When good projects go awry

I love this story from Darcy, a long-time NGO worker, about a project to stop human trafficking in Bangladesh by enlisting the help of imams. The organizers got a big response and large attendance and were tempted to pat themselves on the back. Then they found out that the Muslim leaders had begun telling followers that here was further proof that women should be kept at home and out of the sight of others who might, after all, be traffickers intending them harm.  Imprisonment would definitely put a dent in trafficking.

Selling, buying and negotiating

Cox's Bazar is where people go to shop and we indulged. Naheed, it turns out, is an amazing bargainer. Now, we knew we had to be fronted by a Bangladeshi because prices for tourists automatically go up -- by a lot. But she is so ferocious a negotiator that I thought at least one clerk was going to cry -- or kill her. (See clerk in top photo who opened up about 16 rolls of material before she found one she liked and then bargained him down to wholesale price.) The jewelery salesman in the second picture was extremely aggravated by her after she got him down to like $8 on a string of pinkish pearls and then declared that if he was willing to sell them that cheap they must be plastic. He dramatically lit a candle and thrust the pearls into the flame to show that they did not melt. She then bought them.

Fish and especially dry fish is a huge ingredient in Bangladeshi diet so shops are filled with a mind-boggling array of specimens. Very colorful.

Forget about ego and fear

Welcoming sign and good thought.

Banyan tree on monastery ground, beloved as the tree under which Buddha taught.

The monastery bore no resemblance to the elaborate and rich Buddhist shrines we toured in Thailand that pompted Cisco to remark at one point: Really, they are a big overdone.
Local woman praying at the monastery

Bangladesh beach activities

Shelling, fishing, av'ing and herding.

Inani Beach

OK, this is what I pictured when we set out on the weekend trip. Inani Beach, about 20 minutes ride from the main beach where we stayed at Cox's Bazar was vast and beautiful even on an overcast day. The stones are actually coral outcropping and we picked up shells everywhere. the water is warm and the beach ran forever. Well, that's what 120 kilometers without a hotel or fast food shack to mar it looks like. Bangladesh advertises: Come see it before the tourists come.

Views from the Sea Crown at Cox's Bazar beach

We stayed in the hotel closest to the beach. It was small but very clean and right on the beach. Rickshaws lined up right outside the exit trying to catch any possible tourist out for sightseeing.
Directly across the street from the hotel on the sand itself were a couple of cafes that served great but fiery hot Bangladeshi food.

But turn from the beach side view from our hotel and we looked down on some slum housing set close to shore.

I tried to shut my western eyes. It would be ridiculous to go to the Bay of Bengal and look for Virginia Beach or Fort Lauderdale Beach. After dinner we went out intending to walk on the beach. Some boys trying to see us shell necklaces stopped us on the street, though. Naheed began talking with them and they told her about how that day they'd seen a man washed out by the current and he's never come back. That happens a lot they told her. Maybe the body would show up in a day or two. (I thought of Doug's note.) As the boys and Naheed were talking her 20-year-old daughter standing near me yelped. What? I asked. And she pointed at a rat running near the sea wall. Two cockroaches that definitely met Florida standards scurried up the wall too. We decided not to walk on the beach.

Packs of dogs, men with cameras and little boys with shell necklaces all prowl the beach in search of opportunity.

Beach at Cox's Bazar

Fisherman setting pole to hole his net in the surf.

Killjoy

I boasted to friends that I was headed for the Bay of Bengal and the longest unbroken coastline in the world -- 120 kilometers of beach. Colleague Doug Cosper, a world traveler and big Asia hand took away some of my excitement with this response:

"Sounds exotic. Swimming in the bay of Bengal, huh? Remind me to tell you about how the Hindus tie certain dearly departed to rocks and send them to the bottom of the rivers that flow into the Bay of Bengal. On second thought, you don’t need to know that right now. Have fun!"

Ship Breakers

The road south from Cox's Beach is piled high with odd junk, commodes in one place, orange lifeboats in another. This is all the bounty of ship breaking, the opposite of ship building.

