Caffeine in the morning sun

What a way to start the day: chuckling at the improvised rain hat my rickshaw wallah was wearing. It made my morning.

Well that and the two cups of freshly brewed coffee I drank warm for the first time in ages, courtesy of the welcome drop in temperature. So far monsoon season gets two thumbs up from me.

Little earthquakes

Shunajur Village is sixteen kilometres from anything resembling a town centre. To get there you have to follow a small dirt road for fourteen kilometres, then continue on foot up and over the river. At the small shack on the left after the bridge, turn left and follow the dirt path into the trees. You know you’re in the right place when you get to the thatched huts. If you’ve got access to a four wheel drive, the journey takes about an hour in good weather; much longer by any other means.

As far as villages go, this one is pretty lucky. It has a tube well providing safe access to drinking water, and sanitary latrines. The odd cow, a handful of goats and ducks add their animal sounds and smells into the village mix which remind me of the hobby farm I used to spend summer holidays in. Not that I eat cows or goats or ducks, or even eggs. Trying to explain that to the villagers is like trying to explain that where I’m from falling pregnant isn’t dangerous. The very idea is hard to grasp for women who give birth on dirt floors with the help of traditional midwives, of whom 79% are illiterate and untrained. I use the term ‘women’ loosely, since 60% of women have already given birth by the age of 20. I’m 28 years old. These statistics scare me.

At least I don’t have to be scared for the girls in this village. Through women’s empowerment support early marriage is widely understood as being dangerous. Considering the average age of marriage for girls is 14 years old, this is something to be excited about. Here girls are lucky, they can carry on being girls and go to school until they’re 18; they don’t have to worry about giving birth on dirt floors just yet, let alone dealing with a husband or a family in law.

In fact, the future is as bright as it has ever been for the girls in this village. With any luck, they may not have to give birth on dirt floors with the assistance of the local midwife who was trained by her mother, grandmother, or neighbour. The name and number of the local government health visitor is well known here, so the possibility of delivering little Jasmin or Faisal with the help of a trained midwife is a little bit closer to becoming a reality. These girls may also have some say in deciding the size of their family, as the welcoming of contraception use by the older, respected women is becoming more widespread. Since all of this healthcare costs money, though, nothing is guaranteed.

When I say this healthcare costs money, it’s important you know what I mean. I’m not just talking about the actual care itself. Of course these women will probably have to pay for the doctor and/or nurse, and any follow up medication or bandages etc. But they also need to pay to actually get there. Those sixteen kilometres on foot when you’re pregnant, sick, or injured must feel like six hundred. The alternatives are paying a rickshaw puller (man on a bike) or CNG driver (motorised baby-taxi) to take you there, and then bring you home. This is expensive stuff though, if you’re from this village. It’s a long way, and they don’t earn very much.

When I say they don’t earn very much, it’s important here too that you know what I mean. In this village, women earn money through selling vegetables they grow in their front yards, or by hand sewing detail onto salwar kameezes. If you do a combination of these, you can expect to earn between 100-200 taka, or AUD$1.85 - $3.75 per day. This doesn’t leave enough to buy luxuries like apples, let alone pay for rickshaws or CNGs. Considering that most women aren’t involved in paid work, this again puts these women in the lucky column. With only 4% of women earning a cash wage, earning anything at all is a huge step in the right direction. We all know what money buys.

Which brings me to how optimistic I am for this village, or more correctly, the people who live in it. From the outside, it looks like they’re getting a lot of the important things right. They’re becoming healthier, educating their children, and earning money. On the governance side, they’re forming committees enhancing women’s empowerment, and solving village problems collectively, then marching up to the local government to demand the services the law says they should be receiving. Their girls will be women before they become wives and mothers, and their boys better equipped to be good husbands and fathers.

Yes, as far as villages go, this one is pretty lucky. Or not, really, since luck had nothing to do with it.

We're all in this together

I love technology. I love the Internet. I love my lap top. I love mobile phones. I love my iPod. I love electricity. (This last one I shouldn't really say out loud given how most electricity is generated the world over, it's terribly 'unleft' of me).

