Travelling in... Nepal Bicycle Trip- Day 6 (Kathmandu - Barabise)

I decided to push myself and do a big ride to the Tibetan border at Kodari, basically so that I was able to say that I am able to cycle up and downhill for 90km and still walk up 2 flights of stairs to get into bed. Well I can, but it doesn't seem so important now. After all I didn't get to Kodari which was 125km away (I miscalculated the route).

The biggest challenge was mental. Leaving Kathmandu was a nightmare as I had to take the worst road in Nepal (not my words, but I agree) to Bakhtapur which is basically a 10km long construction site, which in heavy traffic after a hard night's rain left me disgustingly muddy. Not muddy in the healthy rural dirt I'd been used to, but from roadside puddles. At my first coke and samosa stop one old man was so outraged by my filthy state that he insisted I clean my knee which I had cut the day before and re-disinfect it. That was after only 2 hours.

Then came the longest descent in the world ever. So long that it became intimidating, as at the top I could see across to Himalaya range including Mount Everest and at the bottom in the valley there were banana trees. So long that it was boring, and my bike got a puncture just to give me something to do beyond submitting myself to gravity.

At the bottom was when the mind-games started. I'd just covered my average day's ride of 50km and was feeling it. I knew the remaining distance was uphill and I wouldn't make it to the border so why bother going on, especially in the midday humidity of the Nepali Monsoon. I pulled on my 3rd and final grimace of the trip and pushed on, quickly passing a car parked with three Japanese (they could have been Korean, Vietnamese, or Chinese etc., but I was in no state to challenge my prejudices) and one of the men shouted out: "You're so hard".

That was the turning point. All my life I've been called everything but hard (at high school "pussy" was common, and replaced by "camp" at university but then I did insist in wearing a black, velour top the whole of first year). Here was the recognition that I've been craving since Elliot Lewis was unanimously voted (out of fear) "Cock of the School" at St. Cuthberts Primary School in Manchester when I was 10. I couldn't let down the East Asian gentleman now that he had conferred the ultimate status that any true northerner aspires to, and I pushed hard so that the last 30km actually passed by quite easily. Arriving at the revised-end town of Barabise it was once again pouring with rain, so I jumped on a bus to get back into the valley (and escape having to climb back up the huge descent).

Inevitably on the bus, a local that I had told not to sit next to me asked me what I was doing in Nepal, and I proudly informed him, like the hard man that I had become that day, that I'd cycled a big distance that day. The guy just shrugged and asked my why I was now sat on a bus and not riding back to Kathmandu. Bastard.

Travelling in... Nepal - Bicycle Tour Day 5 (Kathmandu Landfill run)

I got inevitably lost. The route that I'd been show on a small map at the bike shop didn't match the route on my big map, which in turn didn't correspond to the roads I was riding on. Which made it a pretty amazing 6-hour ride.

I ended up passing out of the Kathmandu for an unexpected view of the Annapurna Himalayas, and then doing a crazy descent in which the path was completely washed away at three points so that I had to jump across (dismounted of course, I'm still a pussy). Unfortunately my newly discovered route did pass through Kathmandu's landfill site so that I spent an hour cycling uphill breathing through my mouth only because of the passing rubbish lorries and swatting away flies. But it was a price I was willing to pay in order to cement my status as weekend rider, which I achieved firstly by falling off.

Whilst descending at a snail's pace on section that resembled a ski mogul course, I put my front wheel in a puddle that was actually a deceptively deep hole. The wheel got stuck, and I proceeded to perfectly arc over the handlebars in slow-motion. So slowly that I was able to consider that I didn't want the bike to follow and land on top of me causing more pain. Not slowly enough so that I was able to get out of the way of the bike that followed and landed on top of me causing more pain. Still, one of the advantages of riding in rural areas is that you can lie on the floor as long as you like when you fall off and slowly assess your pain and catch your breath (when you fall off in the city you have to get up quick and drag your bike out of the way before you've started properly bleeding). More importantly, mud does a lot less damage to your knees and face than tarmac. However, lets not paint a rural accident idyll, as in both contexts noone will come and help you. When I fell off I was hoping that a young and buxom milk made that had been washing her lingerie in the nearby stream would come and offer to clean my wounds, but she ignored me continuing with her laundry. Falling off in the city, people just walk past you. Either way, you're on your own.

I completed a cut up knee and elbow this with the most ridiculous sun-tan. I wear gloves when riding, and hold such as position that apparently the only parts that are exposed to the sun are my forearms and chin. It was the first really sunny day, and so between my hands and elbows I now have a shade difference which could be used to sell Indian skin whitening cream. And a bronzed chin, which I never felt self-conscious of until it became a darker shade of pale (as compared to the rest of my face). Still, at least now with cuts on my knees and a tan, I look the part as an almost real cyclist.

