Border Song

Things I’m going to love not missing

3. Living in a petri dish of putrification

The sheer stench of humanity has caught me unawares in Bangladesh. Of course I expected some stinkiness. I’ve traveled through countries with worrisome approaches to sewage before, let alone markets, food and all the other sources of smell. But true to style, Bangladesh takes the smelliness factor to a whole new level.

Considering the conditions in the ‘desh, some smell is to be expected. When you throw in the heat, the sweat, the size of the population, the density of the population, the geographical location (at the delta of rivers which run through India et al) and the inadequate infrastructure just to name a few, it’s no wonder things get a little ‘on the nose’.

Knowing all this doesn’t make it any easier when faced with a full-frontal olfactory assault, and I’ll be well pleased when a walk to work in the morning doesn’t have me retching in the gutter (which is so often the cause in the first place).

Between the smell of everyone’s morning er, business; the pong of animal intestines under the midday sun; the scent of a few/hundred/thousand people sweating it up; or any of the other multiple sources of stench we’ve become so accustomed to living without in Sydney, I’ll be happy when this side of life goes back to out of sight, out of mind.

Things I’m going to miss loving

3. You mean I’m not European?

Airport Staff: Are you Indian?
Me: Um, no. I’m not.
Airport Staff: You are Chinese then!
Me: Actually, no. I’m not Chinese either.
Airport Staff: Where are you from then?
Me: Australia. I’m from Sydney.
Airport Staff: *confused look* Are you sure you’re not Chinese?

Recently I took advantage of the Eid (end of Ramadan) public holidays and took a trip up to the hills of India. Having discovered that I could fly direct from Chittagong to Kolkata, cutting out the treacherous trip to Dhaka in between, it didn’t take me long to deliberate on whether I should stick around for the festivities, or decamp to another country.

True to form, Bangladesh didn’t cease to amuse me even as I left. The conversation between myself and a member of Chittagong’s international airport staff left us both a bit bewildered. It’s fair to say the airport doesn’t see a lot of traffic in terms of tourist travelers. The curly haired, white, blonde girl dressed in full local garb was clearly messing with the guy’s head. Just as it was messing with my head that in twenty-five minutes, yes, twenty-five (!!!!), I would be in another country.

That’s less time than it took me to drive to my parent’s house last year, and we both lived in Sydney.

Of Asian descent?

True to style for an Aussie, being in such close proximity to international borders is a rare experience, and one I’ve been taking full advantage of. Having taken multiple trips ‘overseas,’(a term which Australian’s use interchangeably with ‘international travel’ since they are one and the same for our lovely distant island), I’ve loved feeling a little bit European.

I’ve even been able to give the language box a bit of a tick and feel all culturally in-synch by rocking up on foreign soil and breaking out a bit of the local lingo with more fluency than the pleasantly surprised West Bengali’s in India anticipated from the white chick.

Sure, Bangladesh ain’t Switzerland and India is a far cry from France, but for this little Aussie, the novelty of being able to pop into other countries for a quick weekend away (or preferably longer) shows no signs of wearing off any time soon. It didn’t stop me from feeling an overwhelming sense of jealousy when I ran into an Italian/Spanish/English speaking German in India who trotted out bits of all four languages within fifteen minutes, but hey, I still felt pretty cool.

We used to vacation

What does one do when one has four weeks left to move out, pack up a life, finish up a job, and say goodbyes? Leave the country of course!

A 10 day trip to Darjeeling and Sikkim in India has hopefully restored my sense of balance and will enable me to become super packer. Super detached from material goods. And super tough (read no tears) when saying sayoonara to my colleagues.

Rather than gab on about the delights of my trip, I thought I'd just link to my photos instead.

Mmmmm, Sikkim: beauty you can breathe.

Stories from the city, stories from the sea

Do you work on women's empowerment?

