Girls just wanna' have fun

Or so I thought until a couple of my favourite girls landed at Zia International Airport in Dhaka about ten days ago. It turns out girls not only want to have fun, but they want electricity to power fans, oral rehydration salts to power bodies, and regular toilet stops to, um, well, yes.

Lucky for Penny, Sally and I, the 'desh has largely been able to provide all of these between the 'race across the nation' cultural program I designed for us. Think glitz and glamour (the outfits), think exotic, exciting overland journeys (yay for travel insurance), think 'authentic experience' (we'd love to stay for lunch in this tiny village with no sanitary facilities but we simply must run...)

The ten days Penny had didn't sound like much until we began. You see, it all started very civilly with Pen and I easing into our Dhaka days with a cup of the desh's finest (okay, only) Lavazza:



Before exploring the wonder that is Old Dhaka (think The Rocks*), Karwon Bazar (think Flemington Markets), the artsy fartsy parts of Dhanmondi (think Newtown), the shopping and eating mecca that is Banani (think...Paddington?), and the expat club scene (think, er, alcohol).

But things became rather hectic once Sal came to town (yes, there were tears, and they were mine), and the brave girls they are have been whisked from one end of Bangladesh to the other via every means of transport that has turned up. Whether it be back of Bangladesh's environmentally sound answer to the ute:



Pen and I on the back of a flatbed rickshaw in Dinajpur

Or catching regular rickshaws, CNGs, local buses, boats, and first class coaches - we've done it all. Catching sleep whenever we could became the name of the game, which is a lot harder than it looks when you throw in 14 hours of Bollywood music and movies over loudspeakers. Noise canceling headphones, how I lust after you!



Sal displaying her amazing ability to sleep on demand

In the ten days that were, we managed to pack in:



Rangpur and Dinajpur



Mini Bangladesh in Chittagong

The shipwrecking yards



I still don't want a job there, no matter how many times I go

with a side visit to a small village which gave Penny the opportunity to clean off some of the 'goo' she'd souvenired on her feet:



Pumping water from the tube well so Penny could cleanse before the crowd

and time in Sitakundo, a town just north of Chittagong with heavy Hindu influences



A local Hindu temple

where we got invited underneath a tree by a local guru, as you do.



Underground with a Guru

Having the gals here has been simply amazing. I love sharing my life here, and watching their faces light up (albeit sometimes with terror at the oncoming truck...) at the sights and delights has been really rewarding, at least for me.

While Pen has already departed, I've still got Sal for another three weeks, and have even found her a job as official photographer for my next work field trip.

There's plenty of work to go round, so if anyone else wants to come and join us, you know how to reach me!

*Apologies for my readers unfamiliar with Sydney, but it's my blog and I'll...

In the flesh

I am a vegetarian. This term is not as straight forward as it should be, and I’m partly to blame because I am the kind of vegetarian that will sometimes eat fish. Ergo, I’m not really a vegetarian. But, for the sake of this post, let’s just be lazy and call me a vegetarian.

Even worse than being a vegetarian, I am the kind of vegetarian who has read, no, gobbled up really, The Ethics of What We Eat. I’m also a vegetarian who recently watched ten minutes of a non earth-shattering documentary on the BBC that showed tuna in the sea somewhere being slowly suffocated to death in one of those nasty fishing nets that can trawl three quarters of the Indian Ocean in one go. Now I can’t eat tuna.

As a child who spent time on farms getting to know dear Milo before she became T-Bone, and collecting eggs from Little Hen before she made the transition from producer to produce, I know what it’s like to watch farm animals live happy lives scratching in the dirt or chewing the cud and I have no problem with the food chain when it flows like this.

When I’m home in Australia, my reasons for not eating meat (or eggs) are twofold*:
1. I believe I am making a more ethical choice by not eating meat given a) the conditions many animals are raised, fed and slaughtered in to keep the supply of flesh flowing, and b) the negative environmental impacts that result.

2. I believe I am making a positive health decision. Since cutting meat out of my diet (for me, a progressive process) my fruit and vegetable intake has gone through the roof, not to mention legumes and all those yummy things which health people assure us are the nutritional equivalent of attaining nirvana.

Add to that the fact that I just don’t miss the stuff, and it all means I’ll be very surprised if I ever go back to chowing down on a juicy (read bloody) rump steak.