Bangladesh is now the leading purveyor of this dangerous trade in the world. When the Baltimore Sun came out with a Pulitzer Prize winning story in the late 1990s on workers killed and maimed while working for minuscule wage stripping old ships from around the world for scrap and fixtures, India led the world. Bangladesh's low pay and the vagaries of the Bay of Bengal off its shore that allows workers to get ships much closer to shore (where they are easier and hence cheaper to work on) gave it a competitive edge.

The Sun story resulted in the US Navy halting the shipment of its old vessels to the Indian subcontinent. I don't know what the situation is today. Shipbreaking remains difficult, highly dangerous work and it's horrible for the environment because of the materials and gases released by the process. But Bangladesh is happy for the work. It provides some money for its impoverished population and it turns out scads of scrap metal needed for the massive construction going on in Dhaka.

Now this is troubling because scrap steel is 20 percent cheaper than virgin steel, but it's surprisingly just not as good. That means all those gigantic structures going up in the capital are just a little more vulnerable to faults and collapse than I like high rises to be.

Filling up in Bangladesh

We had to get out of the car whenever we stopped for gas.

No, not because we were cramped and tired from the hours of driving. We HAD to get out of car.

This is because there is a high risk of explosion at Bangladeshi gas stations, our co-worker explained. The drivers of these little CNG's frequently do their own mechanical work and handmade compressors are touchy.

The stations are packed and the wait outside the car can last an hour or more so tiny stores have grown up around the edges of the station that call to customers with streamers of potato chips bags and cartons of sweets on their counters. The stores also offer a ledge which offers protection from the constant rain.

Nothing in the stations is automated. The men taking payments and counting change by hand at a table set up in the explosion zone let me take their picture. This gave them an excuse to stare at westerners. We found further in the south of the country that people felt no need of an excuse.

Some of the reasons it took 11 1/2 hours to get from Dhaka to Cox's Bazar

We saw rickshaw accidents and trucks off the road, but no dropped passengers while traveling.



The backs of trucks and rickshaws are vividly hand painted with designs and scenes, which is nice considering how much time in a day tailgating drivers are looking at the backs of vehicles.

Because we missed our window of opportunity to leave at 5, we ran into all the horrors of Bangladeshi traffic. Surprisingly, the roads are generally in good condition, but they are two-laned, narrow with no shoulders, and overburdened with an array of users including trucks, buses, rickshaws, CNG (gas-powered golf carts), farm equipment and pedestrians.

But worse of all is that while there are traffic rules, they are ignored. While there are traffic police, they generally stay off to the side out of harm's way.

Here's how it works. You are supposed to drive on the left, UK style, but if you really did that you'd plow into rickshaws etc, so everyone drives in the middle of the road as fast as they can and then at the last minute the driver who loses heart first veers sharply to the side, sending rickshaws scattering. Does it sound like a game of Chicken?

There you go. Now, to drive in Bangladesh you also have to do the following: tailgate, have no respect for human life, even children, jam on brakes frequently, and sound your horn as often and for long as possible. The cacophony of horns is so blaring that the warning has lost all meaning. Passengers typically emerge from long voyages with whiplash and raging migraines.

I have just never seen anything like it.

Cows interrupt game of chicken in village near Chittagong



Poor infrastructure makes for big traffic problems in Bangladesh, but this wooden-bottomed bridge outside Cox's Bazar was still picturesque.

Why we had time to travel

We were able to get away from work for a bit because Monday (8/18) is a holiday following Shab-E-Barat.

This is a Muslim holiday, but not one mentioned in the Koran. It is not observed widely outside of Bangladesh and I did not encountered it in Bosnia or Algeria.

But it means Night when Fates are Decided or Night of Forgiveness and it's something akin to a big bargaining session between Allah and his followers. They believe that what will happen to them -- and to all living creatures -- for the coming year is decided on this one night.

With so much at stake, they stay up all night praying in mosques and they cook up a storm of sweets and share them with the poor. Followers also fast during the day, visit the graves of loved ones and, in effect, practice for Ramadan, which is coming up Sept. 1, in hopes of making a good impression on Allah.

Again, I refer to http://www.dhakadweller.blogspot.com/ for a look at the food specialities of the day.

How a nice place in Bangladesh got a name like this

Bazar is a commonly part of place names here -- many of what we'd call "squares" or piazzas in the west are known as bazars here -- Karam Bazar, Mogh Bazar. The bazar part is usually a reference to a big market (bazaar) that served as the landmark that put the place on the map originally. But the question here is -- who was Cox.