My response to this question, posed by Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times

Sure, I can tick the box saying I work on the empowerment of women and girls. A big tick. But truth is, I don’t do much. “Can you write your own name?” I might ask. “Does your daughter go to school?” Probing question after probing question, I tease out the threads of women’s lives until they become whole stories without an end.

I might talk to their husband, or their son, but I might not. I might sit amongst the cacophony of colour a group of women create when they sit together in saris to discuss violence against women, or early marriage, or dowry, or divorce and ask what has changed their world. I might laugh at a woman pulling at my curls, tight and defiant in the humidity, and accept her offer of a banana or mango. I might cheer, or cry, or clap as I hear about twelve year old Tania who was promised to a man four times her age; or Nasrima who has rebuilt a road so her daughter can go to school; or Kuki who is training Tasmina to take over her role as leader of the local women’s empowerment group when the funding runs out.

I will lift my lens to meet their eyes. Trying to capture smiles, the shy ones, the individuality of the woman in her black chador, the wisdom in the grandmother, the hope in her daughter. Lights! Camera! Action! I will bring all three with me, and feed off the symbols we devour of life for the bottom billion; dirt floors, roaming chickens, naked children, tube-wells. The bloated bellies aren’t so popular these days, or the big eyes staring vacantly, so I will look for the children who have clothes on, whose teeth are clean and white, who can lift their heads and focus on me.

At the end of the day I will open my notebook, filled to the brim with more tales than I could ever tell, and sort through them. Should I pick Tania and Shopna who have started a small spice business from their slum, fingers stained yellow with tumeric? Maybe Moutushi, the first in her family to finish high school, or Maya, the first to use contraception in her village? Should I choose the educator? The midwife? The mother? The village elder? The husband who supports his wife’s economic independence? How can I choose one when the world is so full of little earthquakes reshaping what it means to be born a girl in Bangladesh?

Do I work in the area of women’s and girl’s empowerment? I guess I don’t. Not really. But by telling the stories of those who do on a daily basis, as part of CARE Bangladesh’s SHOUHARDO Program, I know a lot of people who do. This is their story.

It was a strange time in my life

Things I’m going to love not missing

2. Oh s*it, bu*ger, cr*p, f**k, da*n I’m gonna ddddiiiiieeeee
 A quick glance over at my upper arm is enough to remind me I’ve had more than my fair share of near death moments this year. The impressive bruise I’m currently sporting is the result of an incident with a motorbike. I was on the footpath, and soon, it was too. The collision wasn’t major, but it was enough to elevate my heart rate and leave a nasty mark. The really big concern for me is not that I got hit by a motorbike while walking home from work, though. The major concern is that it wasn’t a big deal! I didn’t call anyone after it happened, didn’t ice my arm, and didn’t mention it to many people except when they pointed at the bruise with a degree of alarm I perhaps should have shown when it happened.

This cavalier attitude towards my mortality has got to stop.

Between seven car accidents, speedboat trips over open water without a life jacket, overnight bus and train journeys on hair-raising roads and tracks, a mutiny, flying with airline carriers who think ‘maintenance’ is optional, a cyclone, crossing eight lanes of traffic in a rickshaw with trucks bearing down on me, or being out and about on the streets of Dhaka (x risk by 10 after dark) – I’ve had more near misses than I care to think about. 

That be the view from my bus window

one trip to Dhaka. Comforting.

 What really brought it all home was a recent weekend in Kolkata. I spent three days there and didn’t have a single near death experience. Not one. Within an hour of being back on Bangladeshi soil I had three. THREE! In one hour! And I am not the kind of girl who seeks these things out (er, choosing to visit hair-raising countries aside). I’m not an adrenalin junkie. I don’t want to throw myself out of a plane. I don’t want to tie myself to an oversized rubber band and hurl myself off a cliff. That’s not my idea of fun. I like living. I like the idea of growing old and wrinkly and boring the kiddies with tales of what it was like “in my day.” I choose life! 

