Last Post from Bangladesh

This will probably be my last post from here, as we are leaving for the airport tomorrow afternoon. The past two days in Dhaka have been eventful. Last night we went to a dinner party at the home of the Vice Chancellor of the Independent University of Bangladesh. We figured that we would be treated to a nice meal in an apartment with the Vice Chancellor and his wife, but upon getting there we saw that the event was much bigger than we could have dreamed. We walked through a gate to a lavish party attended by many of the most important businessmen and politicians of Dhaka, as well as many professors from the IUB. There was an arc of tables laden with traditional food, including freshly barbecued kebabs, sizzling nan bread, battered and fried chickpea pockets, the Indian yogurt drink lassi, and numerous beef dishes. I talked with a Korean businessman in the garment industry and the chief lawyer for the current ruling party in Bangladesh. The lawyer gave some really interesting perspectives on political issues given that I've already talked to rural villagers and local politicians about the same issues. For example, while the union council chairman said that the prime minister is selling Bangladesh to India by allowing India to freely use its ports, the lawyer said that Bangladesh is following a precedent set by the port cities of Antwerp and Rotterdam in allowing access to its ports in exchange for payment, and that it is a very beneficial practice for Bangladesh. I had a good time at this decidedly posh event. This morning we went shopping at a mall in Dhaka packed with cheap clothing, entertainment, and food. Something is very gratifying about spending a lot of bills that say 1000 on them, even if they're only worth a little over $10. For dinner today we went to an up-scale restaurant that, while being a very classy joint, offers entrees for an average of $6. The food was delicious, and leaves me thoroughly satisfied with the regional cuisine. I'm now trying to get over a runny nose and getting ready to leave tomorrow. It's been great! Thanks for following.

There and Back Again

I spent the last several days in Srimangal, a region in the northeast of Bangladesh. The purpose of the journey was to understand the breadth of ethnicities and activities in the Bangladeshi countryside, or something like that. This area has been cultivated for tea beginning in 1840 when the British arrived. They brought Indian indentured laborers to work the tea gardens, creating an isolated group of Hindus who speak a combination of Hindu and Bangla that is largely incomprehensible to native Bangladeshis. We learned a good deal about the tea industry, which wasn't very interesting but gave us an idea of what life is like in this region. Most of the tea gardens are owned by businessmen that use government tea subsidies to benefit them in other ventures and neglect their gardens, causing unemployment and a decline in output to the point where Bangladesh might need to start importing tea. The area was beatiful - rolling hills covered with rows of tea plants that rolled into tropical forests, which composed the entire landscape until the British decided that the terrain was perfect for tea production. We took a fun hike through a national park, saw Capped Langurs (see picture), and visited a village in the forest. A manager of a tea plantation showed us around and we had fresh and delicious tea at his nice colonial house. We stayed at the Tea Resort, which catered to Western travelers and thus made delicious food that appealed to our American sensibilities, including spaghetti, pizza, and cheese sandwiches. We had the badminton court to ourselves and the bungalows provided excellent space for movie watching using one of the guide's projectors. Yesterday, we traveled to villages and played with village children and observed their ceremonies for the celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning. We took part in a dance performance and are becoming well versed in traditional Bengali dances. The bus brought us back to Dhaka today, as we try to soak in Bangladesh for 48 more hours.

Today we were invited to the house of the village opinion leader, a title that just seems to designate that he is respected. He welcomed us and offered a meal of cornmeal, rice, a beef curry, and fresh vegetables. We ate with our hands, as per Bengali custom, and talked about differing values in our cultures. We had to convince him that we love our families and are not totally individualistic, as the family bonds between extended family in the village culture are arguably a good deal stronger than those of our culture, as many members of an extended family live together in a household. We walked back to the RDA along a two lane highway that routinely sees tour buses race to pass each other, narrowly avoiding rickshaws and pedestrians and blaring their horns all the while. At the RDA, we've been working on a Bengali dance for the culture night we're putting on with other students that are staying here and finalizing our proposals for the papers we'll be writing based on our research. Tomorrow is our last day here in Bogra before we head to the tea plantations in Srimongol. It's good fun here, but I'm starting to look forward to the next semester of school.

So the trial was resolved in favor of the bad guy, as apparently he had a legal right to the land which was determined by tracing back his lineage and the distribution of land that happened over time. Not as much wrongdoing going on as we suspected, although he's still a sinister guy that didn't treat his aunt very well. I had a day off yesterday, and used it to relax and throw a frisbee around. Today we went to meet with the union council chairman, who is pretty angry about a lot of things, including India and secular law. We went to the town of Bogra, where we visited a ruined Buddhist monastery and saw some archaeological artifacts. We dined on Chinese food in town, which was a welcome respite from the fare we've been having at the RDA every day. Having trouble keeping up with everything going on around the world, but sounds like Haiti's in a bad state right now...

A Slice of Village Life

The controversy we've been following most closely is the one I mentioned about the nephew who arguably stole his aunt's soil using his political connections and then had his henchmen beat up his aunt and four other women with bamboo. Today we walked into the south side of Bangra and saw people digging a gaping hole in the ground. This strange sight piqued our curiousity, and we wandered over to see what was happening. As it turned out, the nephew, whose name is Rubel, was digging up another piece of land to make a fish pond. As we walked up to talk to him, a woman walked up yelling at him, and according to our translator, accused Rubel of digging up her land. She screamed "God will judge you," which Rubel responded to by saying, "We'll see about that." This predisposed us to not liking the guy, and we liked him less after talking to him and hearing him deny the whole matter while telling us about his political office that has no responsibilities, which suggests that he has been given power due to his birth in a prominent family. Our informants in the village said that he never actually bought the land he robbed the soil from and that everything he told us about the event was a lie. While talking to these people, Rubel's brother stood near us and seemed to be listening in. Fishy business. We are planning to go to the trial tomorrow morning to see how the matter is resolved, and how this guy plans to wriggle out of the hole he's dug himself, pun intended. Never a dull moment in rural Bangladesh.