For the answer I refer you to a blog written by a university administrator with whom I worked and shopped in Dhaka. Shahnaz is a life-long resident with a big store of information about the country and the capital. She also totally appreciates food and travel and her pet dog (unusual in Muslim populations where they generally are regarded as "dirty." She believes this is a misinterpretation of Koran.) Anyway, she knew the story of Cox, though it is not verified, she warns on her blog.

Hiram Cox was an 18th century captain in the British East India Company and he was appointed superintendent of a region in south Bangladesh that had seen decades of bloodshed between natives and various conquerors of which the British were the latest. He set out making a better life for refugees in the areas who were in conflict with the locals, but he died prematurely with the job undone. Still, he'd made a big enough impression that a market was named after him. And you see what happened as a new town took shape. We end up with a British name.

Shahnaz's blog "Dhaka Dweller" is at http://www.dhakadweller.blogspot.com/

Don't try to bullshit me!

A group of us decided to spend a long weekend on the beaches in and around Cox's Bazar in far south Bangladesh near the borders with India and Burma. This is about a distance from Dhaka equivalent to about a three-hour drive in the U.S., but we were told it would take eight hours if we left early before traffic got bad. We settled on a 5:30 a.m. start time.

I was downstairs in the hotel waiting at 5:20. Yes, Rosemary was early; it's true! But as I have always said, punctuality is an overrated virtue from which I've never derived any reward. I was thinking that at 7:20 when I was still not picked up. As it turned out, the place we'd rented a car from had sent over a sedan with no shock absorbers -- not exactly the most comfortable ride for an 8-hour trip and the battle to get a decent SUV took a couple of hours.

Because we were staying overnight at Cox' Bazar, I'd checked out of the hotel, so had no room to return to to wait comfortably. I was stuck sitting in the lobby near the door. An attentive doorman kept checking on me.

It turns out that a whole different crowd frequents the Westin in the early morning -- young people -- locals not tourists -- fresh from bars and nightclubs that are a fact of life despite the country's Muslim background. The Westin puts on a lavish buffet every morning starting at 6:30 that attracts the hung-over and still-awake.

A long-haired youth in tight jeans and many bracelets tripped out of a shiny black SUV, staggered through the front door fiddling with a cell phone and stopped dead in front of me sitting on my couch. "Excuse me, where are you from?" he asked. I told him New York. "Wow, I'm from New York, where about?" I explained upstate and he immediately said, "Oh, you're not from New York" with such dismissive snobbery he convinced me he really was.

"So, what are you?" he then wanted to know, but he was not looking for the answer "journalist" or whatever I am now. He meant heritage, so I told him Italian-American. "You are not," he flatly said. "I'm sorry if I'm bothering there but I'm very drunk (which was true) and I saw you sitting there and you looked so tourist I had to know. I'm sorry." He explained that he was the son of an army man turned local politician-- which explained the expensive car and the swagger -- and had lived most of his life in NYC. He missed it. "So, what are you?" he asked again and I repeated Italian-American. "You're Jewish!" he announced. "I know. Look at the hair!"

No, really not, I said and was overcome by this creepy feeling of deja vu. For years my mother has compared me to Natalie, the character in one of her favorite books, the historical novel Winds of War. Natalie ends up in a concentration camp with her uncle because she won't stop wandering around Europe as the Nazis get more and more powerful, which is ironic because she had never acknowledged her Jewish background because she was so secular. But wait! I really am not Jewish! So how could I feel disloyal denying a phony background he was giving me?! Because Jews are not well-regarded in this Muslim country that identifies with Arabs, maybe?

"Well, if I were, I'd tell you, but I'm not," is the best I could come up, knowing it sounded awfully close to "I'm not prejudiced, really, some of my best friends are!"

I was grateful the doorman was hovering close by and was about to call him over when the kid thrust his cellphone in my face. I thought he'd been trying to connect with some party friends, but no actually he had been looking for a video he wanted me to see.

A sleek Bengal tiger paced across the tiny screen. He'd filmed it at the Brooklyn Zoo, he told me. He'd never seen a tiger in Bangladesh, the native country he and the animal shared, but he'd seen one in New York City. "I love that place," he said, headed unsteadily toward the escalators up to the buffet with a last apology for bothering me.

