Dhaka Life: Three Wise Men hit Dhaka

One inescapable part of life in Bangladesh is being asked for "bakshish" (a tip). It's virtually impossible to walk anywhere in Dhaka without being stopped or followed by someone old, young, naked, disabled, singing, chanting, or manning a traffic light. They can range from the lighthearted, such as a little girl singing a song for you as you wait for the lights to change whilst sat on your bike (I gave her 0 Taka), to the disturbing when a man grasping an ancient prescription clutches you by the arm as you emerge from a bakery shouting "cancer" over and over again (I gave him 0 Taka).

There are 2 reactions: the 1000 mile stare. You very quickly learn in Dhaka that to make eye contact with people is an open invitation for them to ask you for something. Of course, not everyone is going to ask you for something but it is so draining when you are asked that you end up completely cutting yourself off from allowing any potential opportunity. This I personally feel is a rather a sad way to have live in a city, and so can lead to the second reaction: do a completely misinterpreted cultural event which allows you to gives something back in a structured manner in which everyone, including yourself benefits.

Every year in Spain, it is the Three Wise Men (they call them the Three Kings) who bring presents to children on the Epiphany (6th January), the same day they arrived in Bethlehem having followed the star etc. etc. Father Christmas doesn't even get a look in on Christmas Eve. So on the 5th January, children line the streets of their city or village, to watch as the kings arrive on a long procession, in which sweets and promotional items are distributd. It is a nice and frankly harmless atmosphere, and I doubt that many of the kids even realise the religious dimension of the event these days.

Of course the Spanish manage to add a personal touch, by having one of the kings (Balthasar) who is black, be played by a white man who has blacked up. Now I can imagine this may have been necessary in Franco's Spain, when perhaps the black population of Spain was very limited. But that they still choose to practice this day is pretty embarassing and actually has negative effects.

For example, one of the Cabalgatas (January 5th procession done by the Kings) I watched as a kid in my mother's village with my brothers and sisters. After we had got home, my little brother Juan who is now a young anarchist-punk local rock star, burst out in to tears, "Balthasar wasn't a real black man" he blubbered, as the whole sham of the event hit him. And I was left speechless, as a 13 year-old trying to justify Spain's closeted racism which they seemed willing to hang on to late in to the 20th Century.

Anyhow, back to the point of this post. The 1000 mile stare is so depressing, and yet so unavoidable, that there is a need to balance it and this year it was done through hosting Dhaka's first ever Cabalgata. What started as a drunken conversation on Christmas Eve, evolved in to a 15 person procession through the streets of Gulshan and Banani, replete with 3 kings riding on rickshaws, loyal pages handing out lentils, rice, sweets, juice, biscuits.

As a cultural event it was a disaster, but it did work as a method of distributing food. Firstly, we failed to plan our route very well and so chose to start from one of the only points in Bangladesh where there are no beggars to be found. The first 15 minutes of the procession were panicked as we had no children to share our gifts with, which forced us to over-compensate by going down the road on which there are numerous families trying to live. That is where our second weakness was exposed, as we had no distribution plan. All three Kings were attacked on their rickshaws as people started to grab at the food items, lifting whole bags of rice when they were only supposed to get packets. In some cases it was visible that this occured out of desperation (i.e. very hungry mothers) and in other cases it was plain theft (i.e. very rowdy youths). And this exposed our third weakness, as we hadn't actually discussed what to expect (beyond the original drunken discussion on Christmas Eve).

I thought it was great fun. A complete mess, as noone had a clue as to why foreigners were riding down the road dressed up and giving things out. So the cultural dimension was lost. But also some of the Spanish contingent were shocked at the reaction of the people. Remember, all their lives they have seen the event lined up at the side of the road, waiting patiently in the January cold for the Kings to role past. It was never going to be the same in Dhaka, and the people certainly weren't going to thank us. In the end the rickshaw wallahs panicked and accelerated away, leaving the kings separated from their royal escort, and the royal escort vulnerable to the ongoing attacks of the people demanding more and more food. Next year I am already planning to put the Kings on camels so that they can get a greater street-level clearance.

A lot of people have since asked why I would do such a thing using words such as proselytising and imperialism. You can get everything in Bangladesh, including $6 loaves of bread like the one I just had for my lunch. But it is hard to rationalise or be accept what you see and experience every single time you leave your house. So on serious note I did help prevent me from going crazy, or to completely cut myself off from the country. On gentler note, it was a lot more fun than NGO work.

Expat Human Rights: The Right to Suffer at the Dentist

There can be no value placed on what I learnt on my Development Studies course (well actually £9000 would be a good starting point as it was the cost of the course at the LSE). However, alongside the lectures on governance, institutional development and child rights, there should have been at least one hour dedicated to the real issues of the developing world: it makes relationships very hard work (lesson learnt there is that don't try long-distance), and that dental treatment can be a real issue (the lesson learnt there is below).

My first experience was in Honduras, where my dentist was the runner-up in the Liberal Party's primaries to the now infamous Roberto Micheletti (his goons shot up the door to her surgery and also sent her rather nasty letters to make sure she was runner up to him, but in hindsight that pales as compared to leading the 2009 coup d'etat). Her reaction upon seing the state of my teeth was to laugh out loud, proclaim that my mouth was a mess, and that Britain must be a developing country if its dentists could not sort me out.

