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efore I left I heard it said that the tourist slogan for
First, consider the population: Bangladesh has a population of 140 million people, packed into a country the size of New York state, living on an average of 6 and a half dollars a day. With a birth rate of 2.7 children per woman, that population has doubled in just a few of generations. Over 60 Percent of the population is below the age of 25. The average woman marries at 18.
The day I arrived two headlines rocked the news, and both were plainly visible on the streets of
Free Trade Zones are widely agreed by most people in my business to be the scourge of the third world. In special agreements with countries desperate for work for their people, these fenced-in compounds buy no raw material from the local market place and pay no taxes. All items arrive and leave the factory solely for the purpose of exploiting the cheap manual labor. The goods arrive via ship, go straight to the factory in sealed containers, and leave the country immediately after assembly. Technically, the items never even touch the soil of the country they where the factory is located. And because they pay no taxes, they contribute nothing to the infrastructure of that country, nor do the workers have much bargaining power with management. As such, the wages are typically horrible, and the working conditions even worse. These are the great modern day ‘sweat shops.’ While these zones have been set up around the world with the permission of governments from
But in an indication of just how bad things are in
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here’s something much more disheartening about urban poverty than rural. I have lived in a village with the poorest of the poor in Africa, and seen shoeless children, naked but for a pair of shorts, kids who will never spend a day in school, never see a dentist, and likely never see a doctor, running free and playing happily for the better part of their lives. This is not to say that these children don’t deserve more, but they seem possessed not only of a greater freedom and sense of community but of a greater dignity than the barefoot children walking on the overpasses in Dhaka, or peddling goods between the cars at every stoplight in Dhaka, seven year old girls in grubby clothes going from car window to car window, keeping one eye on the traffic light so that they can dash back to the median until it turns red again. They appeared not to have been robbed of their childhood, as those girls at the traffic light had.
Being stuck at a traffic light is something you will spend at least two hours of your first day in
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was on my tour of
Unfortunately, the parliament has been turned into a prison for the last two prime ministers, and parliament hasn’t met in over a year. The country is ruled by a small group of advisers who are shadowed by the military, under a ‘state of emergency’ that’s over a year old and is expected to last at least another year. We stood at the edge of the vast lawn in the back side of the building, and watched another man being ushered toward the prison. God knows what he’d done, though my hosts assured met that it was likely a criminal rather than political offense. Nevertheless, watching an ordinary-looking guy being frog-marched by three men with their hands on the back of his neck into the parliament-cum-prison is never a pleasant sight.
After a brief walk around the building – since we couldn’t actually approach it – we visited a few other sights: the university; a monument to the Bangla language movement – who rebelled against the imposition of Urdu by the eastern Pakistani administration – where we witnessed a group of men laying a flower wreath at the base of the 70’s-era concrete and steel structure; and then on to a monument to the freedom fighters who brought independence to Bangladesh in a nine month long war in 1972. We moved back into the crawl of traffic, and more beggars weaving between the cars, and on to other sights.
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nevitably, those seven year old girls selling things for 12 hours a day lingered especially long outside my window, whether in the hopes of selling something to a rich foreigner or due to sheer curiosity, I’ll never know for sure. But the guy who spent five minutes today trying to sell me newspaper in the inscrutable Bangla script today is an indication that it’s probably the latter. ‘Come before the tourists do,’ if you want to be ogled everywhere you go, surrounded by an audience watchful of your ever move, which isn’t always the best thing in a country with remarkably few public toilets. I travel all over the world, often to out-of-the-way places that have little contact with the outside world. Though it’s certainly not the first, it’s been rare for me to find a place where my mere presence has provoked such a staggering, relentless curiosity as
But whether they live in towns or villages, the overwhelming majority of Bangladeshis have got this charming lack of unselfconsciousness, this inimitable unprepossessedness about them, nowhere in more evidence than during the Bangladeshi national pastime, which appears to be what my countrymen refer to as ‘hocking a loogie.’ Tomorrow my mission is to count how many times I’ll hear that gorgeous sound, for which I can find no other expression than the aforementioned, when a man (or woman) summons forth a gob of spit and phlegm from the back of his throat, and hurls it forth into the world. I am convinced that it’ll top 20. They just don’t think twice about it. Sometimes the sound of one person will excite the impulse in another, and before you know it you’re standing in the middle of a symphony of spitting.