Travelling in... Nepal - Bicycle Trip Day 3 (Bhaktapur - Dhulukiel)

My arse hurt the moment it touched the saddle. In fact, I don't think it had even touched the saddle when it started hurting so reluctant was it to not have to spend another day in full contact. And back down in the Kathmandu Valley the weather was much hotter so that until numbness had set in, the first hour of the day's ride was tough as I struggled to find a rhythm. The scenery had changed from the National Park, so that I spent most time racing little boys on their bikes (and winning!), and swerving round gaggles of schoolgirls who between 7-10am continued to block the road as they walked to or from school (but were never seemingly in school). Even if they aren't learning anything, they are at least smartly dressed.

I was aiming for the Tibetan Buddhist site of Namo Bazaar, which technically meant leaving the valley and climbing to the top of another 2000m "hill". With my now efficiently controlled method of riding-wheeling the easy-hard parts, I reached the stupa feeling ok. I left my bicycle and bike at a cafe and passed through the site's gate and set myself up to take a photo of a small ceremony taking place next to a shrine. Only to be bitten by a dog. In 8 years of traveling in countries with rabies, I have never been bitten directly by a dog. Once in Honduras I disturbed 2 copulating canines and was chased by the frustrated male who only managed to bite through my waterproof trousers. But here, in the biggest demonstration of bad karma ever, a very small (though thankfully domesticated) dog had a nip at my ankle. Its mouth was so small that it was barely able to reach around to sink its teeth in, but he had a good scratch and it hurt enough for me to consider calling for a helicopter to medivac me directly to Bangkok.

Instead, I applied some Savlon cream and struck a sombre tone as I toured the stupa in order to exorcise my dog-bite-bad-karma, and also so that Lord Buddha could take mercy on my arse which was losing its numbness having been out of the saddle for 15 minutes.

Again I was able to enjoy some high-speed descending (though only one motorbike overtaken this time) which went a little too far, as I then had to do some low-speed ascending. But I passed through some kind of fatigue barrier where my legs disconnected themselves from my body and cycled up the whole route without me needing to get off once. Could this be Buddha intervening directly and allowing me to transcend to the status of weekend cyclist? By the time I got to the end town of Dhulukiel I couldn't stop my legs so that I rode past the guesthouse (actually I missed the sign). By the time I rolled into the next village and started to think that I was in the wrong place, a donkey started to chase me at quite a high speed forcing me back towards the guesthouse. Now there was now doubting as to the Buddhist divine intervention which with the dog bite and all was quite tiring, and so I settled for my regulation post-ride 2 hour siesta ( sleeping on my front, to give my arse a rest).

Travelling in... Nepal - Bicycle Trip Day 2 (Chisopani - Bhaktapur)

There cannot be many worse ways to start the day than putting on your wet clothes from yesterday, but I was in fine spirits because it had at least stopped raining. Over a damp breakfast I decided to change my route to finish in the historic town of Bakhtapur, in part as a means to dry out myself and rucksack, and also because the guide who I ate with warned me that the hotel in the village which I was otherwise planning to stay in was worse than that in which I had just slept. I thought this was a display of Nepali irony, but he pointed out that in Nala the hotel was renowned for its fleas, and for the pleasures of having to share a toilet with local truckers.

Importantly, once setting off I still had my legs and the riding seemed much easier going as I knew when to get off and push as opposed to wasting precious energy, or wheel through a bog as opposed to getting incredibly filthy and wet. I was committed to riding up the first hill away from the hotel anyway because I was in view of the young and impressionable trekkers who had been so impressed by my bike trip the night before, whilst they smoked their way through enough hash to last a freshers week (I hate students). I still managed to get bitten by another leech on my shin as the previous day, but on the other leg so that I had two rather amusing Jesus Christ-like wounds.

There was a lot of downhill after the struggles of the previous day, and as I descended out of the clouds and the Shivapuri National Park, I cycled for the first time on what could be respectfully called a track. This made the cycling even easier back up to Nagarkot. This is a dirt road on top of a hill that is famed for its views of the Himalayan range across to Everest, and in the photos of the cafe the view looked incredible. But I was back above 2000m and in the clouds.

So more downhill, this time for 15km straight on a sealed road which made the cycling even easier down to Bhaktapur (thus justifying my change of plans at breakfast), and more importantly allowed me to live out my Tour de France fantasy: I crouched into what I felt was an aerodynamic position and overtook as many cars and motorbikes as I could on the winding descent (bicycles rule!). Downhill on a hike is crap as it hurts your knees. On a bike there can be no finer feeling, especially if you know that there is no uphill until the day after and putting it into context, the fist 20km had taken me 3 hours whereas the last 20km took me only 40 minutes.

