Notes from Independence Day

Not our school children going home

It’s been another busy week in Dhaka.  Our elementary school kids just finished their musical, Millie is working hard on her homework, Gail is grading papers, and I recovered from a 36-hour bout of food poisoning just in time to accompany a group of fifth graders on a tour of Dhaka’s municipal landfill, the largest city dump in Asia. 

The food poisoning was my own fault—eating a little slaw with my *Major Chain* Fried Chicken with Millie Monday night while Gail was at her French Cooking Class. As weight loss programs go, this was not all that effective. I loss some weight but missed my Total Body Workout Class and a Water Aerobics Class, have spent no time in the weight room and very little on the bike. 

Actually, the tour of the dump was most educational.  The culminating event of the Primary Years Program (International Baccalaureate in elementary schools) is an exhibition—5^th graders research a portion of a general topic in small groups of four or five students, devise lines of inquiry and produce a final presentation.  This is the antithesis of the way school is taught in most places and certainly in Missouri (except for those two PYP schools in Springfield).  The students have mentors (me for the city dump group) as well as their teachers, but they decide which tangent they wish to pursue and how to pursue it…

Our fifth graders’ over-arching issue is “Sharing the Planet”, and each group has a different take on what to study.  The day of our trip a different group interviewed beggars in the streets (Dhaka has lots), another acid survivors (Dhaka has too many)—it’s all pretty incredible.  And then there are all those export-only garment factories paying 22 cents an hour.  Lots to study.

My group was interested in how things are reused and re-cycled, and started out considering air and water pollution.  While there’s plenty of that to study here—incredible color pictures of factories dumping toxic wastes into the rivers almost everyday in the newspapers—and lots of air pollution.   The place is exactly what the Koch brothers’ Tea Party is hoping for in America—no environmental restrictions and lots of poor people working for almost nothing. 

But I digress.  After only an hour or so on the road the five students, one dad, the driver and I, armed with cameras, surgical masks and gloves, found the landfill…a mound of trash, covered with a thin veneer of earth, the size of an American indoor football stadium and twice as long.  In a country without hills, it sticks out.  We had driven past shanties with bales of plastic and paper and two guys working through a field of trash just before we entered.  When our van pulled around the completed landfill to the active trash dump, we saw the real action.

Ready for Sale

Our five investigators

Four backhoes (the big ones, on tracks, with four-foot buckets) and a bulldozer were moving big piles of loose trash.  Every time a backhoe scooped a load, half a dozen women and children would pick through the trash for anything they could sell.  I was sure someone would get hit by a backhoe, but it didn’t happen while we were there.  I told our kids to be brave and we’d get out and take some pictures, but when I opened the van door, I realized there was an inch of black sludge beneath the van.

We drove to a dry piece of road before we got out.  We were immediately surrounded by the working kids and a few adults; our only Bangla-speaking student did all the talking, asking kids questions while we all took pictures.  The kids told him that they got paid and that they also went to a school nearby, although we didn’t see it.  After a few minutes of this we got back in the van, chased out the flies and headed back out via the office. 

Where the Action Is

The Workers Come to See Us

The Burlap Wagon

Getting Water at the Office

On the way home

The Streets of Dhaka

The main office is a relatively new looking building at one end of the main landfill, with a water spicket in the parking lot.  A man came out and spoke to us.  He told us he was the manager and that all the trash in Dhaka came here.  He also asked to see our permission letter.  Our driver showed the AISD bus authorization form, but that wasn’t it. It turns out you have to get permission from a government office to see the landfill.

Who knew that touring the city dump required permission?  We acted contrite and I assured him we had no idea, and by the way, could we ask a few questions? So the students got another interview and we got a few more pictures, including one with the manager. 

One of the things he told us was that those kids we had talked to were not paid; they were allowed to go through the trash (don’t know if they had to have a government permit) and sell whatever they could.  Which is where those bales of plastic and paper came from that we had driven by on the way into the landfill. 

We all got back in the bus and headed back to school.  The pictures are from the city streets on the way back to school.  Since some schools were letting out as we returned to ours; yes, that's a “school buses”.

Not an AISD school bus

About the language: Here it is Bangla; in Calcutta, it’s called Bengali.  It is distinct from Hindi, and indigenous to this area of the subcontinent, Bengal.  

The maintenance of local language is significant to the maintenance of cultural identity.  In 1952, when this was East Pakistan, college students were killed for protesting the imposition of Urdu as the official language of Pakistan.  In Bangladesh, those students are remembered as language martyrs, and people believe that this is the only place that revolted to protect its language.  Eventually, the events of 1952 led to the declaration of independence, March 26, 1971, 41 years ago today. 