I especially love these things today because even though I've not left my apartment (thank you recurrent Bangla belly for at least being mild this time) here is what I have done:

* confirmed my flights to Egypt, Turkey and the UK for later this year
* applied for a new passport
* wished my brother safe travels for his flight from Barcelona to Paris this morning, and then discussed the luxury of treating himself to a pair of sunnies from the Louis Vuitton store in Paris this afternoon
* planned, gossiped and joked with my sister
* spoke to my parents
* consoled a friend who had a big one and behaved a little badly last night
* heard from friends in London, Sydney, Brisbane and Bangladesh
* found out about the eradication of smallpox from Larry Brilliant and the future for dealing with pandemics "we [now] live in each others viral environments" (2007, about animals and humans); and Richard Dawkins' view on atheism "we are all atheists about most of the Gods humanity has believed in, some of us just go one God further" (2002)
* listened to The Beatles, Radiohead, Patti Smith, The Pixies, Placebo, and Badly Drawn Boy, and
* watched a Belgian arthouse flick, Le's Enfantes

To do all this I used a mobile phone and a laptop connected to the internet with a SIM card in (another) mobile phone using a data cable with my laptop giving me access to: iTunes, vodcasts and podcasts, skype, a dvd player and facebook, among other things, which made all this possible.

The revolution of communication technologies is incredibly exciting to experience on a professional level for someone who works in communications - especially the drop in costs of communicating globally, and the way that people the world over can collectivise (oohh, sounds scarily communist doesn't it - it's not, I promise) over issues despite not knowing each other from a bar of soap, and being geographically disparate. A perfect example is the current activity on twitter following the Iran election.

Personally, however, it's even better. Communication technology has effectively bridged the gap of living alone in a foreign country, and has made me feel completely connected and part of it all.

While all these electricity-hungry gadgets don't bode well for climate change, I'm eager to see where we go next. Between e mail, text messages, skype, blogs, social networking sites like facebook* and twitter, I know my world has changed for the better. And it looks like I'm not the only one.

*yes, I still think facebook could be better termed stalkerbook, which I guess means I'm a stalker, but I prefer to think that getting good at using this stuff is more preferable to not using it at all. What did Shakespeare say - 'there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'?

Where did you sleep last night?

Another month in the 'desh has come and gone and I've been a busy little bee, albeit one who feels like it's been blown about in one of the almost daily monsoonal lightening storms here.

This part of the world being as full on as it is means I've had barely any time to really contemplate 'the big questions', like where my next paycheck is going to come from (given I'm at the 8 month mark); I've been far too busy gallivanting around the place. In the past month I've been from the bottom left of Bangladesh (Cox's Bazaar), to Chittagong, Dhaka, up to Kishoregonj and Netrakona (which has the best food in the 'desh I've had so far), back to Dhaka, across to Kolkata in India for a long weekend, back to Dhaka and back to Chittagong. Don't ask me what day it is. Actually, don't ask me anything important for the next five days, which I am planning to spend catching up on sleep and generally enjoying my own bed, coconut husks and all.

The advantage of running around the place as if I was conducting my own personal Amazing Race, er, without a partner and the tv crews and glamorous locales (jeez, quite a stretch I'm making there...) is that I've done some pretty cool things like:




Given a poetry reading




Watched storm clouds roll in from a boat in Kewajore

Kewajore, a remote part of the Kishoregonj region, is flooded for six months of the year. It took 3 hours to travel less than 30 kilometres to get from Kewajore out to one village in the area. Crazy. When we finally got there, I spent the day trying not to appeal to every villager in sight to jump on our boat and head on out of there (ok, not really, it was a small boat and I had one of only two life jackets) because it is simply insane living that close to flood waters, which as far as I can tell is only going to end badly in a country wracked with natural disasters. It was a big lesson in understanding just how little land there is available in this country, forcing people to live on the equivalent of a sandbar at the beach.