Travelling in... Nepal - Bicycle Trip Day 1 (KTM-Chisopani)

The pre-trip-courage alcohol must have worn off at 4am, because I was woken up by a rat on the floor above my room eating something. Suddenly I panicked (not at whether a rat was eating my breakfast which I had drukenly placed out next to my bed in case I forgot to eat the same meal that I take every day); what if I couldn’t even complete the first leg of the ride up to Budhanilkantha which was 15km uphill out of Kathmandu? My romantic notion that the whole trip would be like some Tour de France escapee, riding alone at the tete de la course was suddenly in doubt. In fact I wish the rat had come to my room and eaten the breakfast because I found it inedible, and so set off on an empty stomach. The riding was at first very pleasant and I felt suitably competent, covering the first uphill 15km in 45 minutes and overtaking some weekend riders in the process. But after a quick visit of the sleeping Vishnu site and 2nd breakfast, I progressed up the road which continued to get steeper as it entered the Shivapuri National Park. Then it simply stopped being a road.

It turns out that mountain biking is uniquely difficult: riding up hill is a challenge within its own right, but when done on wet sand which is incredibly rocky then it is actually impossible. After only 2 hours I hit a low point when I was overtaken on a ridiculous gradient by two Buddhist monks who were managing ascend quicker on foot than I was on the bike. That seemed like a suitable point to bring out my much-practiced “professional-cyclist-grimace” and pushed on hard, to be rewarded with an unexpected and very long exhilarating down hill section. The terrain which had up till then proved unrideable when going up, was easily mastered with gravity on my side.

After lunch at 10:30, the road again started uphill, got narrower, and cloudier as I pushed over 2000m. Trying to stay positive I focused on the good things: with 6km to go at least I hadn’t fallen off in one of the numerous bogs I was ploughing through, until I fell off in a particularly large bog, my confidence getting the better of me on that occasion. Well at least been bitten by any leeches, until I was bitten with 4km to go. With 3km to go at least it hadn’t rained, but then the clouds that had been present all afternoon decided to drop their load.

I arrived in the end town of Chisopani, which is constantly in a moving cloud as it is built on a mountain pass and so has the dampest (and most miserable) collection of hotels in Nepal, soaked but smiling. I’d managed to cover 50km and climbing 800m with only the tennis coaching as fitness coaching. Once I had paid for the privilege of a cold shower and put my pajamas on at 3.30pm, I tried to dry my remaining belongings off, only to make them all wetter in the process.

Travelling in... Nepal - Bicycle Trip Day 0

I wanted my preparations for a 5 day cycle trip in Nepal to be based on that of a professional cyclist: I would get my legs shaved, have a blood transfusion, grimace lots and wear lycra. Unfortunately I was too busy with work, and so ended up boarding the plane to Kathmandu armed only with a sachet of electrolytes (I’d just read an article on how cyclists sweat differently, and I know that I tend to sweat out of my armpits) and pair of ugly sunglasses whose sole purpose is to scare pedestrians out of your path.

But I know my Kathmandu well and within an hour of landing had already hired a bike and planned a route with the rental shop owner. One of the planned days involved about 70km riding (up and downhill): “Do a lot of cycling?” the owner justifiably asked me. At this point it dawned on me that I hadn’t seriously ridden a bicycle since 2006 (the Belarusian junk that I rode in Tajikistan doesn’t count because the left pedal would fall off if ridden for more than 25 minutes).

“Yes” I lied, not willing to lose face now. I recalled how in London I would have to ascend Fleet Street to get to my university, and even once fell off quite seriously with the effort. So by now self doubt was starting to creep in together with regret, because I knew that if I’d had smooth legs the owner would never have doubted me.

So to establish the upper hand I hopped on my newly hired bike to give it a test ride in the carpark. One thing that I hate about mountainbikes is their ridiculously low gears, which only serve to allow scallies/townies/chavs to cycle around council estates at speeds slow enough to successfully harass old women and plan their next unwanted pregnancy. Forgetting this, I pedaled as hard as I could to demonstrate my core strength, straight away hitting a speedbump and falling off. Dignity destroyed, I paid up and cycled on the wrong side of the road to my guesthouse.

I still had to pack enough into a school rucksack to last me 5 days, but could only face drunk. Feeling much better once I’d managed to squeeze in a spare pair of socks next to my electrolytes I ordered dinner. Knowing that professional cyclists eat pasta for breakfast, I decided to go one better and have pasta for dinner, together with a lot of rum & coke. At some point I must have decided that sleep was a good idea, and amorously assumed that if I took my bike to my room we would be able to forge a successful partnership over the night.

Pause and Rewind: Escape

Out of Office is turned on. I've bought a ticket to Kathmandu. Got the address of a bike shop in Thamel. Spoken to a very tall Swiss man with a map of the Kathmandu valley. Changed $25 for my 30 day Nepali visa. That's all I need right now. The chance to swop the pollution of Dhaka with that of Kathmandu.

