Critters...

Bugs, and big ones at that, are a part of traveling to a more tropical climate.  (Although, it is worth noting that bugs are a part of my life at home too...I think my sister killed over 40 spiders in the first two weeks she lived in my apartment). 

Mosquitoes are plentiful here in Dhaka (and they love me), so I sleep under a mosquito net. Thankfully, they don't carry malaria. Cockroaches are also plentiful - they mostly live in our kitchen, but I also have a fairly large cockroach family living in the cracks and crevices in my bathroom.  There are so many that it is usually not worth killing them - more just emerge from the cracks.  It's a bit of a losing battle.  However, I have learned that you have to kill them carefully, or you have a really big mess to clean up afterward!  I think it is really funny when the cockroaches are "hiding" in holes in the sink, but you can still see their antennae sticking out and moving around...reminds me of when little kids play hide and seek! (you know, when they just can't quite get themselves fully hidden even though they think they are!)

Here are a couple of my bathroom cockroaches...these are some smallish ones...

There are also some impressive spiders in Bangladesh - they are huge!  I've seen one big spider in my house which I just pretended didn't exist and I've never seen it again, but the really big spiders can be seen close up in Lawacherra Rainforest (the same place I saw the gibbons and got leeches on my feet)!

Here's a couple of pictures - they were pretty cool to look at because you could see their body parts in so much detail!  In this first one you can see the bug the spider had killed and wrapped up (beside it in the web).  This picture is of the spider's underside.

Here's another shot...

And, one more, just because!!

Traffic in Dhaka

So, just to give you a sense of where I live, this is a short video I took of the traffic on an average day in Dhaka. This road is one of the main roads near my house - about a 20 minute walk away from my apartment. Thankfully, there are many pedestrian overpasses on this road, which is where I took this video from.

Things that you might notice in the video...

-car alarm sirens that some of the buses install as their horns in an effort to get other vehicles to move out of their way (it's not terribly successful, and just irritates their foreign passengers (aka me) to no end!)
-people crossing the street despite the presence of pedestrian overpasses!
-rickshaws waiting to cross the highway (I was trying to get the video to include that sight as well, but didn't succeed).
-cars and buses cutting each other off constantly...

When I take a rickshaw and I need to go across this road, I always get off the rickshaw on one side, pay the driver, and then walk over the pedestrian overpass and get on another rickshaw. No sense in risking my life and his!! There are traffic police that stop traffic, but they are not always listened to and I am just not ready to risk crossing in a rickshaw when I can walk much more safely!

The buses are all dented and scraped along their sides from cutting each other off in traffic...pretty scary looking. Dhaka is not the place to drive if you are concerned about the condition of your car...you will get scraped and bumped by other vehicles.

The honking really got to me in the first couple of weeks, and some days it still does irritate me because it seems so senseless (why must we all honk when no vehicle is moving???) but for the most part now I can tune it out.

Traffic in Dhaka...always interesting!!

Tea Estates & Reflections on Poverty

One of the highlights in Srimongol is seeing and visiting the many tea estates in the area.  The tea plants grow on many of the hills, and there are often tea pickers working, picking the tea leaves that will be used to make the tea.  Pictures show it best...

Notice the tea picker in this photo?

A tea picker...

The tea grown in this area tastes great, and I'm definitely going to bring some home with me! 

I found it easy to look at the tea estates and the tea pickers and think about how beautiful it all looked, but then I found out that the tea pickers only make 48 taka a day (about 70 cents Canadian).  This was a bit of a sobering realization and it saddened me - 48 taka is barely enough to buy food to eat, let alone have anything extra to spend on other expenses of living.  This is an unfortunate reality for millions of people in Bangladesh. 

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, and it is also the most densely populated.  As a result, labour is cheap, and so you find people like the tea pickers working extremely hard for very low wages.  And even still, there are millions in Bangladesh who are unemployed, and many resort to begging on the streets.  Nearly everywhere I go, I am asked for money (taka), and the condition that many of the beggars are in is heart-wrenching.  People with paralysis, missing limbs, birth defects, and blindness, the old and the very young (babies & toddlers) can all be found on the street.  Bangladeshis do give to beggars quite regularly, so a subsistence living can be made by begging, but it is painful to witness. 

