Information buffet!

Yahooo! has come through for me! I feel like busting out a happy dance in time with the Urdu music here, but I'll restrain myself. Here are some thoughts I've had over the past few days. I'm still trying for the pictures...sit tight, and imagine the kind of internet access I have in a country where I have to jump over bloody cow hides on my way to school.

February 3, 2006

Since my last blog entry I have soared the heights of cultural honeymooning, looking at Bangladesh through amazed tourist eyes. And there has been a lot to see, so much that my mind and mouth still have to catch up. I’ve visited brick factories and rice paddies, attended CRWRC management seminars, commuted on my own via baby taxi, visited a paraplegic hospital, cruised down a Bangladeshi river, been to the slums, and more. This has all been part of my generous “orientation,” where I essentially capitalize on every possible get-to-know-Bangladesh opportunity. And there have been many.

There have been stable elements to my program so far: a few days reading CRWRC materials at the office, some formal tours and presentations, attending Friday afternoon church services, and starting Bengali classes last week. But my boss Kohima has been keen on getting me out and about, having me experience as much Bangladeshi culture as I can before I settle down to office work.

I was lucky to be able to tag along with the former CRWRC-Bangladesh directors, Rick and Edith, who were visiting from Canada with some relatives. Edith led us on two day-trips out of Dhaka, where I got to see the segmented rice paddy landscape that makes up most of Bangladesh. Edith is an intrepid, hard-nosed missionary woman, who on several occasions told me to “be more assertive!” Armed with bottles of water, toilet paper, and Droste letter chocolates, she led us out to see some local industries.

People work incredibly hard in Bangladesh. I have seen more man- and woman-power exerted over the past two weeks than I’ve seen in my previous 23 years combined. Out with Edith we saw men make bricks from wet clay—everything from slapping it into the wooden mold to cooking it in an enormous oven, to transporting 17 bricks at a time on their heads. We also stopped to watch women drying rice in long triangular lines, then raking it into patterns like Buddhist rock gardens. Along the side of the road there were people slowly pedaling their loads to market: jute baskets filled with produce, clumps of caged chickens, enormous sticks of bamboo that dragged in the dirt.

Our driver navigated confidently through this local traffic, swerving for motorcycles, cows, and oncoming vehicles that played passing chicken on the two-lane highway. Traffic is the thing that scares me most about Bangladesh: it feels like mayhem. Every vehicle is packed with people, everyone honks all the time, and drives very quickly and very close. Our trips were thankfully free of incident. We had minor mechanical problems at one point, but Edith’s brother Ralph, a farmer from Milverton, Ontario, fixed something under the hood with a piece of bamboo.

We also had another day trip to visit CRWRC’s partner project (SATHI) in Dhaka’s slums. I was bracing myself for this extreme encounter, expecting to break down and cry at some point. Instead, it was a really positive experience. We visited small groups of individuals who were working together to save money, take literacy classes, and learn basic health lessons. CRWRC’s partner organizations all include these basic units of interested poor people who want to work for social change. We visited a women’s group meeting, comprised of 14 married women who had started out saving 10 taka (approximately 17 Canadian cents) a week and had recently started giving out loans to group members for things like medicine, school fees, and starting small businesses.

These women were glowing. They welcomed us into their meeting, proudly recounted their group’s history, and talked to us about their visions for the future. Many of these women are contributing to their household incomes or learning how to read for the first time. SATHI’s mantra is “participatory development” which means that these people in the basic units have serious decision-making and self-evaluation power; eventually they become entirely independent from SATHI, only using them as consultants. One of the greatest joys of being here has been my delight in seeing how CRWRC’s partner projects empower people. I still have so much to learn about development work, but from what I can tell, God has led me to work for a good organization.

I’ll be burrowing into the details of CRWRC for the next little while, learning more about the practicalities of my grant-writing job. I expect that life will be slowing down at some point, though not quite yet. Today my co-worker Alana and I are getting shari blouses tailored, and tomorrow I’m hopefully heading to a Bangladeshi wedding reception. Maybe this excitement is a good note to end on for now. This has been a hard entry to write, because I can’t share everything I’ve experienced. Of course this is my fault, because I’ve waited so long to post and so much has accumulated. I really thought I could figure everything out (the poverty, my work, the politics) before sharing it all, but no, it seems as if I will have to try to speak as I go. Talking and walking at the same time!

February 6, 2006 12:30 a.m.

I’m restless tonight. The luxury of tonight’s activities has aggravated me too much: a birthday dinner out, followed by cake at a lush apartment. Now, in bed, all the sadness on the streets has come back to haunt me, all the grotesque figures that parade along the highways, dodging traffic to show you their deformities: the blind girl with rolling opaque eyes, the man with an arm that bends four times, the boy whose bare torso is warped from leprosy. They push these things against your vehicle, or in your vehicle if they can, asking for money. Or at least I think they’re asking for money. I don’t speak their language very well.

Alana, my coworker, speaks to the children in Bengali when they come and beg. We were in a rickshaw the other night when a little boy approached us with his baby sister slung on his hip. Like all the other children on the street he was dirty and barefoot and the baby wasn’t wearing any pants. Alana tells the boy that she doesn’t give out money. Instead, she starts to talk to him, asking him his age, his name, and if he goes to school. The boy’s face lights up at this attention. He has a beautiful smile, with straight white teeth. When he tells us he stopped going to school, Alana tells him “you should go back!” She even elicits the rickshaw driver’s support on this. He turns around: “Yes, it’s important to learn to read and write,” he tells the boy. Soon the light changes green and the rickshaw starts to move. The smiling boy tries one last time for some taka, then we speed off.

I haven’t hit ground zero yet when it comes to the poverty. I’m in survival-mode Dhaka, trying to get where I need to go safely. I walk down the crowded, dirty streets with my head high and my eyes averted, because everybody stares at me. I hear random English words: “How are you?” “Okay mister” shouted in my direction, and some Bengali phrases too, which I catch pieces of. The beggars on the street are part of this landscape, the one that I steel myself against. I haven’t relaxed enough to let the poverty affect me emotionally. I don’t know when or even if this will happen.

I suppose I’m expecting a kind of break-down, as if I’ve come to Bangladesh for a catharsis from my selfish Western ways. Instead, I find myself struggling with a sense of entitlement, finding a million reasons why I deserve to eat out and be driven around.

Everyone who comes to this country has to come to terms with its poverty and make a lifestyle choice, somewhere on the spectrum between slum dwelling to the diplomatic high life. Right now CRWRC has made these decisions for me (pleasant guesthouses), but at the end of February, I’ll have a choice of where I’ll be staying. My most recent thought is that I don’t want to choose a martyr-like lifestyle just for the sake of suffering in a developing country. My decisions will always affect poor people, no matter where I’m living, so I should try to choose a lifestyle that is sustainable regardless of location. Bethany, she who dispensed wisdom a month ago, said she never wanted to “resolve” the problem of poverty in her life; it’s something that should always nudge us into better actions, better living. How much nudging? What level of discomfort?