My partner says that I am seem very frustrated at the moment. That I'm prone to outbursts of anger such as last Saturday when I fixed the ballcock (who came up with such a ridiculous name?) on the toilet and forgot to put back the rubber seal so that I couldn't get it to stop leaking. I replied that it was a bad example to give as no one likes spending a weekend afternoon repairing a $800 Italian toilet. But even with my humour as an excuse I know she is right. It has happened before.

One week away. Not enough time, but better than nothing and I know I'm coming back to an office that likes me. The past month has been hard: you decide to raise the bar. Put in the extra hours to try and achieve more, something extra. But nothing is easy anywhere in world, and especially so in Bangladesh. So the bar rose, and I ended up dealing with it alone. But it got done. And in the process I was named the office turmeric (you can use it in all curries), that I have the ability to Koi-er Tele Koi Bhaja (fry the Koi fish with its own oil), and by the old office stalwart whose speciality it is to grunt after he says a particularly important sentence; a star.

Development as Distraction: Only 11 Easy Steps...

I was having breakfast with a colleague at 6am in a small Vietnamese soup cafe and we were inevitably discussing work. We were accompanied on the trip by a Dutch author who remarked that she didn't understand what we were talking about because we kept on using acronyms, and upon reflection we couldn't help but agree that we must have been speaking in a professional code. Acronyms is one of the ways that we try to over-professionalise our respective field and programmes.

In my current role of a generalist, one week I will be helping design and document an ECCD project (Early Childhood Care and Development), and the next a MNCS project (Maternal, Neonatal and Child Survival). The fact that ECCD is also referred to as ECD (Early Childhood Development) by some organisations, and fits within the SIP (School Improvement Programme), whilst MNCS is the new version of IMCI (Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses) starts to show the extent to which we like inventing as many terms as possible and then turning them into acronyms. That particular MNCS project had a 9 page narrative proposal, 2 of which was the acronym list containing not more than 55 acronyms. I think that I should set a personal KPI (Key Peformance Indicator) to try and write a full PP (Project Proposal) using only acronyms. 

Another method of over-professionalisation is through making every day activities into technical processes, such as washing your hands. Hygiene practices are so bad in Bangladesh that they threaten the achievement of the MDGs (Millenium Development Goals), and so our WATSAN (Water and Sanitation) Programme aims on creating ODF (Open Defecation Free) Communities through a CLTS (Community Led Total Sanitation) method which is achieved through a CCCD (Child Centred Community Development) approach. One key component is getting people to wash their hands properly, as we all eat with our hands in Bangladesh, and yet only 50% of people in rural areas wash their hands after taking a poop. 

Therefore, the challenge for an NGO is to make handwashing into a technical competency so that it is something that we can make into a programme. My organisation has decided to adopt the 11 step process so that rural people of Bangladesh can have hands clean enough to perform surgery. 11 steps is quite a lot just for a washing your hands.

It ended up causing some debate in the office and provoking the ultimate challenge to development workers of ourselves practising what we preach: the final step in the handwash process above can be seen as cancelling out the previous 10 as no one has a clean town in rural Bangladesh (nor urban for that matter) and so it means that any cleanliness obtained through washing will be instantly cancelled out through wiping on a dirty scarf, dupatta, lunghi towel. As a result, all towels were removed from the canteen's handwash area and replaced with hand-dryers which in the Bangladeshi summer only served to add to the heat of the room that stands next to the kitchen. A successful advocacy initiative led to the towels being returned, against our better hygiene, instincts but at least we can't be accused of not implementing our own approaches.

Dhaka Life: Life as a young foreigner

A blog this week has cut to the heart of Dhaka life, exposing the shallowness of the young foreigner set through a catching "infographic". So I will here defend myself against the merciless attack, as the one thing that the post misses is the basic belief that 100% of young foreigner share in their Dhaka lives;  their experience is unique. Little does the fact that there are 3 jobs to choose from (NGO, Garments, Diplomatic Service), 2 districts in which we all live (Gulshan or Banani) and only 7 clubs in which we socialise; everyone is on a personal mission to do something "original" which they will record through ironic facebook status updates that only people back at home respond to.

The first accusation is that 10% will start a blog. Guilty. And I actually seem to be lampooned by the description of what the average young foreigner blog contains, including the first night in Dhaka and rants on traffic. But my blog makes it clear that it is an exercise in egoism as a means to demonstrate my originality, and has no purpose in improving humanity.

I also own a big "fuck off" camera, the second accusation. I even bought a new lens recently, which means that I have a big "fuck off" camera kit. But I already owned one prior to Bangladesh and I do use it manual mode. The photos are worse as a result, but at last I am being original (back to my first point).

I am probably most guilty of the third point as it is the only one actually caused by Dhaka living; playing tennis. The sport has become my life and its all I think about. It dictates my friendships (can I beat you?), my mood (did I win?) and my stress (can I book another 45 minute session as an outlet for the excess energy pent-up from a day of 4 hour meetings in the office in which the outcome was to arrange another 4 hour meeting). But my game has improved to the point where I can play a shot and imagine how it would look on tv with the super slo-mo shot.