Next week, Singapore. 

St. Patrick's Day Edition

It’s been another happy week in Dhaka.  We went to a local wedding reception, the country has had some momentous events of late, and our girls’ soccer team hosted and won the conference tournament just as the drought ended. 

The wedding reception was our first real cultural experience here in Bangladesh.  The wedding itself was several months ago.  The bridegroom, Shaikat, is one of the tech guys at school.  We think we were invited (not everyone at AISD was) because he has to help us both so much with our computers—we’re so last century. 

Weddings in Bangladesh are frequently a hybrid of Hindu and Islamic traditions.  According to one of our AISD friends, Moslems don’t have a long, drawn out ritual, but the Hindu events can go on for several days.  The wife’s family hosts the wedding and whatever social events they want, then a few months later the husband’s family has a party/reception.  Both families come to both, but each invites friends as well. 

This reception was at a banquet center on the other side of town, but our driver found it, and Shaikat’s father greeted us on the sidewalk.  There were at least 200 people there; he took us inside, and upstairs past everyone else to the front row of sofas right in front of a bench- and flower-covered dais.  Shaikat stopped by to welcome us and let us know that Anika would arrive shortly.  

And then, there she was. 

Anika 

The reception was not so much a gifting and greeting event as a photo-op.  Anika sat on the dais, looking beautiful and perfect while three professional photographers and all the family members with cameras came up to take pictures.  The make-up is a three-hour process itself, we are told; I am not sure how long the henna on the arms and hands took. 

After 45 minutes of photography, we were escorted into the dining hall next door for traditional Bangladeshi buriyani.  We are almost the only ones who required utensils; everyone else ate with their right hands.  As soon as we had eaten, we were encouraged to come back to the photo-op; the tables were cleared and reset for the other 100 or so people.  At that point we were invited to the dais to have our photo taken with the happy couple.  That picture will be available in about a month.

The Happy Couple

The major school news is that AISD won the conference girls’ soccer tournament.  There were five teams—Overseas School Columbo (Sri Lanka), Lincoln School (Nepal), Lahore American School (Pakistan) and the American International Schools of Chennai and Bombay, respectively--here for the event.  We hosted two girls, Sujana and Prahbuti, from Nepal. 

Our team beat the OSC Geckos by one goal in a shoot-out after 90 minutes of regulation and 10 minutes of overtime just as the first storm in months hit.  It had been raining a little during the last minutes of the game, but began to really pour after we got home.  The lightning and thunder were pretty impressive, and there was about 6 inches of water in the street at one time.   

Water, or its lack, has been an issue recently.  Our school has, or had, a deep well that allowed us to have drinking water from water fountains, just like in Europe or America.  The safety and quality were checked regularly by the embassy people, and everything was good.  Then the pump failed.  Actually, a local company pulled the pump and found it to be working fine; there wasn’t any water in the aquifer anymore.  So we now have five-liter barrel-like water containers everywhere. 

Now that we have had a big storm, things may change again.  It's already better here--cleaner air and fewer mosquitos.  

We have also wondered if Bangladesh ever makes the local news back in America. 

For instance, the local opposition party, who sets records for boycotting parliament, called a big rally/protest/demonstration for downtown.  The party in power responded by closing the various means of entering the city—trains, buses and ferries were stopped, vehicles belonging to opposition party members were “confiscated”, armed groups of thugs allied to the party in power assisted the police in beating protesters, and the TV stations were taken off the air.  (Al-Jazeera covered it and our local newspaper kept printing.)

All the excitement took place on the other side of town from us; we were perfectly safe, by the way. 

Our Nepalese soccer players didn't mention the demonstration but asked about the passenger and freight ferry that was struck by an oil barge and sank in a river south of Dhaka killing almost 200 people.  That made the news in Kathmandu as well as here. 

Don't know if you heard about these: 

• The Bangladeshi government won a case in a United Nations court giving it much more of the Bay of Bengal than either India or Myanmar wanted to give up; American oil companies are all excited. India would like to negotiate.   
• Russia just gave Bangladesh a soft loan to build a nuclear reactor here for producing electricity.  They are just waiting on the government to write an energy policy that will insure that it will all be safe.  What could possibly go wrong?  

Meanwhile, the biggest issue here in the diplomatic enclave is that the government has decided that this is a great time to install storm sewers, so streets in the area are littered with 4’ concrete tubes waiting for ditches to be dug.  Consequently, traffic is worse than ever. 