Which means I better get out of here quick smart. As my father lovingly pointed out the other day, “you know, statistically speaking, the longer you stay there…”. 

Yep, thanks Dad, I’m on it. Four weeks and counting. 

Things I’m going to miss loving
2. The Call to Prayer 

When I first got here there was a half hour period every morning where I dreamt up extremely uncharitable scenarios which all had a predictable end involving smashed loud speakers and gagging. I know it wasn’t very nice of me, or culturally sensitive, or respectful, or any of the things an Aussie Youth Ambassador should be. But when you’re being woken up for sunrise every single morning by warblings from a religion you’re not part of – it’s pretty hard to be respectful.

I solved the problem by getting my brother to send me industrial-strength earplugs. It has been months now since I’ve had to use them though, as I’m finally able to sleep through the first call to prayer.

For those who don’t know, the call to prayer occurs five times a day, just before sunrise, mid morning, lunch time, mid afternoon, and at sunset.

Now that I can sleep through the first one, I love hearing the call to prayer drifting out from the loudspeakers of mosques across the city. As well as being great markers of time now the sweat-factor means I don’t wear a watch (oh, there’s the call the prayer, must be lunch time/going home time/dinner time), they’re really rather beautiful. I find myself pausing what I’m doing and listening in. It makes me feel connected to the city, a part of something bigger, even though I’m not part of the religion.

Sure, I’ve got problems with it too. I’m not sure how I feel about the call to prayer being so public in a supposedly secular state. I suspect it makes some people from other religions feel marginalised, especially given the tense history between Muslims and Hindus here. And it sits uncomfortably with me that religion is used so often in Bangladesh in ways I thoroughly reject – keeping people uneducated, restricting them from participating fully in the social sphere, cementing unbalanced gender roles among others (not forgetting that this can be said about most religions the world over in some way). 

It has taken me by surprise how much I like hearing the muezzin (man who calls Muslims to prayer) make the daily calls, and I was surprised to realise I’m going to miss it. Not enough to stay, mind you, but I have certainly come a long way from being the Girl Who Dreams of Destruction.

Hyperballad

According to my diary, I’ve got about 5 weeks left in Bangladesh and then it’ll be end of chapter, moving right along folks, please GFC clean up after yourself so when I’m done spending all my cash, I can find gainful employment come March. Pretty please.

This gives me 5 weeks to post about the 5 things I’m going to miss loving, and the things I’m going to love not missing. Oh yes, a list, one of my favourite things. Instead of doing the ole’ bullet point number, though, I thought what better farewell to the ‘desh than a long and drawn out departure, spread out over – yep – 5 weeks. So, taking it away at number 5, I bring you:

Things I’m going to love not missing

1. No, no way, oh no, uh uh, that’s not even…you mean it’s…my dinner?

The first thing that probably comes to mind on reading a sentence like that is a scene out of Survivor, you know that old reality TV show where they stuck a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Australia) and made them do silly things like obstacle courses, jigsaw puzzles, and eat rare and exotic food like bull’s balls, spiders, brains etc. But that’s not the direction I’m headed in here.

What I’m talking about here is B – L – A – N – D. Not a word I associated with food from the sub-continent before coming here, but wow, how things change. At first it seemed like a dream. Lentils, naan bread, mixed curried veggies, tropical fruits, roti for breakfast and sweets for dessert. How can you go wrong?

Wrong, though, is exactly the word for Bengali Cuisine. Actually, I take that back. The word I’m really looking for is yellow. Everything here is yellow. Yellow dal, yellow vegetables, yellow meat, yellow bread, yellow fruit, yellow yellow yellow. And while I have nothing against bananas, and think they’re actually on the tasty (and safe) side of the Bengali food equation, there is just something slightly disturbing about an entire nation’s food relying so wholeheartedly on one colour. Especially when you’re from a country that says something about three colours on your plate at every meal (or a rule to that effect). And colour on my plate is something, as a vegetarian, I normally excel at.

