I guess I slowed down quite a bit in the last two weeks. Dhaka fatigue set in, and the prospect of coming home loomed ever larger and made me less and less interested in what was going on in Bangladesh.
It's not like I didn't have any time. The last post I made was on the last day of work in Dhaka before the Eid ul Fitr holiday. Basically, everyone in the Government (and I suppose most businesses) got a week off for Eid. It's interesting how a very poor country ends up with all these holidays while in the richest country on Earth we get by with very few national days off. I suppose this is one of the reasons they're so poor.
Anyway, during the Eid holiday I still did some work, but mostly just tried to pass the time somehow. Difficult when there was no transportation available other than rickshaws; basically, I just spend a lot of time in the hotel or at the BAGHA club. I did a lot of reading, and watched the entire "Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister" series.
Eventually the office opened again, and I went back to work for two days for some final meetings. At last, on Saturday the 25th I stepped into a plane and flew away, my first mission over.
Forty-eight hours later, after reuniting with my wife Irina at JFK, I came home to a very enthusiastic welcome from my dogs Luc and Marlie!
It's good to be home!
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Traffic
Yesterday it took my driver one hour and 55 minutes to go a distance of about five miles, from the office to the Green Goose Hotel (my home away from home). [Note: yes, it was Sunday, but that's the way a lot of these Muslim countries roll. The work week is from Sunday through Thursday.] Now, you would think that, since this works out to an average speed of 2.5 mph, and humans can usually walk at between 2.8 to 3.4 mph, it would be more effective to walk. However, there are few functioning sidewalks here, and those that are nice and smooth are usually used by motorcycles; the ones that aren't used by motorcycles are usually the homes of street people. Of course, one could do what the locals do and walk on the roads, but not only do you run the risk of being run over by cars, tuk-tuks, and rickshaws, but in may places you may have to wade through sewage or other standing water. And of course any western face is a magnet for the legions of beggars walking the streets. All in all, I think I prefer sitting in the car for two hours.
Dhaka is a city of 16 million people, and even though the people here are very poor a lot of them still own cars. Added to this are the countless bicycle rickshaws that clog the streets, as well as the motorized tuk-tuks (sort of a converted motorcycle with three wheels and a green cage for driver and passengers) that zip in and out between the cars. To make things worse, traffic laws are generally not observed unless there is a policeman within arms reach. Traffic lights, where they exist, are never turned on, and are essentially used for decoration.
The road grid is also a big problem; side streets are generally just wide enough for two cars to pass each other if they fold in their side-view mirrors. Even in the more recently built neighborhoods such as Gulshan, the streets are just not set up to use as alternate thoroughfares during heavy traffic periods (though people try anyway, to frustrating effect).
In all, it is a chaotic situation that makes for a frustrating commute. At the moment it is the Muslim month of Ramadan. This means for some reason that traffic is fairly light in the mornings. It takes us about 20-25 minutes to travel from the hotel to the office. However, businesses and schools shut at 3:30pm during Ramadan, due to the fact that everyone is fasting and therefore hungry. Starting at 3pm, therefore, the roads become full of people going home. At best we can make it back to the Goose in an hour; yesterday took considerably longer, due to the fact that it rained and therefore more people took cars than normal.
Of course, the beggars and booksellers do good business during these traffic jams. They meander through the cars stuck in the streets tapping on windows begging or trying to sell the same dozen or so books. Whenever they see me, the booksellers whip out their copy of the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography; apparently it's a big seller among us whiteys.
I do have a solution for Dhaka's traffic problems, and it's based on three very simple steps that the government could easily implement with a minimal investment. I haven't been able to get an audience with the Prime Minister to present my proposal yet, but I will tell you what it is:
1. Establish a system of one-way streets on the side roads, so they can be used as fairly rapidly flowing alternate routes during high traffic periods;
2. Install stop signs and traffic lights at intersections and instruct the public in their use;
3. Implement exemplary, public executions (preferably by disembowelment) of people who break the traffic laws by failing to stop, cutting people off, making right turns from the left-hand lane, and trying to run over pedestrians. Hang the bodies at the major intersections to push the point.
These simple, modest changes would, I think, see a return to civility and free-flowing traffic to Dhaka!
Dhaka is a city of 16 million people, and even though the people here are very poor a lot of them still own cars. Added to this are the countless bicycle rickshaws that clog the streets, as well as the motorized tuk-tuks (sort of a converted motorcycle with three wheels and a green cage for driver and passengers) that zip in and out between the cars. To make things worse, traffic laws are generally not observed unless there is a policeman within arms reach. Traffic lights, where they exist, are never turned on, and are essentially used for decoration.
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| View from my car yesterday |
In all, it is a chaotic situation that makes for a frustrating commute. At the moment it is the Muslim month of Ramadan. This means for some reason that traffic is fairly light in the mornings. It takes us about 20-25 minutes to travel from the hotel to the office. However, businesses and schools shut at 3:30pm during Ramadan, due to the fact that everyone is fasting and therefore hungry. Starting at 3pm, therefore, the roads become full of people going home. At best we can make it back to the Goose in an hour; yesterday took considerably longer, due to the fact that it rained and therefore more people took cars than normal.
Of course, the beggars and booksellers do good business during these traffic jams. They meander through the cars stuck in the streets tapping on windows begging or trying to sell the same dozen or so books. Whenever they see me, the booksellers whip out their copy of the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography; apparently it's a big seller among us whiteys.
 |
| Bookseller displaying his wares. |
1. Establish a system of one-way streets on the side roads, so they can be used as fairly rapidly flowing alternate routes during high traffic periods;
2. Install stop signs and traffic lights at intersections and instruct the public in their use;
3. Implement exemplary, public executions (preferably by disembowelment) of people who break the traffic laws by failing to stop, cutting people off, making right turns from the left-hand lane, and trying to run over pedestrians. Hang the bodies at the major intersections to push the point.