At least I can outwardly deny one of the accusations as I've never attended a wedding in Bangladesh, and  thankfully there is a dearth of single women in the office which means that experience is unlikely, but on the other hand I am guilty of having pedalled 2 rickshaws. The first time I paid for the privelige, and the second time I had to pay 20 taka for breaking a spoke which I was accused of breaking.

At the same time the blog is wrong again as I didn't buy a rickshaw, instead going for the even more original option of a scooter. Its probably the most dangerous thing I could do, but at least its something so dangerous that noone else does it.

And talking about bowel movements is something which everyone does, its unavoidable. Deshis refer to them as loose motions, and bideshis even manage to facebook update whilst sitting on the toilet (impressive, considering that the toilet is the one place in an apartment where there is no a/c machine). I personally struggle to do so, as in Bangladesh my bowels have bought a clock so that I go to the toilet every day 8:07 for my (loose  or tight) motions. How original is that.

So in conclusion it seems that I can't escape the broad brush that paints the lives of all young foreigners in Bangladesh. We all do the same things no matter how originally we believe we are. And lets be honest, if there's one thing  that really unites all foreigners is that everyone openly or secretly hates it and wants to get out.

Dhaka Life: The Bangladeshi King of Sarcasm

I admit that I give Bangladeshis a hard time, especially over their sense of humour. Until yesterday, I thought it had no ambition beyond combining Pakistanis and goats to get a cheap laugh, but actually what I have completely failed to miss out on so far during my time in Dhaka is the rich vein of sarcasm that is running through the country. Take this letter to the Daily Star from Monday for example, which frankly I can assume only to be a prank, as it manages to improve through every line (my response in italics):

Driving experience

Saleh M Ayub, Houston, Texas, USA

I began driving at a tender age of 12 and I got my first driving licence in the year 1976. 

There is nothing tender about driving at the age of 12, just scary. And how did you "get" your licence in 1976?

Since then I have been driving on the streets of Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, Rajshahi and many other places without one single incident of accident.

Bullshit. Impossible. In 34 years of driving with a "licence" you never once hit a rickshaw?

Today, for the first time I drove on the streets of Houston, Texas and the experience was weird not because of the left hand driven vehicle but because of the regulation. 

Yes, it is a weird to have to follow regulations. 

The maximum speed limit is the reason of my weird experience. On some roads the speed limit is 35 and on others it is 40, while driving within this speed limit, I felt like I was driving behind a rickshaw or something like that. 

Please, when did you ever drive behind a rickshaw doing 35mph! 

The entire road that lies ahead is free, yet you cannot drive faster because of the existing rules. Back at home I could not drive peacefully because of rickshaws and here because of regulation. The speed limits on high ways and free ways are OK.


Aaah, you are not a migrant-labourer taxi driver but in fact a Philosophy PhD at the University of Texas, who is studying the conflict between the notion of freedom and the fact that it must be guarded and enforced by so many laws. 

Houston seriously lacks public transportation, it thus occurred to my mind why America does not import the rickshaws from Bangladesh along with their pullers, thus helping each other. 


Now you're just taking the piss. 


Houston gets the much needed environment friendly public transport maintaining the average speed of 35 miles per hour and Bangladesh relieves itself from the burden of population. There are many other places like Houston all over America, even if all the rickshaws are imported from Bangladesh, it shall not be noticeable.


This is incredible: send your CV, all 3 lines of it, to the UN. Big thinkers like you are what the world needs. 

I bet Bangladeshi drivers are the best in the world. 


I bet they're not. 61% don't even take a test!


The accidents that takes place every now and then is not due to the inefficiency of the drivers, rather because of absence of rules and their proper application.


Now and then! So the fault that drivers break the law and kill people is not their own, but that of the authorities who fail to prevent them from doing so. Gotcha...

Dhaka Life: Landlord Farukh

I think that throughout the world you can always rely on taxi drivers and landlords to be the same. For example, no matter where you are you can be sure that you will be asked by a taxi driver how much you earn (always divide the figure by at least three), how much their car would cost in your own country (always make it sound cheaper just to watch their disappointment)  and whether you can facilitate a visa for them back to your home country (actually I guess this doesn't happen in a London cab, but then I've only ever taken one in my life and was too drunk to remember).

As for landlords, they all seem to display the usual characteristics of wanting to extract as much money in return for as little service as possible, and in Bangladesh the situation is no different. When we arrived in Dhaka we had the option to find our own apartment which meant walking around randomly cold-calling apartment buildings that were marked "to let". There was no shortage, and after a couple of weeks had found what we thought to be the perfect place: 4th floor and so up from the traffic and mosquitoes, and the apartment had never been lived in which meant that it was minimally furnished. It all seemed to good to be true.