The Past Few Days

I haven't posted in the past few days because I traveled out to a rural area of Bangladesh called Bogra, where broadband connections do not reach and the air is smog-free. I am staying at the Rural Development Academy, a governmental agency that provides training and new technologies to farmers in the area. The campus is beautiful certainly by Bangladeshi standards and by most other standards as well. The campus is similar to the Amherst campus in some ways, with dorms, a library, computer facilities, sports fields, and cafeterias. The major difference is the 80 acres of demonstration farms used for research and development of genetically modified plants and farming techniques. We are here to do field research in a village in the area, and will be doing so until the 17th. We have split up into five groups, each with a guide/translator, that are researching different topics: Politics, Health, Environment, Economic Development, and Education. I am in the politics group, and we have been interviewing people about their local political systems as well as their perceptions of the national government. This is an important subject for the villagers, as they come in direct contact with taxmen and governmental officials in ways that Americans don't always. For example, government officials recently came to the village and told the villagers about a tax that had been on the books for 15 years but never collected. The official told the people that they would have to pay all of it. When the people went to the tax office, they paid the 7000 takas but their receipt indicated that they only paid 1300 takas. Also, today we heard a story about a land dispute between an aunt and nephew that resulted in the nephew using his political connections to bring in 50 men to dig up all the soil on the land and take it away on trucks. In an agricultural community, this renders the land useless. Instances of corruption such as these are widespread, and it has led many of the villagers to question the utility of democracy, or at least democracy as currently implemented in Bangladesh. We also hear ideas such as these when talking to the Bangladeshi students and professors involved in the HECUA program during lecture and discussion in the evening. Bangladesh is fascinating in part because of the unique coexistence of the Western model of development and the presence of huge domestic NGOs that resemble corporations, and seeing how these forces affect a simple agricultural community has been very intriguing. Almost everyone Bangladeshi has a different idea of how the country can be improved, which reflects the state of flux in this country but also that there is a great deal of hope for the future. I am having fun in the present, as I am taking advantage of the RDA's badminton facilities and open spaces to play frisbee. The food isn't as exciting as it used to be, but the program makes up for that.

Dhaka Day

This is my second blog post of the day. Hopefully I can keep up this torrid pace. We spent the morning at the Society for Environment and Human Development, an NGO affiliated with HECUA. The director explained its role to us, which is centrally doing investigative reporting on environmental damage caused by multi-national corporations and international institutions. The director talked about how both the government and the media have vested interests in not having the truth on certain issues be widely known, a symptom of a country that relies on aid from USAID (US Agency for International Development), ADB (Asian Development Bank), the World Bank, and the UN. These organizations use debt and aid as leverage to pressure Bangladesh into producing goods that G20 countries can import, including shrimp and coal. This economic focus leads to environmental short-sightedness, as shrimp and prawn farming decrease biodiversity and make farmlands more susceptible to flooding through the destruction of coastal mangrove forests and coal mines cause deforestation. The NGO struggles to even have the truth on these issues disseminated, and awareness of environmental problems is often low even amongst people that stand to be most directly affected.

After all that, we went to KFC and had a delicious meal. The Colonel's special recipe is just as special on the other side of the world. We then embarked on a bus tour of Dhaka, and got explanations of various locations from a local resident. We saw a lot of historical places, including University of Dhaka, the Parliament Building, the Mughal area of Dhaka, the site of an uprising intended to keep Bengali as the official language of Bangladesh, and other places. We stopped at the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh to see a 350 year old gatehouse, a Hindu Temple, and a site with Mughal ruins, one of the few open spaces in the city. As we went to more remote areas of Dhaka, we began to get the Mona Lisa treatment from the locals, as crowds gathered around us as we stood around doing nothing, which is apparently fascinating when white people do it. Some children got extremely excited when they saw us and climbed up fences and chased after the bus waving and yelling. In a country with little tourism, it's possible that they hadn't seen a white person before. Or maybe they confused one of us for someone famous. One of the most striking sites that we saw was a tributary of one the large rivers of Bangladesh. The river seemed to be swarming with small rowboats and large ferries, as the waterways still play an important role in transportation for both goods and people in the city. I was reminded of old paintings or lithographs of the Thames or the Seine in which it seems that boats cover nearly all of the water. There really isn't any space in Dhaka without people, which gives it a chaotic quality and makes it an excellent place for people watching. You can also see ad hoc barbershops on the streets, people carrying chickens around to sell, rows of publicly available printers, and countless other things that don't make sense to someone from a society that has more rigid standards for how people ought to go about their lives, or so it seems. We then took two hours to go five miles through the intractable traffic. It's so dense that ambulances and police cars can't even find a way to get through to their destinations. I impressed the crowds that gathered around the bus with my dance moves and had some pretty funny non-verbal interactions with people on rickshaws through the window. We then went to a store run by BRAC, an organization dedicated to alleviating poverty. They re-sell rural artisan goods in urban areas including pretty cool t-shirts. Everyone gets very tired pretty early, we must not be adjusted yet. I'm going to learn about BRAC today and then will go to the Rural Development Academy in Bogra for the research portion of the trip.