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| Whether I love it or hate it at that given moment, Dhaka strikes me as a city that inspires--the contrasts of beauty, brutal harshness, old, new, struggle, and triumph are everywhere, if you stop to look (safely out of the reach of traffic, and preferably somewhere quiet) |
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Intelligence aside (substitute “requirement for living abroad” ), that quote to me summed up exactly what I was experiencing. Someone that morning had asked me if I was having fun, and I said, “I’ve never been more miserable or happier than I am right now.” And while that’s true, it sounds pretty weird when I say it out loud.
I hit 100 days in Bangladesh this week! It marks my longest continuous stint in another country (and probably a since that I should stop counting in days…). In some ways, life here has gained a certain rhythm, but some days it feels like I hit the scan button on the car radio and there’s a rhythm, it switches to a new song every 5 seconds or so, so I never quite get the beat. But that’s part of the fun.
I sent this quote to my friend Blair who before selling out and going MBA corporate on the world spent two years in the Peace Corps to ask him what he thought about it. His answer has been playing in my mind for several days.
I strongly believe that being thrown into an entirely new pond, so to speak, has the potential to make anyone into a better person. Or at least a more interesting, mature and subtle one. We all get a little of this when traveling, of course, but traveling fosters a different kind of growth - it prompts you to make more immediate comparisons between what you're seeing/experiencing and what you know "back home," because you're literally seeing it all through your America Eyes. Living abroad is different. You're developing Bangladesh Eyes, and evaluating everything you encounter through those lenses. After a year or two or five, you'll look back on your first impressions, interactions and whatnot and laugh and think, "geez, I was so green!
You have more "yous" lurking around in your personality too! Can you be authentically "you" in such a non-Western context? Tricky question... it's different for everyone.
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| You don't have to go far out of the city to find the complete contrast of pastoral tranquility. Good reminder that while I mainly observe urban life, BGD is still 70% rural dwelling. |
More me’s!!! That’s a scary thought for sure. But this question of who is “me” here versus who is “me” in Boston, etc. is an interesting one. And while the answer likely will keep changing, it’s worth taking a snapshot here and then to have some measure to look back on.
The streets of Dhaka challenge me in a way that Boston did not. Often it feels like I’m walking through a gauntlet of sorts. The smells can be horrible, there are people with all sorts of physical deformities begging on the streets, and when I get into the slums (they estimate that 50% of Dhaka lives on under USD 2 a day, so there are many), the malnourished, mainly naked kids are everywhere. When I get a close look at their mothers, I realize that a lot of them are younger than me. The public health person in me aches looking at the motorcycles with families piled on with no helmets (shout out to grameen phone and BRAC for tackling road safety by providing rickshaws with reflective stickers), the cigarette smoking that’s rampant, and the lack of sanitation practices around a lot of the street food (I have high standards for where I eat on the street, and water in what looks like a gasoline container does NOT pass the bar as something that should wash off my mango. Water in a sprite bottle—depends how hungry I am). Women tend to stare at me silently; sometimes I smile but usually I just stare back, grateful for a safe place to keep my eyes. Men stare too but I try not to make eye contact with them, even if I fix my gaze on the ground or hide it behind my crazy new pair of big red aviator sun glasses, they’ll attempt lewd comments that, when I understand them, end up being comically undermining their intent, “Oh my god!” or “Sexy” or my personal favorite, “Good morning!!” (often said in the late afternoon or evening; I still smirk ever, ever so slightly). It’s rarely threatening, but doesn’t inspire me to stop and chat. My dealings with rickshaw wallahs no longer stress me out the way they used to. There are zoning rules about which roads they can’t cross, without a bribe at least (like the one between my house and my office), so I know where to walk to get one, or where to expect to be left, and simply by following my destination (TB gate jaben?) by asking “Koto?” (how much?) before climbing in, the price drops drastically—my ride to work has gone from tk 80 to tk 30 (USD 1.10 to 0.45). I still have to pay attention; the roads have enough divots and random bumps that I’m liable to get jostled around (I came close to flying out today in a massive puddle), and traffic is still rather terrifying especially when you’re turning. A few days ago, my rickshaw driver asked me if we could cut through some of the back streets on the way from my favorite coffee shop (in Badda) to my office (Gulshan 1), I said fine, but he neglected to tell me that to get TO the back streets, we would cut across the intersection, go against traffic for two blocks, in the middle of which he’d bump up against another rickshaw, whose driver would start screaming at us, and then the two would start punching each other, and then, finally, head into the windy back roads that are too narrow for most cars to enter, lending to the aging buildings the quietness of a different era. I’ve started appreciating this about the rickshaws; I like riding through these labyrinths of winding streets that are easy to miss in my daily walks.