These simple, modest changes would, I think, see a return to civility and free-flowing traffic to Dhaka!
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Gulshan
The area of Dhaka I am staying in is called Gulshan. It's one of the nicest parts of Dhaka, home to a lot of foreign embassies, diplomats, and expats (and of course the expat clubs like BAGHA). The area is treelined and shady, with mostly nice apartment blocks and fancy homes. Gulshan is sandwiched between two other nice parts of town, Banani to the West and Baridhara to the East. Together, they're sort of the Westwood/Beverly Hills/Bel Air of Dhaka.
View Larger Map
Map showing Gulshan (center), Banani (left) and Baridhara (right).
The green arrow is the location of my hotel.
Which in fact sets up a very unfair comparison, because for all its luxury, Gulshan, like its two upscale neighbors, still has its share of beggars, potholes, and rickshawallahs, and the traffic can be from Hell itself. Although it is a newer, planned community, the streets are very narrow, sidewalks are rare, and the numbering system makes no sense (just zoom in on the map above and you'll see what I mean). And of course you should never, ever, drink the tap water.
So it's the usual story of opulence among squalor. People with what would be a middle-class-style income in the West live very well, while the vast majority of the population either works in very menial jobs or begs for a living. It can be very depressing, therefore, to go for a walk around here. It is simply not possible for a Western person to walk more than a block before being offered a ride on a rickshaw. The wallahs can be very persistent, sometimes following you for several blocks trying to convince you that you should not be walking but rather riding in their (terribly uncomfortable, by the way) rickshaws.
Equally, you can't go much of a distance before being approached by a beggar. Some are severely crippled, others appear to be faking it (but not so many of these), and many more are just old people who can no longer work and are reduced to this type of life. Or you might see the combination of young and old, an old woman holding a small baby. The whole thing makes you feel bad for them, and also makes you feel angry that this is a society that doesn't seem to take care of its people.
You can, of course, assuage your guilt by giving the ones who seem the worst off some money, but you have to be very careful you're not seen by the others, otherwise you will be mobbed by beggars. This happened to some colleagues who were visiting a nearby park; one of the guys gave a child 10 taka (about 12 cents), and for the rest of the visit to the park they had an entourage of 20-30 people following them around.
So one steels oneself and marches on, affecting a cold, hard stare and saying "No" everytime one hears the word "Boss".
Anyway, back to Gulshan. I recently saw a house mentioned in a website as a beautiful marvel of architecture (here is a link to it: http://hiconsumption.com/2012/07/concrete-sa-residence-in-dhaka-bangladesh/). Turns out that house is just a few blocks from my hotel! On the other hand, the street in front of the BAGHA club (also a few blocks away) has a broken sewer that has been leaking into the street at least since I've been here, with no attempt at a repair in sight.
So maybe not quite Beverly Hills....
View Larger Map
Map showing Gulshan (center), Banani (left) and Baridhara (right).
The green arrow is the location of my hotel.
Which in fact sets up a very unfair comparison, because for all its luxury, Gulshan, like its two upscale neighbors, still has its share of beggars, potholes, and rickshawallahs, and the traffic can be from Hell itself. Although it is a newer, planned community, the streets are very narrow, sidewalks are rare, and the numbering system makes no sense (just zoom in on the map above and you'll see what I mean). And of course you should never, ever, drink the tap water.
 |
| Typical street scene in Gulshan |
So it's the usual story of opulence among squalor. People with what would be a middle-class-style income in the West live very well, while the vast majority of the population either works in very menial jobs or begs for a living. It can be very depressing, therefore, to go for a walk around here. It is simply not possible for a Western person to walk more than a block before being offered a ride on a rickshaw. The wallahs can be very persistent, sometimes following you for several blocks trying to convince you that you should not be walking but rather riding in their (terribly uncomfortable, by the way) rickshaws.
Equally, you can't go much of a distance before being approached by a beggar. Some are severely crippled, others appear to be faking it (but not so many of these), and many more are just old people who can no longer work and are reduced to this type of life. Or you might see the combination of young and old, an old woman holding a small baby. The whole thing makes you feel bad for them, and also makes you feel angry that this is a society that doesn't seem to take care of its people.
You can, of course, assuage your guilt by giving the ones who seem the worst off some money, but you have to be very careful you're not seen by the others, otherwise you will be mobbed by beggars. This happened to some colleagues who were visiting a nearby park; one of the guys gave a child 10 taka (about 12 cents), and for the rest of the visit to the park they had an entourage of 20-30 people following them around.
So one steels oneself and marches on, affecting a cold, hard stare and saying "No" everytime one hears the word "Boss".
Anyway, back to Gulshan. I recently saw a house mentioned in a website as a beautiful marvel of architecture (here is a link to it: http://hiconsumption.com/2012/07/concrete-sa-residence-in-dhaka-bangladesh/). Turns out that house is just a few blocks from my hotel! On the other hand, the street in front of the BAGHA club (also a few blocks away) has a broken sewer that has been leaking into the street at least since I've been here, with no attempt at a repair in sight.
So maybe not quite Beverly Hills....
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Elephants!
Right around the corner from the BAGHA club I ran into this guy:
and his little buddy:
There are *some* cool things about being in Bangladesh!
and his little buddy:
There are *some* cool things about being in Bangladesh!
Saturday, July 28, 2012
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.
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.
 |
| Typical rat's nest of wiring |
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.
Friday, July 27, 2012
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.
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?
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!
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| Rickshawallahs waiting for the Boss |
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.
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