Not here I don’t. It’s all yellow.

A typical meal in a Bengali restaurant goes something like this. Get a big bowl of yellow, oily water which we will hereto refer to as ‘dal’, despite the complete lack of, well, ‘dal’ (which means lentils). Throw in a small side bowl of yellow vegetables, or ‘shobji’ cooked to within an inch of their life then thrown into a big pot full of yellow, oily water and simmer until everything takes on a mush-like consistency. Throw in a plate of white rice (which is destined to become yellow as you ‘moosh’ the dal and vegetables together), a side of cucumber, some salt and a slice of lime and there you have it. A la carte, deshi style.




For the meat eaters, it gets slightly better as you get to add yellow, bony, deep-fried fish or fatty, yellow goat/chicken/beef to your plate, depending on Today’s Special.

As a surprise, you never know how fresh the food is when it reaches the table with worrisome speed, suggesting a whole load of ‘here’s something I prepared early…much earlier…maybe even yesterday, or the day before that…’ which can leave you feeling like you’re just a mouthful away from salmonella. Lip-smacking stuff.


Things I’m going to miss loving
1. ‘Hey, kali!’

Bangladesh is deservedly renowned for it’s cycle rickshaws, and the art that adorns them, which some rickshaw wallahs take very, very seriously. Combine this cycle power with the motorised CNGs, and the buses of all types from the dodgy ‘I-need-to-upgrade-my-travel-insurance’ variety right up to the ‘here’s your water, your biscuits, and a blanket, just nod in my direction and I’ll be up in a jiffy to help’ kind, and you’ve got pretty much the whole country covered.

Transport in general is something Bangladesh does well. In fact, it would be entirely possible to not walk more than about 10 steps in any direction for a week or more. All you have to do is walk out the front door, shout 'hey kali!’ to the nearest empty form of transport, and off you go. It’s cheap. It’s everywhere. Come to think of it, it’s like the McDonalds of the sub continent, and just as likely to contribute to the obesity epidemic overtaking the middle class here. It is scarily easy to say ‘why walk?’ when, for 20 cents, you can pay someone else to do your sweating for you. (…Unless it happens to be one of the ten months of the year here when it’s stinking bloody hot and you’ll be sweating anyway…but I digress).



Now every time I curse and swear at the lack of taxis in the city on a Saturday night, I can reminisce about how, “In Bangladesh, we’d be able to just stick out our arm and…”. Oh, I’m going to be such great company when I come home.

Sleeping Rough

Call me slow, but I used to wonder why it is often difficult to get people in dangerous mosquito prone areas to sleep under a mosquito net. It seemed like a no-brainer: Sleep under net & avoid nasty blood-letting and possible infection with malaria/dengue. End of story. I even thought it was kind of...exotic. Sleeping under the net would be akin to those princess type beds I wanted so much when I was a kid. And the romance! There didn't appear to be a downside.

But oh, how my tune has changed. Here's the bit no one actually mentions... IT"S BLOODY HOT UNDER THERE! It turns out that mosquitoes are not the only thing the netting keeps out. Fresh air, or any air flow at all, is rendered virtually impossible.

As I lay awake underneath one the other night, feeling the sweat soak into my pyjamas, the overhead fan churning away uselessly, I spared a thought for those who do this every night. It's crap.

My plea to designers is to come up with a mosquito net that manages to allow airflow while keeping out the nasties. And make it cheap, please. Adoption rates need all the help they can get, considering malaria still causes over a million deaths each year.

The Distance

It might be after the event, but I want to give a big shout out to my sister Kara who did the Oxfam Walk last weekend. For those who don't know, it's a 100km slog, which she and her fellow Snail Trails knocked over in 32hrs. Ouch!

It was in the name of charity, and so far they've raised a tidy $4,335. You can still donate (come on, all donations are tax deductible!) here.



Kara climbing for her life