And so it was. There is a life lesson there straight away, as if there is an apartment which looks great but has remained unused for at least five years, then there must be a very good reason. In our case it is the owner Mr Farukh. He is a retired old man with a face like a beaver, has two front detachable teeth which flap when he breaths in-and-out (you can watch them as he talks), who suffers from chronic laryngitis (he told me), has to strap both of his knees (he showed me), and had an operation on his prostate last year (thankfully he didn't show me), and is from the Snowball school of turning black into white: if-I-say-it-then-it-must-be-the-case-even-if-the-reality-is-completely-opposite. His favourite catchphrase is "for your convenience", for example: "I will come round at 8am on Saturday morning for a cup of tea, for your convenience."

Still apart from the random theft of some boxes by his wife for my convenience, the fact that the whole family came to inspect the insides of our wardrobes and kitchen cabinets when we moved in for my convenience, and the clause he inserted into the contract that we must "not pierce the integrity of the walls" for my convenience, it seemed that we managed to mutually assure our respective conveniences.  As a minimum, I thought that him getting $900 a month would be enough to do that.

Instead, we have descended into farce over a very expensive, Italian toilet seat. My partner and I hold that said toilet seat was faulty when we arrived, but made the mistake of not pointing this out as we were more interested in the genuinely more convenient task of fixing sausage dogs on our walls. And so when the toilet seat inconveniently broke, which Mr Farukh noticed on the day that he visited the apartment when we weren't there without notice or permission for my convenience, he made it clear that the toilet seat could never have been faulty because it was from Italy. Battle lines were drawn.

The first agreement was to look for a new toilet seat that matched for my convenience, which proved inconvenient because the toilet seat comes from Italy and you can't buy Italian toilet seats in Bangladesh any more. My compromise on that was to purchase an alternative American toilet seat for $60, which was not to Mr Faurkh's convenience as it was made of plastic. Mr Farukh decided to come to my office, of course for my convenience, and drop the bombshell that he now wished to replace the toilet to preserve the style of the bathroom. That would cost $550 but he was willing to drop to a Malaysian model for $350. Whilst my colleagues bit their tongues in dismay, he also pointed out that if the toilet was going to be changed, then the washbasin would equally require replacing in order to retain the coherent style of the bathroom, but if we gave him a cheque for $800, for our convenience, it would all be OK.

After 45 minutes of heated debate over whether the fact that just because a product comes from Italy it can never be faulty, I finally snapped and told him that this was a ridiculous situation. Mr Farukh then played the trump card: you are a foreigner, and you do not appreciate our background nor respect our culture. Thankfully my colleagues were present to hold me back from committing a convenient act of murder on a pensioner, so I excused myself for lunch instead.

So now, like a divorced couple, we are no longer allowed to even speak to each other over the phone. My office now requires that all communication pass through them, and that Mr Farukh cease his requests for 8am weekend "social" calls, or $800 toilet seat replacement plans. But the withdrawal syptoms are hard for us to cope with, and just the other day I had 5 missed calls in the space of 3 minutes from the old man. I took the sixth, as he managed to route it through the office phone system: he just wanted to come for a cup of tea and to chat, because we were friends and the office didn't understand our relationship and so could he come round for a cup of tea. For my convenience of course.

Development as Distraction: Confessions of a Development Practitioner

I've been asked why I do not write about my experiences of working the Bangladeshi development sector.  It would be unprofessional for me to do so, as any criticisms could be misinterpreted by the staff with whom I work, partners that implement the projects I am supporting, and organisation that I am contracted to. But this week the following article turned up in my inbox, and I think it is worth sharing. 

Shahana Siddiqui runs a critical eye over the do-gooding industry

Yet another meeting, yet another round of completely pointless discussion. Each session sounds the same: a model project, awareness campaign, broad national agenda, working with the government -- but no funding, no project; no one at the meeting can actually guarantee any funds -- must check with supervisor to see if funds are available; but this project is crucial for further empowerment, community mobilisation, strengthening institutions … so it goes.

Same old cha-nashta. Two pathetic pieces of apple stare at me with cheap biscuits to add to the palette. The cost-saving lemon tea gets cold while I listen to yet another soap-box monologue in a strange Bangla-English concoction, filled with clichés and development jargon.

Blankly facing the over-enthusiastic program officer from yet another terribly acronym-ed organisation, I start thinking of the e-mails I have to send, the friends I have to meet, and the groceries I have to buy. 

Shahana's attention has left the meeting!

The monologue stops. Everyone is impressed because he used the terms "strategic planning," "consultations," "stakeholder engagement," and my personal favourite, "capacity building" here and there. The last 10 minutes gave no direction, no sense of what this organisation wants, needs, and can do. Yet, they have the audacity to ask for money. 

Worse yet, there are people who are even considering giving them funds!