My next trip abroad for work was to Tajikistan. My Honduran dentist had insisted that I get my wisdom teeth removed, and so I went through the motions back in the UK to have the procedure done. After 11 months I was scheduled to be operated on, only to be offered a job in Tajikistan with a departure date that fell before the operation. I managed to get a cancellation slot, had all four wisdom teeth out (under general anaesthetic, and was then escorted home on the 381 bus in such a daze that I still have no recollection of the trip). Having reduced the number of teeth in my mouth by 12.5%, I now thought that I would be able to travel and work problem free.

That was until I broke a tooth at a food stop on the mountainous road from Dushanbe to Khujand, when a piece of mutton (that I didn't want to eat in the first place but the driver had decided to "treat" me) proved tougher than my remaining bottom molar. I went to the dentist, who filled the tooth, which promptyly fell out after three months. So I went back again, and asked them to have another go and ended up with the worst dentist I have ever met.

The surgery was the best in town. They even made you put elasticated plastic bags over your shoes in a false declaration of hygeine, and had numerous certificates of qualification from such centres of dentistry excellence as Baku and Gdansk. My dentist, whose name I have forgotten but whose face will haunt me for life, proceeded to inject me with lidocaine to numb the pain of the procedure. Only that he couldn't find the nerve. Nor did he succeed in the following four attempts, so that after an hour of injecting my gum I could still feel the drill on my sore tooth.

Anyway, lidocaine is for losers and so we decided to forge ahead, and it was at that point I realised one of the weaknesses of not having planned the visit in advance, as I did not know the word in Russian (or Tajik) for pain, sensitive, sore, or fuck-me-that-is-my-unaneasthatised-nerve-you-are-drilling-on-you-moron. Seeing my distress, we agreed upon a series of hand signals, ranging from a wiggle of fingers through to a full arm extenion in the style of a Nazi salute which meant that I could not take it any more. But he was not content in only exerting physical pain, and quickly switched to psychological torture too.

As he was trying to fill the hole, George Michael's Jesus to a Child came over the radio. This it turned out was his favourite song, and he just had to, at that very precise moment, have me translate the song for him in to Russian. Little did it matter that I was squirming in his chair with plastic bags on my feet. In the end he filled up the hole, thanked me for a great three hours, and refused to charge me as it was the failure of the original filling that had let to me being there.

Needless to say the filling fell out 2 months later...

So the past nine days in Bangladesh have been a nervous time for me: a root canal and crown procedure, and again as I sat down to have my roots literally drilled and filed out I realised I had not carried over my lessons learnt, and so had no idea as to the Bangla words for pain, sensitive or sore. Thankfully my dentist spoke good English, and would check at regular intervals to ask whether the procedure was "paining" me. It did a little, but compared to the Tajik dentist it was a walk in the park.

New Year's Resolution 2010: To blog

In 2009 I set myself 2 New Year's resolutions: to grow a beard and to be able to touch my toes. My body let me down with the former, and I was too lazy to achieve the latter though I did learn to play tennis instead.

So for 2010 I've decided to blog properly. Looking at what I've written over the past months, I seem to mix between comment, travel and personal stories that relate to where I am and what I see. So I will keep it to that; mainly living in Bangladesh, working in international development, travelling in Asia and the related joys and frustrations.

The motivation is that I have kept detailed diaries of all my previous travels and work abroad. Some I will not open yet, such as those in the period when I was living alone in small-town Honduras, with no tv, phone or internet in the house, running a street-kids centre where writing a diary was the only way of venting my daily frustrations and the massive, unachievable pressure I felt towards supporting the rehabilitation 35 boys. But I regularly go back to my original travel diary from when I Inter-railed around Europe alone at 18, which was penned to a girl who wasn't really bothered that I had left and proceeded to snog her all her colleagues at PC World in Stockport, and recorded not much more than my dislikes of the journey (particularly Austria). Considering that I ate bread and cheese/ham for a month and sat awake trying to sleep on trains to avoid paying for a hostel, there were a lot of dislikes and the diary doesn't cover much else.

Lets see how I manage to keep my resolution for 2010...

Development as distraction: Stop all the Clocks 2 - The Bangladeshi way

A follow up to an earlier post: The Bangladeshi government decided once again to change the time back one hour, at 23:59:59 on the 31st December. Clearly this decision was taken to ensure that all people who had planned New Years Eve parties were able to enjoy a whole extra hour of partying! At the party that I was at, there was a whole platform of ex-pats who had failed to note the time change and who completed the countdown without realising that they were an hour early. That they didn't think it strange that none of the 600 other guests had celebrated the coming of the New Year either is another question entirely.

It turns out that the government is claiming a saving of 200 mega-watts, and now that we are down to one power-cut in the evenings per week, we can reward ourselves with a lie-in. All those Bangladeshis who valiantly refused to recognise the previous time change can now once again enjoy being back on BST (GMT +6). But they better not get used to it, as the government has taken a longer view with regards to planning for 2010 and has already announced that the clocks will change at the end of March and October. At least this time there is more than a couple of days notice.