that went beyond his professional duty. His office helps the Bangladeshi government with major operations such as terrorist threats and drug trafficking, informing us that Bangladesh is essentially the mid point on the narcotics highway between Afghanistan and the Philipines.
The main security concerns he saw were from the upcoming elections which would almost inevitably spark some kind of protests and what are called hartals, or protests/riots. These are constitutionally recognized as means of advocating a political message, but usally they are in fact made up of hired men who ransack an area for media attention. In the event of such an event we would all be texted to tell us what hotspots to avoid.
The other "threats" seemed endemic to any major city (as he admitted), and included being swindled or taken advantage of by taxi drivers, or being mugged by men in cahoots with baby taxi drivers (also called autorickshaws). We have a car and can hire a driver on call so I don't see this being a problem. He said the any rickshawally or baby taxi that we see in our diplomatic enclave on a regular basis can be trusted, and almost everything is only unsafe at night. (common sense was his main message).

All in all the day was pretty heavy, but necessary.

The Dhakehara Temple and the Lalbagh Fort

These were our last two stops on our tour of old city. The story of the fort is quite interesting: it was built for the daughter of ruler of the area, Pari Bibi. However she died during it's construction and the ruler decided that the place was cursed. He changed the plan of the construction from a home to a mausoleum, and poured far more money into it. Parts of the fort were never completed. The grounds are pretty untouched and it is by far the most grass I've seen thus far. The city is built up around it and the contrast is striking.
Apparently the fort is a hot spot for Bangladeshi's to go on dates because it is more private than the streets which are invariably teeming with people.
The temple pictured here is the Dhakehara Temple, which some believe gives Dhaka its name. When we were visiting there were probably 100 people there praying to words being read live through speakers. The temple features shrines to Durga, who is the main goddess of Bangladesh. She has ten hands and takes ten forms. Unfortunately the temple is not in its original condition, having been ransacked during the civil war.

The pictures got a bit mixed but anything that looks religious is from the Temple and anything that is from an elevated view or has grass is from the fort.

Note the rickshawali with the Nir'vana shirt, a play on the shirt inspired by the popular alternative rock and roll group from Seattle.

Our first full day was Friday, August 1. Friday is the Muslim day of prayer so the city is far less crowded especially in the morning. We took this opportunity to visit Old Dhaka and do a tour of some historic sites. Although Old Dhaka is only five miles away, it can take up to 2 hours to get there on a normal day. We were lucky, it only took us about 40 minutes. I took about 14o pictures, the best of which are posted here. Highlights include: the river dock, the old Armenian church, the Star Mosque, the Red Fort (which was built around the same time as the Taj Mahal). This was also my first major encounter with the Bangladeshi people. Unlike cities in India and most of the region, many of these people in Old Dhaka may see a tourist only a few times a year. The slogan in Bangladesh is "get here before the tourists do" and it's been that way for 30 years.
As a result we were received with stares, and many children would request that I took their picture. We were definitely the main attraction in the area, but I never felt threatened by the giant amount of people in the streets. The people of Bangladesh are extremely inquisitive, asking "what is your country" if they have the English, and very eager to please. Characteristically I would say that the Bangladesh people are docile, inquisitive, hospitible and gentle.