Visited the Opera House of Kishoregonj

While I was wandering the streets of Kishoregonj, a local lad latched on to me, and offered to give me a walking tour of the city including the "city highlight": the oldest water tree in Kishoregonj. Tourism Australia, eat your heart out.

My trip to Kishoregonj was followed directly by hightailing it out of the country to:




Drink champagne




and cocktails




with the girls - Natalie and Casey




in Kolkata

Which while it wasn't quite the oasis I was hoping for (perhaps I should have twigged that a half hour flight to another part of Bengal, even if it is in a different country, may not result in a drastic change in culture), Kolkata still offered enough of the good stuff to keep us entertained.

To prove that it wasn't all about the booze, we took in a few cultural sites, the highlight for me being:




Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying

I've never seen such high quality care being given to older (dying) people before, en masse. Clearly they have no staffing issues since there were plenty of volunteers, and I imagine the funding streams are fairly consistent for a charity (though this place is a strictly 'bare-bones' affair), but still. I was impressed, and even left a bit speechless at the good work being done.

As for how the weekend ended? Only with the worst flight I've ever been on, and I've flown Aeroflot.

It involved:
- a dead body: the man who died as we were boarding our plane in Kolkata,
- a five hour delay,
- a mini-revolt: staged by (male) passengers desperate to get off the plane to perform their prayers even though we had boarded the plane and were about to take off, complete with trying to get into the cockpit and banging fists against the plane doors,
- flying through a lightening storm: because turbulence was what the already agitated passengers on this flight needed, and
- men behaving badly (again): by refusing to stay seated with the plane was taxiing, and instead pulling luggage from overhead lockers and crowding the aisles before the plane had even stopped.

All this was topped off by a midnight traffic jam in Dhaka, which was about the point where my frazzled nerves gave up on me, and I spent the taxi ride holding my head in my hands, eyes shut, sweat dripping down my back, pledging that I would give my left kidney to spend 24 hours in a country that worked.

But now I'm back in Chittagong and I've done the grocery shopping and spoken to the family, and had a long cool shower and (this part) of the world seems like a better place again. Life on the merry-go-round is set to continue too as I prepare the cultural program for my first visitors!

Penny and Sally, don't forget your insect repellent, sunscreen, and duty free quota of 2 litres - you'll need all of them where we're going...

Today's Lesson

Guilt. Five letters. Implies regret for an action(s), intended or unintended.

I’m carrying around bucket-loads of it at the moment. Which could seem out of place given that I’m not exactly living the high life, or taking it easy on the work front, or earning money, or doing a whole host of other things that normally induce feelings of guilt in me (eating the whole pad thai myself/ordering a second bottle of wine, then a cocktail, on a school night/driving instead of walking/paying $100 for a pair of shoes/choosing the magazine insert over the actual paper…)

But I feel guilty nonetheless. I feel guilty when I walk past beggars, guilty when I spend AUD$10 on a meal, guilty when I want to go home alone and have a glass of wine rather than ‘gossip’ with my non-drinking colleagues, guilty that I live in a lovely apartment, guilty that I splurge on olives and flavoured soy milk and diet coke, guilty that I’m not working harder or longer or faster or better. Guilty that I’m not reading more, learning more, writing more, engaging more with the world.

If I was to pick what I feel most guilty about, though, it would be that I have been born into a culture which affords me the choices and possibilities, (as both a person and a woman) which have led to this opportunity to work overseas with the support of my government in an area I feel ever more passionate about. And for that I am very, very grateful.

If you’re looking for me this evening, here’s what I’ll be up to:

guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful,guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful,guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful...

Shelter from the storm

While I was busy entertaining the Chittagongian city-folk during Cyclone Aila, the coastal areas and islands in Bangladesh were (and still are) having a tougher time of it. In terms of cyclone severity, it didn't rate very high on the danger scale, however so much damage has been caused because the cyclone hit at high tide, which meant already high waters just went higher, and higher, and higher...

Here's a pretty accurate account of what the situation is from the BBC: