This is a song to say goodbye

This blog, no longer active, detailed my experiences as a volunteer working in International development in Bangladesh from October 2008 - October 2009. My new home on the web is Meeting in the Aisle. Come say hi!


Things I'm going to love missing

1. "I wanna' live forever..."

This last installment was going to start in a very different way. Any regular readers of my blog will know I’ve found the stare factor a bit much sometimes. I’ve been photographed on my way to work, filmed while sleeping on a bus, snapped as I stepped out to buy tomatoes and crossing the road and eating dinner and climbing onto rickshaws. Basically, from the minute I leave my front door, to the minute I return, I’m at serious risk of falling prey to the pedestrian paparazzi.

Not content with sneaking pics using mobile phones, people have surrounded me in vegetable patches, at the local market, as I’ve waited for a break in traffic or have been in CNGs. To cut a long story short, a moment’s peace is a rare thing for a bideshi (foreigner), and especially a female bideshi. Apparently, we’re the main attraction at the zoo, the kind of zoo where interaction is encouraged. Or Angelina Jolie, I guess, depending on which way you spin it.

Of course all this staring is to be expected (right?). It is not as if Bangladesh is a melting pot of multiculturalism. And bideshis wear weird clothes, eat strange food, have strange customs, behave inappropriately, talk in odd languages, and turn up in the strangest places. Under these conditions, how could you not stare, if you were a local? It’s only natural.

Natural or not, it can become extremely trying. When I’m hot and sweaty and stinky, or tired, or in a rush, or stuck in one of Dhaka’s notoriously hideous traffic jams, or going about the banalities of my everyday life, I’ve found out I’m not inclined to encourage idle chit chat with complete strangers who want my mobile number. 

I don’t want to be facebook friends either. Or teach you English. Or visit your family, marry you/your brother/your cousin/your friend. While I’m on topic, I also can’t do you any favours with Australia’s immigration department, or find you a job, or give you money. Or give you Ricky Ponting’s home address. 

When all is said and done, I am really looking forward to getting back my anonymity. While it has occasionally been lovely to feel a part of a community, albeit a weird one-sided one where everyone knows my name but I have no idea of theirs, I yearn for the days when a trip to the corner shop isn’t fraught with the prospect of my photo doing the rounds at ‘the pub’ (read tea stall). I mean, I can hear them now “Oi, you should have seen the Sheila I saw the other day! You wouldn’t believe it! She was walking around, cool as you like, completely alone AT SIX PM! And she SMILED RIGHT AT ME! I know she wanted me, you could just tell.” Hmm…Ok, so that might resemble more a conversation or two I’ve overheard in Australian pubs, but you get my drift.

I guess this all means I really do want to be just like everyone else. 

But the stare factor hasn’t made it to number one of things I’m going to love missing. As I glance over at my sister, currently bent over a bucket, there is something way more significant that needs to top this list. I hereby declare that I, Lyrian Fleming, am looking so very, very forward to not worrying if every meal prepared outside of my kitchen is going to leave me purging all the things I’ve ever eaten, and the things I have only ever dreamt of eating, out of my system. 

Salmonella, E coli, and all your buddies – our departure will come not a moment too soon. Bangla belly, I bid you an eager farewell, with just a small, modest request. Please go gentle on us, we’ve still got Delhi to deal with… 

Things I'm going to miss loving

1. The beehive of life

What better way to end the 'desh than by quickly tapping this out as I'm hunched over the fan, sweating at 6am, having stopped to hear the last morning call to prayer. I'm in a rush, bags packed, and have a flight to Kolkata in two hours. I have to go out onto the street and hail some form of transport, and squish me, my pack, and my sister into whatever it is that comes our way, but something will, because that's the way Bangladesh works. 

For all the open sewers, the creepy crawlies, the heat, the stench, the broken pavements, the failing electricity and all the other things which I haven't got the time to go into, Bangladesh has carved out a little piece of my heart. There's a hole in there somewhere that is being filled by a whole horde of people who have spotted the space and are now madly setting up shop. Sticking up tarps, tying ropes, securing foundations, painting everything in hypercolours, and probably installing a variety of horns which can be blasted at any given moment.

Not quite the tidy metaphor my English teachers would have liked, but you get my point.

So it is with a bit of a chuckle I am admitting to myself that the very thing that has driven me so crazy here, the sheer chaos of the place, is probably the thing I will miss the most. I know I will miss the cacophony, the crowds, and the crazy pace of life that goes hand in hand with over 150 million people living in a football field. One that's always just moments away from being flooded.

Amazing to admit, but it's true.

And I'm going to leave it here, because it's time to rush out the door. I've got a plane to catch that I don't want to miss. A big shout out to everyone who helped make my stay just that little bit easier with phone calls, packages, visits, letters, post cards, e mails, text messages and everything in between. Every little gesture helped immensely.

Allah Hafez x

Song for my sugar spun sister

For her first day in Dhaka, I whisked Kara off to the beautician where we promptly got pretty toes. It's all about easing her in gently...