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| The structural design of this building sort of sums up what my days usually look and feel like........ |
Perhaps the extremity of the street culture creates the need for the other extreme to balance out—in my friendships, I feel that I’m warmer than I’ve been historically. To the point where sometimes I feel like a walking hallmark card. But it’s sincere! I’m still immensely grateful for having friends, since they make all the difference in making life here fun, rather than simply “rewarding.” But the subtleties of language get a little lost here sometimes (so far only have one person who seems to get my constant punning, which recently has taken on a bilingual flavor), so I have to strip sentiments down and just speak straight from the heart. Coupled with the norms around physical contact—I’m not really supposed to touch guys at all (handshake sometimes ok because I’m a foreigner; and on the soccer field one of the guys jokingly called me “Maria bhai”, Mr. Maria, so everything’s fair game), but I’m allowed to be touchy feely with other women—I feel pretty romantic with my girlfriends sometime; all the hugs and handholding is pretty addictive. Even in the office, I find myself spending a lot more time listening and trying to empathize than I think I used to do. Some individuals sense (or assume) that I have a different set of values than typical Bangladeshi culture, so sometimes they want to confide in me, because they expect that I’ll sympathize in a way that perhaps most people don’t—often it’s about relationships (or lack of them): women who are still single but above marrying age (say, 26, like me), women who are divorced, and a host of other situations that make them feel isolated. The austerity of their honestly inspires me to try to match it. Meanwhile, because I’m bideshi (foreign), I’m given a lot of latitude about how I behave—I know that I can get away with a lot of things because I’m not a Bengali woman. I don’t get judged on the same metrics, held to the same expectations. It’s not fair, but life here is anything but fair, so I just accept that bit and hope that I can be a vanguard for extending similar freedoms to all women. I’d love to see a soccer league for girls be established, for example, or hanging out in groups at the coffee shops in the evenings (maybe with the husbands at home with the kids for a change). I can dream.
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| Food for thought--the cinnamon rolls that you've heard so much about :) There are plenty of creature comforts here too! |
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| Hard at work at North End Coffee! A batch of brownies will be coming out of the over soon, INSHALLAH |
Another recent trend is my adoption of the phrase “inshallah” (God willing). People here often say it at the end of a statement, like, “I’ll see you in Chittagong. Inshallah” or “We’ll play soccer at 8PM, inshallah.” Clearly it’s religious (and Arabic) in origin, but as I made plans again and again and watched them get smashed to pieces in ways that I never even imagined, I started to see why people qualified all statements about the future. There might be a massive rain storm, or a power outage, or you are home with food poisoning, or a relative is ill, or there’s a hartal, or traffic is so bad you can’t move, or you lost your phone, or any of the other myriad things that here are hard to plan for but quite common. In this environment, people plan differently to account for the probabilities of changing circumstances. In the U.S., we take for granted an immense ability to regulate our environment and execute our plans, that here, is just not possible. The longer I live and work here, I increasingly appreciate that and try my best to emulate it, because it’s a more effective way to function.
Like I rarely make plans more than 1-2 days in advance—when Ruthie was coming, I could scarcely be coaxed to look at hotels prior to her arrival. And I find that whenever hints of my American confidence is planning creeps back out and I don’t account for these possibilities, things ALWAYS get way, way, way off track. So I say inshallah in a superstitious way (“knock on wood” style), but also to remind myself that I’m operating in a context of much higher level of chaos than I’m accustomed to. “The book will be ready for the conference in October, inshallah” I said in a meeting yesterday, much to the amusement of the government officials I was interviewing. When I write to folks at Harvard with our plans to publish our book by October, I write “Inshallah” and then delete it, assuming that it would seem pretty weird to them coming from me. But I can't help myself from typing it anyway, even if I do ultimately delete it.
So that’s what I got at 100 days—thanks to everyone in Bangladesh who has made it so worthwhile, and to those of you from afar that manage to put up with my erratic correspondence .
Miserable? Happy? Overthinking life? Eating too many cinnamon rolls? You tell “me,” if you can figure out who that is…..
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