Welcome to a typical non-profit development sector meeting, oops, sorry, "consultation" -- where nothing really gets done but people love to hear themselves talk. We use every term in development lexicon, seriously believing that verbal diarrhea will end world poverty.

An entire industry has grown out of poverty in Bangladesh, and with that, a cadre of development practitioners who have made a career out of it. I am very much a part of that cadre. 

All to often, I stare at many of such soap-box preaching program officers and wonder about their paths that brought us to yet another time wasting meeting.

Thank God for poverty
The development sector is in many ways Bangladesh's bread and butter. Pictures of poor brown faces, of a rural woman with a cow, or naked children playing in the local pond, are what we sell to the world for aid and investment.

We have successfully created a social science laboratory out of extreme poverty, violence against women and children, disaster (and now of course climate change), and overall lack of opportunities to a decent, respectful life of the millions who continue to live in horrible realities.

And we term this as "social science lab" with great pride. Along with the ethical contentions the term raises, what is more objectionable are the "scientists" who are carrying out these social experiments.

How many of these "scientists" are in fact trained in the ethics of social science? How many development practitioners are aware of how their programmatic interventions actually change people's lives and social fabric? How many of the development practitioners in every level, entered this sector with heart and not as a second choice to a government or corporate position?

The flip-side to these questions can very easily be, is it a pre-requisite for development practitioners to have the passion, the heart? Can this sector be treated like any other and hence the roles viewed like any other job? Is it time to change the entire attitude towards the development sector and approach it as "social business"?

The development sector, especially NGOs, is only recently being seen as a career path by the second and third generation of development practitioners.

The first generation of practitioners entering the sector had the spirit of the post-war reconstruction. Nationals secured positions in international agencies thanks to the disasters, death, and deluge of early 1970s that created positions to be filled by the country's educated class. Others created their own organisations working mainly on reconstruction and economic empowerment.

The "old-schoolers" always say that they stumbled upon this path. There was certainly a general socialist approach to development, the conviction to do something about the extreme poverty. But it was not a career any of them dreamed of.

In many ways, they are the ones who created this sector, gave us the likes of Brac, Proshika, Gonoshastro Kendra, Grameen Trust, and retained the national operations of the international organisations such as Save the Children Alliance, Care, Concern, Oxfam and of course, the global giants like the Word Bank and the UN.

The second generation is in many ways the worst of the lot. They neither had the aspirations of the first generation to reconstruct Bangladesh nor did they ever want to come to this sector the way the third generation has. The systematic desecration of the national education system, the high barrier to entry into the civil service due to corruption and favouritism, and the failure of the private for-profit sector to create enough jobs left the generation coming to age in the 1980s and early 1990s with a grim future.

NGOs of that time provided employment for many of the graduates of that era. Coming from various disciplines, they did not have the formal or professional training to work in the fields or at the policy level.

And now, with the third generation, my generation, development sector has become a career choice.

Public and private university students know more about the development sector and are able to make informed decisions on their career paths. Internship programs are now popular among all university students, both studying in Bangladesh and abroad.

The aim, however, is always for that LSE, SOAS, Sussex masters degrees in any of the development related programs. A couple of internships at any of the leading organisations in the motherland, masters from a leading international university, proclamation of undying love for Bangladesh, and we are set for a glorious career in development. We are the generation that thinks globally, acts locally.

So, we take upon the "NGO look" (cotton sari, teep for the women and khadis for the men) during office hours and attend the "intellectual" gatherings at night. We are the coffee club debating, fusion music loving, Facebooking, Foucault- and Nietzsche-quoting, procession and art gallery attending, all-that-is-ethnic-is-beautiful generation.

While we partake in all that is "Bangali," we are also the best negotiators for the higher pay and better positions at the leading development organisations. Of course, we deserve the high pay irrespective of our limited experiences and even more limited access to the local communities. After all, we are English-speaking and Bengali-thinking -- the bridge between the East and the West -- the generation who will take Bangladesh to the digital, global era.

Making a big difference
Every year, NGOs employ thousands of project managers, field officers, researchers, evaluators, and other made-up titles that usually do not really mean anything, who are unable to think beyond their specific projects and intervention sites. 

From my own experience working with a range of agencies in the development sector, only a handful of the middle-managers are able to look beyond their specific projects and interventions.

Many of them, through their experiences in the fields, develop a strong sense of ethical questioning of whether all these fund pumping and project drafting and evaluating are, in fact, improving the lives of the people.

Changes in project -- additions, eliminations, alterations, no matter how big or small -- can have a significant impact on the beneficiaries. But how many practitioners understand the programs and their changes trickling down from some international consultant who typically spends three working days in Bangladesh and based on "best practices from around the world" drafts a project that affects millions of lives?

A consultant wrote it, so it must be true, it must be right. And if it isn't, we can always hire another international consultant two years into the project for an "external evaluation," and another one for a "progress report."