Lullaby

Things I'm going to miss loving

4. Getting my gear on

Know what it’s like to dress up as a grape? An orange? A lime? What it’s like to wear your pyjamas to work every day? How it feels walking into a meeting with conservative VIPs in thongs? What it’s like to not have a fat day? I do, I do, I do!

For a whole year I’ve been spared the strict rules and regulations that are the dress codes of living in a cosmopolitan city like Sydney. The good bits about this are multiple. I haven’t been caught lying in bed thinking, ‘nothing’s ironed!’, or ‘how dressed up should I be?’, or ‘am I having a fat day or a thin day?’ I haven’t had to worry about matching my shoes to my outfits, about wearing makeup, or doing my hair, or about whether my daytime dress will carry me through to evening. All this while having an office job would have seemed like some far out feminist-breakout utopia to me a few years ago.

That is the wonder of the salwar kameez.


I'll play the grape in today's fruit cocktail

Sure, there are days when I don’t feel like featuring as one of the colours of the rainbow. When I feel tired and frumpy and sexless and the last thing I want to put on is the equivalent of a potato-sack-does-gay-mardi-gras. I worry about what my waist line is doing, and curse the ever expanding capabilities of the draw string. Most of all I miss wearing dresses and skirts and feeling feminine. But, on reflection, the positives of such liberation far outweigh the negatives.

Seriously, I haven’t had to ‘suck in’ for twelve months. What an opportunity! (PS, if anyone knows a good pilates instructor, I’ll be on the look out in March…)

When all is said and done, I know I’m going to really miss the freedom of dressing ‘deshi style. Being the kind of girl who isn’t known for my love of washing and ironing, or shopping, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life lamenting the piles of dirty, unwearable, unfashionable, out of date, and downright unsuitable outfits I have had to choose from. To be given a year reprieve from this was more than a girl like me could ever ask for. Not only has it been okay for me to be all crumpled and mismatched – it has been expected! Here there are no colour rules. It’s as simple as Long top/pants/scarf, every single day. The brighter the better!

All this talk has made me ask myself just how I’m going to feel once I get back into the camp of consumerism, where I will have to check size tags and relegate lime back to the fruit aisle (where it rightly belongs, I might add). Bring it on, I say. A year off is proving to be just about enough. I mean, I’m not even sure if I have legs at this point. Those two ghastly white things I catch quick glimpses of every now and then can’t actually belong to me…

Things I'm going to love missing

4. This means WAR

“Telapoka” is one of those words which sounds so much better than what it means. Go on, say it aloud. Tel-a-pok-a. It’s cute, got good rhythm, punchy, all sharp because of the ‘t’ and the ‘k,’ and snappy thanks to the short ‘a’ sounds. Next to ‘tik tik’ (the word for gecko), it could be my favourite Bangla word. It’s such a shame it is the word for something I have come to loathe so very much over the past 12 months. A real shame. But cockroaches, while you’ve never been loved exactly, the time has come for you all to DIE!

Cockroaches in the kitchen. Cockroaches crawling out of the plug holes in the bathroom. Cockroaches crawling on my toothbrush, over my clean plates in the cupboard, or flying across the room in the middle of the night? GROSS!

In fact, I am not at all going to miss the general encroachment into my life of pests in general. I’ve had serious rat issues too. First huge rats in my kitchen, eating through plastic containers to get to flour, running off with onions, leaving trails of shit (and fear) in their wake. Then rats in my office at work. Rats so big they tore huge pieces out of my curtain to nest with. So strong they ripped chunks of wood off the inside of my desk draws. So annoying they turned my notebooks and paperwork into shredded paper, and left trails of destruction over everything I dared touch. Not content with doing all this at night, the bastards ran over my feet or were found in the middle of the day chewing on my pen. Brazen bastards.



Exhibit 1: Rodent destruction in the workplace

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the spiders. Being somewhat of an arachnophobe, I once would have thought these hairy creatures would always feature at number one of my dreaded creepy crawlies, so only making number three is a big step forward. But I still don’t like them. I don’t like them so much that I spent over an hour stuck on the squat toilet in my home, trapped by the hairy huntsman parked between me and the door. What to do? What to do? The arrival of monsoon sent more of the beastly things inside, and turning every corner in my place became an exercise in testing my somewhat frayed nerves.

How did I cope? Let’s just say I would make a terrible Buddhist, because I did what many before me have done and went on the offensive. The weaponry in my arsenal ranged from surface poisons to aerosol sprays. I built barriers out of water bottles, sticky tape and metal grates. I gave up desk drawers to the cause and moved my things higher, out into the open, into the light, or in extreme cases into the fridge. I only crossed the territory from one room to the other armed with cans of bug spray, ready to go onto the attack. And I killed. I squashed, I squirted, I smashed and I sprayed the buggers into submission.

While I have had a few wins and regained some territory, the war is never ending. Until now, that is, because “I’m leaving on a jet plane….” Ahhhhh. How’s the serenity?