This tendency, combined with their friendliness and curiosity, can sometimes be a dangerous cocktail. Today I was stretching my legs on a long ferry ride when I saw a man in a double-breasted suit sneeze into his hand a dozen times in a row. A few minutes later he was approaching me with his hand outstretched – thank god it was the other hand – in greetings. I tell myself that he didn’t, that he couldn’t have touched his two hands together during those few moments between the sneeze and the handshake when I wasn’t watching him, but I’ll never know for sure. Tourist slogan number two, ‘Come to
Second runner up is, ‘Come to
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he North Korean embassy was across the street from my hotel in the upscale (-ish) Banani neighborhood. A lighted glass case displayed scenes of Kim Jong Il reviewing the troops, Kim Jong Il reviewing the rockets, Kim Jong Il giving advice to some wheat farmers, (mustn’t have been very good advice), and so on. One evening I saw a Korean man lingering outside the building. I couldn’t help myself, so I struck up a conversation. Told him that I thought it would be my only chance to meet a North Korean, since they didn’t seem to travel much. ‘Nonsense!’ he said, and went on to talk about his 10 years with the World Food Program around the world. A North Korean with the WFP struck me as somehow ironic, though I didn’t think it was a wise joke to share. I told him I would love to visit his country, and asked for his business card. When I told him that I worked for a non-government aid organization, he said that he too worked for an NGO, pointing to an unmarked building across the street from the embassy. Then he cut the conversation short and walked back into the embassy.
In fact, all the pariah states are here: I also saw the embassies of
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ut I get the feeling that I’m giving you the wrong impression, leading you to think I don’t like
You gotta love the rivers. Despite its modest size,
But it’s not only the rivers that give the impression of an entire country under water. There are man made ponds and canals literally everywhere in the Southern half of the country. At first I thought that they were the result of an extremely high water table, and that the earthen spaces where people had built dwellings were artificially built up. I was shocked to learn that I had it backwards: in many places the water table during the wettest months is at least 20 feet from the surface, about the same as a good part of the sub-Saharan Sahel band of
There was one such canal around the house we saw today, a moment after the roof burst into flames. We stopped the car immediately to help the family throw buckets of water onto the thatch roof, and after the frantic, disorganized efforts of our five man party and a half dozen family members (ever heard of a bucket line, anyone?) it was out. The roof was gone, and though they had pulled one wall down hastily in order to save it, it appeared that all four walls, as well as the majority of the roof beams, were saved. We were lucky, our driver said, that there was a canal all the way around the house. Yeah, unlike every other bloody house in this part of the country, I thought. It is remarkable to see just how little the truly poor own. With the one wall torn down, the one-room house was laid bare, and there was precious little to burn, at all. I pressed some money into the houseowner’s palm, which, frankly, is an impulse I have to hold in check several hundred times a day in
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e were on our way back from the second village visit of the day, where we’d talked to several dozen families who had lost homes, family members, and livelihoods in the recent cyclone. Our organization will be replacing fishing boats and fishing nets, digging wells and providing latrines, and clearing out the ponds from the countless fallen trees. These families were living on the edge before the cyclone, occupying the lowest lying land on the edge of the riverside. When the 10 to 15 storm surge jumped over the embankment designed to protect them, they went from poor to utterly destitute.
One woman we spoke quickly came to tears as she told the story of holding her 11 year old girl in her arms as their house filled up with water, holding as tightly as she could, which wasn’t strong enough. To see what many of these families called a ‘house’ in the best of circumstances, with just a few corrugated zinc sheets hammered onto a framework of boards over a dirt floor, is enough to break your heart. Another man showed us the grave of his wife and two children. What can one do in such circumstances? Offer condolences and sympathy, of course, which always feel so pathetically feeble and useless in moments like that. ‘Just your being here is in itself enough,’ one woman said. Another woman said that they only suffered for one day, whilst we’re still suffering to try to bring them assistance.