But then there’s this other reason, which Paul McCartney has conveniently already articulated for me: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian” which rears it’s head every time I go to a ‘developing country.’

Taking a walk through Karwon Bazaar, a large market in Dhaka, I found myself once again thinking, ‘I am so glad I’m a vegetarian!’

I couldn’t imagine picking out one of these little guys,




Or one of these comfy looking chooks



Or point to a pound of chicken flesh (see baskets above) that’s been sliced and diced on the market floor and think ‘mmm, that’ll be perfect for tonight's main course!’



Every time I see things like this I'm reminded of just how far removed the majority of people I know are from the food chain. In a country like Bangladesh, it's virtually impossible to avoid, and I think it's a good thing. There is no pretending where your goat curry came from.

It also reminds me that McCartney got it wrong. Slaughterhouses do have glass walls here, and I've never met a single Bangladeshi vegetarian. Not one, in over eight months.

*Oh, and there's that small part of me that always wanted to be a hippie but was (un)lucky enough to be born in the wrong decade with an aversion to dreadlocks which make me think of those huge Irish wolfhound dogs that are interesting to look at from afar but up close are kind of smelly and, well, unpettable. So deep.

Beggar on the street of love

It’s fair to say I didn’t know a lot about Bangladesh when I applied for this job. I knew a few hazy details – they had a cricket team, for example, and it was near India? And some taxi drivers in Sydney were from Bangladesh. I knew this for certain because three nights before I got on the plane I was having one last hurrah with my friends Michelle and Jez, and the taxi driver who took me home in the wee hours of the morn was listening to the cricket in Chittagong. We shared a moment. Or at least I had a moment. He was probably quite glad to leave this babbling, slightly slurring, overly emotional girl on the curb.

So those are the things I knew – Bangladesh had a cricket team, was near India, and there was a Bangladeshi taxi driver in Sydney. Overwhelming really.

If I start talking preconceptions though, I had plenty. For one, the India thing. I assumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that Bangla food would be similar to Indian food. It isn’t. I was pretty spot on with the expectation that there would be lots and lots of people, there are. And that there would be lots of beggars. There are. And that I would find it hard to deal with the whole ‘begging thing’. Once again, I was spot on. To quit beating around the bush, the begging thing absolutely sucks.

I’m not going to bother trying to be articulate about it because there’s nothing fancy or warm and fuzzy or intellectual or even interesting about the conditions of a society which forces an entire underclass of people to rely on the generosity of others to survive. The very fact that it has taken me over eight months to even write about is a good indication of how inadequate I feel.

Not a day goes by where I am not approached by someone – a man with his femur (that’s a big bone in your leg) sticking out through the flesh, dull with dried blood; an eight year old girl carrying a naked and malnourished toddler with the kind of bloated belly we’re all familiar with from those old World Vision ads; an old women with cataracts so murky I wonder at how deftly she negotiates the traffic.

I’m cornered in the market by the old lady with the walking stick, followed home to my door by street kids who try to hold my hands or hang off my shoulders, helped across the road (yes, he stops the traffic, for me) by a man with what looks like cerebral palsy to my medically untrained eye.

The only way I’ve found to ‘deal’ with it is to have one policy and stick to it. The idea of trying to value one persons’ wellbeing above another’s is so repugnant to me (though I understand it is an important part of many people’s lives, it’s something I’m just not cut out for) that I’ve had to take a ‘one size fits all’ approach. I just don’t give.



A reminder for me from the Kolkata metro station that things can change

When it comes down to it, I believe that if I give to children, I am helping perpetuate the cycle which keeps them out of school, uneducated, vulnerable to the sex trafficking and prostitution industry, and attractive slaves to gangs a la Slumdog Millionaire who take their cut of the money begging pulls in.

For everyone else, the sick, the disabled, the people shamed from their communities, the ill and the ageing, I leave them to the mercy of the ill-equipped government and NGO services that are too few in number, but who are there, and who specialise in bringing beggars out from the underclass.

At the end of the day I believe whatever small amount I would give will always be inadequate – and would not form part of the bigger solutions required to address the system which fails so many.

Fortunately the organisation I am involved in here is working on the bigger solution bit. This doesn’t make me feel any better when I walk the long way home to avoid the boy with one leg who begs in front of the fruit stalls at the end of my street, but at least it’s something.