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This blog, no longer active, detailed my experiences as a volunteer working in International development in Bangladesh from October 2008 - October 2009.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?

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.