Being here and seeing this first-hand is definitely challenging...gives me lots to process and think about.  At the same time, I am encouraged by the potential that Bangladesh has - the people here are not blind to the challenges that face the country, and bit by bit they are working to improve the situation here.  Many of our nursing students are passionate about doing this, and that is really exciting - they want to go and make changes in their country, be leaders in health care, and provide care to those who need it most and who are often overlooked.  I'm excited about the potential that they have to accomplish this!

World Cup fever!

Well, the World Cup has just started, and preparations have been underway in Bangladesh for the last month. Flags are flying on rooftops, from apartment windows, from flagpoles in the middle of villages, and men are sporting jerseys all over the place. The two favourite teams here are Argentina and Brazil, and pretty much every Bangladesh male has chosen one or the other to support. They are not half-hearted in their support…apparently, fights between the two groups of supporters are not uncommon. I was surprised that even when we left Dhaka, the World Cup fever was just as strong…it was great to see even small towns/villages flying the flags of Argentina and Brazil.

I had a pretty funny interaction with one boy as I was walking in the rural areas near the town of Srimongol. Most Bangladeshis know very little English, but most people know “hello, how are you?” and “good afternoon”, and boys and men will often ask us “where you from?” or “what country?” So this kid who was about 13 or 14 walked by Corina and I on this rural road, and he asks, “Where you from?” So we tell him – “Canada” and “the Netherlands”. Then I said to him, “World Cup – Brazil or Argentina?” At that point, his face broke out into a huge smile, and said, “Argentina! Argentina!” with his arms above his head in a cheer for his team. It was pretty cute! World Cup fever surpasses all language barriers, apparently…

Here are some pictures of Argentina supporters in Srimongol town…the flag they were carrying was pretty impressive!!

 The flag was long!!!  And it definitely attracted attention!

They paraded through the down-town area too!  Go Argentina!!

And, just for fun...here's a couple of guys taking cell phone pictures of Corina and I when we are out walking...they asked if they could take our picture, so I agreed with the condition that I could take theirs too!  People take our pictures on their camera phones all the time...and usually they don't ask...it's a little weird, but oh well!  Foreigners are really uncommon here, so we tend to attract a lot of attention. 

Taking the train...

This past weekend I took a train trip up to a more rural area of Bangladesh, which was really nice – so good to get away from the noise and busyness of the city, even if only for two days. We went to a town called Srimongol, which is where a lot of tea estates and fruit gardens are. It is a more hilly area of Bangladesh, so that was a nice change as well (much of Bangladesh is flat and covered in water).

We had to get up early to catch our train, and at 5:30 in the morning we met our rickshaws to get a ride to the station. At the train station, we found a place to wait where we didn’t attract too much attention – as foreigners in this country, it is not unusual for a crowd of people to circle around just to look at you, and for beggars to come up to you constantly and persistently, but we avoided that for the most part. The people we were sitting near were surreptitiously reading our tickets to find out where we were going, so I knew that they would tell us when our train came. Sure enough, they let us know, and a couple of people also looked at our tickets and made us follow them right onto the train and into the right car. (There is basically no way of knowing what car to get on unless you can read Bangla, and because Bangla is an entirely different alphabet I can’t read anything here!) One lady took us right to our seats, told the people who were sitting in them to move, and then stayed with us for most of the trip! People here definitely do want to do whatever they can to help visitors to their country – it is really nice. We’ve had similar experiences everywhere we go in Bangladesh – someone will always come to our aid, whether we ask them to or not!

There are a few different classes of tickets you can buy for the train – air conditioned compartment, first class compartment, assigned seat in the regular compartment, and standing room in the regular compartment. Riding in the cargo cars or on the top of the train is the least expensive way to travel…and it is a pretty common sight. Every train has at least a few people on top of it (and apparently a lot of people during busy travel times). We had assigned seats in the regular compartment. The windows all open, and there are fans as well, so it was actually pretty comfortable… not exactly the cleanest, but still, not bad! The temperature was bearable, especially because we had lots of wind blowing into the car.