Notes from March 10

Well, it has been a busy week here in the Delta—and I am about a week behind getting this published.

In late February, Gail and Millie went to Bhutan with 20+ AISD high school students, and I went to Bogra, a city in northwest Bangladesh, with our fifth graders.   Bhutan was beautiful and interesting, and Bogra was, well, not Dhaka, but still part of the poorest, most corrupt country in Asia.

I’ll start with the Bogra trip.  We left AISD at 6:00 AM in four buses with 48 students, 5 teachers , four drivers and me.  Traveling through the city that early, before the crowd of buses, tuck-tucks, taxis, various bicycle drawn wagons and human-pulled carts, all racing for their own little wedge of right of way, should be the easiest way to get out of town quickly.  It still took us an hour to go 30 or so kilometers. 

I, as the administrator/white guy in charge, was to call the school’s security officer every 30 minutes or so as we passed through each municipality, but then he had arranged a police escort for us.  So, here we were careening down the road, four buses led by a pick-up truck with rifle-toting guards, flying past trucks and carts, etc., through the countryside.

The Jamuna River Bridge

After about 90 kilometers and 3 hours, we made it to the Jamuna Resort where we stopped for breakfast and to let the kids run around. It’s right next to the Jamuna (upstream it's the Brahmaputra) River and just before the Jamuna Bridge, the 8^th longest bridge in the world and a significant piece of engineering, since the land there is almost entirely made of Himalayan silt and sand. 

The river is one of several that flows through Bangladesh and much of the neighboring Indian province of East Bengal, making this whole part of the sub-continent pretty much an estuary, with the yearly monsoons perpetually shifting sandbars.  Powerful families claim these, since no deeds or titles exist for a sandbar.  They put poor people to work growing two crops of rice before the next monsoon comes and moves the sandbar.  The local peasantry gets about 100 takka a day for their labor--$1.25.   And there are plenty of workers to choose from.  The Rural Development Agency, the end point of our field trip, provides a number of services—agricultural assistance, medical services, and educational support—to two million people in the Jamuna River area alone.  

The work of the Agency is as an agricultural college—animal husbandry (still milking cows by hand), fish hatchery, raised bed crops, rice production, even a bio gas production facility that produces electricity through their generators.  And they have an elementary school—fifty kids in a classroom and it’s the number one school in the province. 

Meanwhile, Gail and Millie were enjoying the bucolic life of the eastern Himalaya; Gail says it is like where we lived last year in India, but with better roads, like Colorado.  They flew into Paro, the only city in Bhutan with an international airport, and were told that, from the plane, they could see Mt. Everest in the distance.  Millie found this doubtful, since all mountains look the same to her.

Dancing in the Dusk

Bhutan limits the number of tourists every year and everyone must take a guided tour.  This tour included a temple in Paro before a bus ride to the capital city of Thimpu, where they visited another temple, some markets and received the lecture on Gross National Happiness, the Bhutanese alternative to GNP.  They also got to see various dancers and performers, and hit a few more markets and temples. 

Keeping Warm

The highlight of the trip came the next day with a trip up and over the ridge (3150 meters) to Chimi Lhakhang, the Temple of Fertility, built in the 15^th century by the “Divine Madman”, Lama Drukpa Kuenley.  From what I have read elsewhere, the guy found Buddhist peace and tranquility through fornication.  The walls are decorated with penises and the temple has lots—stone, ivory and wood.  The monks touched all the kids and teachers on the forehead with each kind as they exited the temple.  Houses in the area are similarly decorated—drawings, statuettes, etc.   Our guidance counselor thought of doing this for his house in Connecticut just to see the neighbors’ reaction.

Tiger's Nest Monastery

The group also visited an elementary school and other temples at Punakha.  You can find the name of the town on Google Maps, but it’s hard to find the actual town.  Gail was having some asthma trouble due to the flowering of the flowering of the local mustard crop, so she didn’t get to take the tour that day to Taktsang Lhakhang, the Tiger’s Nest monastery, which clings to a cliff about a four-hour hike up the hill from the town.  Millie gasped all the way to the top.  

School 

Gail, however, was able to shop—got a couple more masks for our walls (got 9 now), and a woven belt, typical of Bhutanese, for me for my morning stretching, as well as a bronze engraved “singing bowl”.  The bowl can be made to produce a constant tone when struck and rubbed by a wooden mallet.  It resides next to the Indian elephant poker on our alter of Asian souvenirs.

Abby is also on a trip, to Phoenix to visit her grandmother.  I’ll have more to report on that trip, and our recent cultural experiences in my next installment.