These are doubtless the kinds of things that poor, disaster-stricken people say to the people that they hope will be their benefactors, but still I couldn’t help but be affected when they say, as they did, time and again, that while help is welcome, we shouldn’t worry. They will get by. Many of them actually said that they don’t want relief food any more. What they are want are new houses, and loans to restart their livelihoods. The attitude wasn’t hope, exactly. The people I spoke to weren’t exactly smiling when they said they would make it. They usually broke off eye contact, turned the corners of their mouths down, and stared into the middle distance. It was more like indifference, a matter-of-fact fatalist’s resignation. They have struggled, and survived, through things worse than this.
Natural disasters are nothing new in
And yet impossibly, they manage delight! Still, the Bangladshis can afford joy! How, I’ll never know. But a recent study actually found that Bangladeshis were among the happiest people in the world. Whether or not I buy this, I can’t say for sure. Given what we know about the place, it’s hard to imagine them as the world’s happiest, despite its peoples’ ebullient optimism. But what do I know. The innumerable rickshaws are all painted in bright colors with the pictures of Bollywood stars, festooned with all kinds of decoration that must cost a small fortune. The drivers usually can’t afford a decent pair of shoes, but they somehow manage to deck out their rickshaws like every day was a parade. Many of the girls and boys selling things in between the cars are selling pop corn (or ‘Pop Con,’ as the signs say), or Cotton candy. Cotton candy! Imagining a market for cotton candy in a country where the per capita income is six and a half dollars a day is simply beyond my comprehension. But then, much is.
No, it’s not that I don’t love
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suppose the fundamental question that troubles me is this: is it possible to have empathy for someone, and mock them at the same time? Or at least, is it possible to bear witness to heart-shattering human suffering, to be even deeply affected by it, and still be able to be sarcastic? I have known someone who used to work with retarded teenagers. At the time she told me that every single one of her colleagues had developed the habit of mimicking the various retards that they worked with. She loved those kids, she had a ball with them, and still, she and her co-workers couldn’t help themselves from sarcastically mimicking them, from mocking them.
I suppose this is the fundamental question, the ultimate test of maintaining one’s humanity in a career as a humanitarian aid worker, where witnessing pain becomes part of your daily routine. I worked with a French Child Protection specialist in
But what’s all too common in our ‘business’ of relief is unfortunately the other extreme; the byproduct of aid work is cynicism. You get so used to seeing the shit that you become inured to it. It stops bothering you altogether. And that, too, is bad for your decision making; you can’t see past the numbers to see the people they represent even when the people are right in front of you. If it doesn’t mean the loss of your sanity, then it does mean the loss of a part of your humanity, thea kind of dissociation shared by porn stars and sociopaths.
It seems to me that humor – especially black humor – is in fact our last line of defense against the unspeakable. It’s a way of maintaining our humanity, of dealing with all that we see, burdened by the full knowledge of our own powerlessness and inadequacy. That’s what you struggle with the most as an aid worker. You want to change the reality for the people you see. But you’re never able to help anyone other than the one in front of you, one in a sea of millions.
And after a while, as you become increasingly ‘professional’ in what you do, you gain the creeping awareness that your life, and the system in which you work, of international organizations funded by taxes, and citizens of the first world, and by corporations, is in fact a huge part of the reason why these people are in bondage in the first place. You may want to help, but you are also a representative of the very system of global capital, and its inherent inequities, that keeps them enslaved. Black humor is perhaps the only sane response to such a reality. The alternatives – an overweening earnestness or a ‘crusader’ mentality – are not only the way to hypocrisy; they are tantamount to surrender. One must be able to continue despite the foreknowledge that the essence of the project is failure.
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n my last night in
I had a fistful of takas and I gave them all away, knowing full well that it would complicate my life the next day when I had to pay for my taxi and my breakfast and tip the guys at the hotel. I gave half my clothing away to the guys at the hotel. I gave away my magazines for the flight to the bicycle rickshaw drivers that lingered outside the hotel. I gave my sunglasses to the nicest one, whom I’d had occasion to ride with a few times. I gave as much as I could, though I knew it was hopeless, though I knew it wouldn’t make a difference. And I still didn’t feel any better.
Winner of the quest to find a new tourist slogan: ‘Come to