First entry

Hey all, here’s an account of what I’m doing during my January in Bangladesh. I am taking a course called Development and Community through the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA), an organization based in the Twin Cities. I left for Bangladesh on 1/1 and embarked on a 36 hour journey to the capital city of Dhaka. This trip included three flights, including an 11 hour flight to Dubai, multiple lengthy layovers, and many movies watched on Emirates Airline’s wonderful personal entertainment system. During this time I got to know my group, which is mostly made up of upperclassmen at Minnesota colleges as well as students at Colorado College and Salem College. It’s a pretty diverse group of people in terms of academic interests, but most people seemed very excited to travel to a country as intriguing as Bangladesh.
For those who don’t know, here’s a primer on the country. It is a country that geographically is essentially a river delta the size of Wisconsin with half the population size of the US. It is in the bottom 25% of world economies but has experienced rapid growth since it separated from India and Pakistan in 1947 and 1971 respectively. Climate change stands to make a greater impact on this country than perhaps anywhere else, as 17 million people would be adversely affected if sea levels rose three feet. The development strategy known as microcredit originated in Bangladesh, developed by the Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Muhammad Yunus, and has yielded great results in alleviating poverty for people, mostly women, in rural parts of Bangladesh.
I arrived at the Dhaka international airport along with my fellow travelers from Dubai, a group that consisted almost totally of workers returning home with gifts and hopefully hard-earned money for their families. Bangladeshis travel all round the world to find decent wages. Living wages are hard to find in the most densely populated countries in the world and also one of the most impoverished. This became immediately clear to me as we made our way to our hotel in Dhaka, as the streets were lined with small shops and vendors doing their best to peddle their wares to a society that cannot afford luxury. As we weaved our way through a congested mass of traffic composed of vibrantly-colored rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, buses, imported cars that have been converted to run on natural gas, and fearless pedestrians, I was confronted with the paradox of the developing country. Amidst the poverty of this densely packed urban area, a monolithic glass structure dwarfed the low-rises and slums, a structure that I found out is the soon-to-be-completed largest mall in Asia. It reminds me of when I got a huge 12 speed bike for my tenth birthday. It was shiny, new, and opened up innumerable possibilities, yet I was barely equipped to operate it as I struggled to even get up onto the seat. There is some evidence that Bangladesh will be able to get on the bike and ride, but for now it is having trouble mobilizing its significant resources to create competitive domestic industries and lacks a strong consumer base. At least it will have a giant mall. I am staying in the Paradise Garden Hotel in the Baridhara neighborhood of Dhaka. The area is characterized by a lot of embassies and is pretty close to a major residential area as well a big shopping district. On Sunday night, our student guides took us shopping in the central plaza area for our first taste of urban life. There’s a plethora of stores offering mostly saris, color printing, and sporting goods, although there were stores for everything. We had the option of eating at British Burger or Bangladesh’s own Best Fried Chicken. Poor children wander through the streets and often come up to us and attempt to play with us or sell us stickers, and they’re generally very friendly. Loud calls to prayer reminded me that I am in country where 88% of the people are Muslim, although the perpetual symphony of car horns was enough to drown them out. I was struck by the extremely poor quality of the air, as pollution and dust as well as strong urban scents make the air occasionally difficult to breathe. We enjoyed our first Bengali meal, and I realized how glad I was that I’ll be eating Bengali cuisine for the next few weeks. The variety of curries and rice dishes is a welcome break from relatively bland American food.
On Monday morning we traveled by coach over to the Independent University of Bangladesh and were met by a consort of University employees, including the Vice Chancellor and some esteemed professors. They welcomed us to Bangladesh and offered some thoughtsabout the country and encouraged us to ask questions. Our guides explained things like the prevalence of orange-died beards, which is the result of old men using henna ink to cover up their grey hairs, the preponderance of new construction, and the reason for cows wandering the streets (even in a city such as this, people still produce their own milk). We had our first lectures, the first of which was centrally about Indian history, as Bangladesh is historically and culturally Indian, as well as Bangladesh’s economic history. The lecture was given by a Bangladeshi professor at the IUB.
We had a break for high tea and then were treated to a lecture on development theory given by the professor that traveled with us. It explored a range of sociological and economic ideas surrounding development as well as the history of development since World War II and how it has affected development theory. We had a good meal of mutton, fried rice, and hard-boiled egg in the shopping district for around $80 for the 16 of us. We then retreated to the hotel for a night of reading, cricket watching, as well as a group reflection about our time so far. Exploring Dhaka today, more later.