Here are some pictures from the trip.

 Transporting bricks down the river.

The inside of the train...not too full, thankfully!  And the fans in the ceiling were working...which we appreciated during the times when the train had to stop to let another train pass.

Outside of the train, during one of our stops along the way.

Who knew one person could carry so much hay on their head at one time??

Pictures and stories from the rainforest and tea estates to come soon!

Being a tourist in Dhaka...

A couple of weeks ago, one of the other volunteers, Rhodina, and I decided to get out and see some of the tourist sites in Dhaka.  There aren't many...tourism isn't really a big thing here, and the city is mostly just full of people...but we figured that we should try to get to at least a few of the places that the travel books suggest.

We decided to take a taxi to our first location, and paid way too much for it, but oh well (and really, too much was about $8 Canadian dollars for an hour long ride, so not that big a deal)!  We went to Lalbagh Fort, which is a fort built in the late 1700s.  We walked around, looked at some really old buildings...it was interesting.  Here are a couple of pictures...

We also discovered that Lalbagh Fort is a dating/courting location!  Bangladesh is a primarily Muslim country, and it is extremely unusual to see men and women together and showing any type of affection towards each other in public.  So we thought it was pretty funny to pay our admission fee and go into the fort, and find that it is full of couples all sitting close to each other, sometimes even touching or holding hands!!  A few of the women were even wearing burkas.  I took a picture...not a very good one, but you get the idea...

We were the only Western tourists at Lalbagh - everyone else was Bangladeshi.  Apparently, seeing Western tourists is a pretty interesting and unusual, cause every few minutes someone would come up to us and ask us to pose for a camera-phone picture.  Or maybe they just thought that a Canadian girl in a salwar kameez was interesting and unusual...  Either way, I thought it was really funny when a whole family came up to me, grouped around me, and started taking pictures!! Here's me in my salwar kameez...

After Lalbagh, we took a rickshaw to try to find the Armenian Church, another historic site.  The rickshaw puller had no idea where it was, even though he said he did, so we took a very circuitous route to get there, which involved stopping multiple times to ask directions, traveling up and down bumpy alley-like streets in Old Dhaka, asking for more directions...until we finally got there.  From outside the walls, the church was unimpressive, but inside it was pretty interesting!  This church was built in the late 1700s or early 1800s, so it has a long history.  Here are a few pictures...

Last stop of the day was at New Market, which is this huge market that sells pretty much anything and everything you might need...clothes, shoes, housewares, books, etc. etc. etc. By that time we were too tired to do any shopping, though, since shopping at this kind of market is pretty high pressure ("sister, sister, come look, very nice") and involves negotiating the price of items (to at least half, if not more, of the original price that they tell you...and even then that is still more than Bangladeshis pay!)

To get home, we planned to take a taxi, but couldn't find one.  So, bus it was...fortunately, we knew the name of our bus stop, and people were really helpful in making sure we bought the right bus ticket and got on the right bus.  One guy even came and checked to make sure that we would get off at the right place. The people here are overall really helpful, and I feel quite safe here.

I wish I could describe the craziness of traffic in this city, but I really don't think I could do it justice...and pictures don't do it justice either because they don't really show the chaos and noise that is rickshaws, cars, buses, trucks, and CNGs all trying to use and cross 4-lane highways with no clear traffic rules except for the biggest vehicle wins.  I try to take buses as much as possible for that reason, although they are an adventure in themselves...and I probably shouldn't have as much confidence in their size as I do.  The fortunate thing is that there is so much traffic that the buses typically don't get going very fast.

These are a few of my adventures getting around Dhaka city!  Next weekend I am hoping to take the train out of the city for a day or two...just to get away from the noise and busy-ness here and try to see a different side of Bangladesh.  So hopefully the rain co-operates!!

PS Facebook is still blocked by the government of Bangladesh...and it's too much bother to try to find a proxy server that works...so I continue in my Facebook-less state for a while!