Rat's nest

Yesterday I went to the supermarket to buy some small groceries (bread, tuna fish, etc), since I have a kitchen of sorts in my hotel room.  On the way back through the narrow streets I saw a crowd gathered ahead of me on the crossing road, and I could see smoke and some flames.  Since I'm always up for a good disaster, I walked up to the commotion and saw that there was a guy with a fire extinguisher fighting a fire that had broken out among the mess of phone (and God knows what else) cables that is common on all the streets here.

Typical rat's nest of wiring

Unfortunately I didn't have my iPhone with me, so I could not take a picture of the festivities, but you can see a typical example of the type of wiring job they do here in the picture I have posted above.  Since those are all low-voltage telephone cables, I'm not sure how they were able to catch fire, but I suppose it must be possible.  The fire had actually broken out a several points along the mass of cables, and one little tendril had even made a left turn and was heading up the side street I was on.  The guy with the fire extinguisher quickly ran out of juice, and I saw a few locals running up to the scene with a garden hose!  For those of you who don't know, it's not usually a good idea to try to put out an electrical fire with water, but apparently these guys didn't know that either.  I didn't stick around to see if these guys got electrocuted (probably not, since, again, these were low voltage wires; on the other hand, just above them were the high-voltage power cables!).

By the time I got back to the hotel I could hear a siren, so perhaps the fire department got there.  More likely, it was just the wail of an ambulance that was caught in traffic.

This whole debacle sort of illustrates the problems facing countries like this one.  The rat's nest phenomenon isn't restricted to Bangladesh, by the way; in fact, I have seen similar or even worse setups in Vietnam and Mongolia.  But it does show that, while developing countries can be very good at rolling out infrastructure, they are very bad at maintaining it.  So they will build these nice roads and avenues in the cities, and then watch as they get more and more potholed, fixing them only in extremis. If there's a problem with a cable, just run another one; don't bother to remove the bad one.  And why replace all those cables with a single, higher-capacity one?  After all, those telephone poles are strong, and they can hold lots and lots of single cables.

Of course, our own country has problems maintaining infrastructure (witness the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis a few years ago), so I should not be pointing fingers.  But it is instructive to see the cost in places that don't maintain their infrastructure in order to appreciate that we need to be keeping ours up to date.

The BAGHA Club

One of the things that makes life in Dhaka bearable is the BAGHA Club.  Although "bagha" might seem like it is a Bengali word for "place where white guys drink themselves silly", in fact it is an acronym for British Aid Guest House Association.  It is a venerable institution, an intimate, friendly, expat club.  Once you enter the BAGHA Club you are in a place that's not really Bangladesh (although somehow the weather follows you inside), a place where you can have a ham and cheese omelette for breakfast with decent French-pressed coffee, or a beer and a pork chop for dinner.  It's kind of an Islam-free-zone inside a muslim country, and a nice place to decompress.

Although it is primarily a British club, there are members from all over the world.  You hear people speaking Spanish, Italian, French, and Australian!  That last language is spoken by a couple of my colleagues here, who hail from that island kingdom.  It maintains a bit of that colonial, genteel flavor, and seems like it's a bit from another era.  It is even permissible to smoke in the bar area, unlike in our overly civilized West.

The bar at the BAGHA club

I've never really integrated myself into the whole expat scene in other places I've been.  Generally I suppose that it's because I'm usually not in any given place for more than two or three weeks.  However, many of my colleagues on the project are here for two-year stints.  For them, having a place like BAGHA to go to is essential to their sanity.  And having been a member there myself now for the past month, I can certainly appreciate the appeal.  Yes, it is a way of separating yourself from the culture you're in, and some people would find fault with that.  Yet in our country, immigrants also tend to associate with fellow immigrants from their own countries and cultures.  It's a natural thing, and why should we be any different?

Hey Boss!

Rickshawallahs waiting for the Boss

One of many things that are hard to get used to here in Dhaka is the way the natives call all the white guys "Boss". The restaurant staff at the hotel, the hotel security guys, the driver who takes us to work, the elevatorwallah who welcomes us into the building lobby, and the security guards outside our office: they all greet us with "Good morning, boss" when we're arriving, and "Good night, Boss" when we're leaving.

Out on the street the rickshawallahs try to get our attention by waving and saying "Boss! Rickshaw!", the little kids try to cadge small change out of us by running up alongside and saying "Boss! Baksheesh!", ... and then there are the beggars, walking down the middle of the paralyzed traffic, usually cradling a naked infant, tapping on the car windows and croaking out "Boss! Boss!".

It's all very sad, even not considering the beggars, that 65 years after independence they still see white people as "Boss". I suppose that at least to some of them the word doesn't necessarily have exactly the same meaning as it would to us; but it certainly must have a pretty close meaning to the ones who can speak English! So it's all a little embarrassing, to be addressed like that.

First month in Dhaka

Here's an entry I posted in Facebook a few days ago:

I've been in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for a whole month now. I still have not eaten any Bengali food. There are lots of Indian-Chinese-Thai-Pizza places (yes, all those foods in the same restaurant), but the only local food I've seen is the stuff they serve close to the office in a rigged-up lean-to set up against a wall on a small street (well, they're mostly all small...). To watch how they wash the dishes at that place (on the street, dunked in a bucket of brownish-yellow water) is enough to deal with your appetite. And by the way, there is not much more than that in the way of eating establishments close to the office. So I skip lunch now.

Inside Lalbagh Fort in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Traveling

Traveling to different places is one of the things that keeps life interesting, in my opinion.  It gives you an appreciation of just how big and diverse this planet of ours is.  Whether it's going across town to an area with a different socioeconomic level than you have, or flying to the other side of the world, there is something about seeing how people in circumstances different from your own deal with the pressures and pleasures of life.

Texas can seem alien compared with Utah (or for that matter, Utah can seem pretty alien compared to just about everywhere else!), and yet both are in the United States, both are Western in one way or another, they even have similar terrain in places.  But the cultures in both places are both alike and very different in surprising ways.

So of course, going to a different country on the other side of the world, with a radically different culture, language, history, religious tradition, and even different looking bodies, is an opportunity to really examine how those factors end up affecting the way people live.

In some ways there are still the profound similarities that makes us all fellow humans: people love their children the same way generally, they laugh and they cry and they play games and do sports.  In other ways, there are profound differences: the way people dress, the way they show (or don't show) affection, the differences between rich and poor, the way they pray, eat, sing (or don't sing).

I've attempted to blog some of my observations in the past, but for one reason or another I didn't keep current.  Partly it may have been due to the technical platform I was using, and partly it's because of the fact that there are frequently large gaps between trips during which I lose interest in the project.  And in at least one case it's because I went to the same place so many times I kind of became sick of it and thought I had nothing of interest to write besides bitching about the place.

I'll try to do better in this one.  As the web has become more social in the last few years it is easier to disseminate these types of blogs, and I think the biggest factor in keeping it going is the interest of others.  So, if you are out there reading this, I will try to keep posting!  I will also try to bring some of my old posts from the previous blog here so they will all be in one place.  That means that you may see some posts that appear to be out of order, or you may think I'm just bouncing around all over the place. Hopefully, however, what I've written will be sufficiently interesting that it won't be too distracting.  In any case, there aren't too many of those.