Not that the national consultants are any better. 

Anyone with somewhat decent English writing and speaking skills can pose as some kind of expert, on violence against women today to investment climate tomorrow, to indigenous rights the day after. What is your development flavour of the month?

If we are not running after foreign consultants or trying to make quick bucks from our own consultancies, we are looking out for new positions in some other institution. 

There is a saying in this sector: There are no goodbyes -- will see you at another organisation in about two years!

Professionals hit the ceilings too fast without any provisions for upward movement. The typical career trajectory is: two years at a local, unknown NGO, then two more with a project office of any of the leading international organisations; if performance is strong, a short-term contract with the funding organisation; and then after over four years of hard work, low pay and mediocre management of a project, the ultimate entry onto the World Bank or UN gravy train!

Once there, we forget about the years of complaining about the two big brothers (especially boro dada World Bank); we forget about the anti-post-Washington Consensus papers written during the masters program, and articles in The Daily Star blasting the neo-liberal institutions. 

That was once upon an ideal time. We didn't know much then. We didn't know any better, we didn't know about the salary structure and the fringe benefits!

Somewhere between job changing in the name of career building, doing consultancies in the name of becoming an expert, and acquiring the second postgraduate degree (with elaborate titles with "development" neatly inserted somewhere) from a "foreign" university, and all the sitting, eating, meeting, over a decade goes by, and ideals and beliefs disappear. We want to believe we still do this for the people, for those brown faces we put up in our reports and slideshows, but truth be told, it stopped being about them a long time ago.

Everything written above is a testimony of everything I am today. I still try to remember what did that 18 year-old think when she held the slum children with boils everywhere and came home and cried to her mother?

The tears, the fire, the impatience, the determination, the conviction to make a change, to make it happen: where did it all go? How did we become so desensitised? When did it become about a career based on the people but no longer about the people? When did we learn to trick ourselves to believe that we were in fact doing good, developing our nation?

Shahana Siddiqui is a "Development Practitioner".

Development as Distraction: Can you picture it yet?

A personal challenge that I’ve put a lot of thought and visualising into (I had two field trips in June which required a lot of travel and looking out of the car window) is what poverty reduction actually looks like as a final product. My work is so focussed on processes and change that all try to reduce poverty both directly and indirectly, and yet until I visited Vietnam last week I had never been able to actually see a physical situation or standard in which I could see that an individual and their household had crossed a certain threshold, in which they and the aid sector would no longer see or classify them as poor.

The point of the exercise for me is to try and establish a feasible goal to which the development sector should work towards and then get out so that the state and market can be left to do the remaining work. We are so good at setting abstract and high-ended aspirational goals such as the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 or successfully upholding the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but these all seem to envisage a shift towards a Western standard of institutions and living. The result of this is that we fail to properly place our intervention within a country’s development and have a clear view as to our role and subsequent exit-strategy.


Crossing the dollar-a-day threshold is too simple, and fails to capture the multiple impacts on a person’s life which dictate whether they remain poor or are able to improve their overall life condition. Anyhow, in Xin Man district of northern Vietnam I visited the house of Mr Dong. He saw himself as poor but he owned his own house and a small amount of land. The house had a cement floor and tin roof thanks to a government distribution scheme. His two boys both attended the satellite primary school which was three fields down. The family owned four goats and a scooter which meant that they could access the local market because he lived next to a sealed road which would get him to the District capital in 40 minutes and the Provincial capital in 2 ½ hours. There was a health centre 20 minutes uphill which could provide basic assistance.

At a very superficial level, Mr Dong seems to have crossed a threshold where he passed from being poor to having a basic and dynamic life situation in which he is able to continue improving his household situation. Scraping beneath the surface may reveal that it is not entirely true, as he bought the scooter using a government soft-loan scheme which he is not sure he can pay back. He still cooks on an open fire in the house which is highly detrimental to his health and that of his family. I didn’t see a toilet on land, and whether or not his kids attend school and pay attention, or if the teacher is any good is anyone’s guess? Perhaps next year there will be a very poor harvest and so the family could go hungry, but there is the difference: from the picture that I had of Mr Dong’s situation I was left with the impression that he would be able to find a way to overcome such a shock (or something similar) within his own means. The improvements to his life situation are now about refining what he has so that he can continue to move upwards.

In a similar way that kids are asked to paint a picture of what they want to be when they are older as a means of assessing their aspirations, it would be very interesting to do a similar process with development workers. We dedicate so much time talking about processes and change and ideal outcomes, that I’m not sure that we actually have a picture of what ends we are working to (incidentally I think that a lot of development workers I know or work with would not participate as they would see it as too childish for such an esteemed field of work). Of course it is contextual, and the picture will change according to a country, and even within a country (i.e. mountain village vs. coastal village). But I now have the picture of Mr Dong’s situation as my guide.