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.