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.