The doorman shook his head. I was left wondering if there was something wrong with my hair.

The art of eating with your hands

In Bangladesh, as in Uganda, most people eat with their hands, although they are always carefully polite enough to put out utensils for the foreigners.

You'd think it'd be easy to eat with your hands, after all, kids are naturals at it. But try it. When I did, I slopped slop grains of rice and crumbs everywhere and hated the feel of grease on my fingers.

In Islamic Bangladesh there is another rule that makes eating without a fork even harder -- you can only use your right hand. So now you are left to cut meat, dig bones out of fish, mix sauces into rice and deliver all this into your mouth with one greasy hand. It takes practice.

Here's how it's done.

Scent of Bangladesh

The rainy season means day-long rains for days on end. It's gray and moist and depressing. Mold and mildew become a big problem in this climate, so in many bathrooms and enclosed places to combat the scent of fungus run amok people use moth balls. The combination of scents is powerful -- and distinctive in its own way.

Taking a swig

Right on this news editor's desk in plain view -- it's Jack Daniels, well a bottle anyway.

Liquors bottles emerging from newsroom desks is a long-dead custom in the US and the last place I expected to see it revived was in a Muslim country. Twice today on visits, straight-arrow, polite men have pulled out bottles and apologized.





It's not really Jack Daniels or Stoli's, however. They just use the nice glass bottles for water. Ah.

Stuck in a jam

A bus stopped in traffic shows the scars of driving in Dhaka

It took something like an hour to drive from one section of the city to another this afternoon because of the thick, chaotic traffic. It is normal, my Bangladeshi co-workers told me. Traffic is the built-in excuse for every time you are late to anything in Dhaka because everyone here has lived through a city drive. There are no lanes, no rules, no order. There are occasionally signals, but they do not seemed timed to relieve jams or aid flow. It seems even more out of whack to my eyes because they drive on the right side here, English fashion.

It is not enough to know traffic rules, my co-workers explain, you also have to know human psychology and it helps to mind read since you never know if those rickshaw drivers will veer into your path or that driver there will cut into your lane even though he's headed in the opposite direction.

Driving here is tricky, treacherous, and scary.

There is some thought that all of life in Bangladesh is like this. Maneuvering in traffic is no different than making it through politics or office bureaucracy. The difference, Zahid says, is that you can see it happening in the streets.

Havoc of rising food prices here

Meanwhile, at the Westin, one of the four five-star hotels in Dhaka, guests find fresh fruit and home-baked cookies in their room nightly. It's so unfair.


Here is a story from the BBC earlier this year. One of these bamboo and sheet-metal sheds has been erected in a field near the office where I'm working. It's something like a fenced in park, except without trees and cows and goats wander around. Strange it the middle of a big city. Apparently there is a story to be done in how many of these fields meant for use by all people, including the homeless, have been turned, illegally or somehow, into businesses.

But I digress from food prices.

The article also mentions the US Embassy. It's a huge brick building fenced and gated at the back of a big field. It reminds me of an upstate penitentiary.

Bangladesh faces food crisis
By Mark Dummett BBC News, Bangladesh

There is a simple enough way of judging how serious Bangladesh's food crisis has become this year - it is to count the changing number of people queuing up to buy government-subsidised rice each day.

As the weeks have passed and the sun above Dhaka has become stronger, so the queues are now forming earlier, and more and more people are joining them.

The shops are little more than bamboo and sheet-metal sheds set up on patches of waste ground, and the men working in them are soldiers of the Bangladesh Rifles.

This unit's normal job is to guard the country's borders. But for months now it has been helping preserve the country's stability by selling cheap food to the poor.

The rice they sell is three-quarters of the market price.

The shoppers are no longer just rickshaw pullers and day-labourers, as they were in January, but government workers, security guards and teachers.

Instead of two orderly queues, one of men, the other of women, there are now often four queues, and a scrum of frustrated people at the front.

"The price rise has been really hard on the people of Bangladesh," Milon Das, a primary school teacher, said.

"Though I am a teacher, my salary is low, and I cannot afford rice at the normal markets. This is our country's biggest problem."

The price of a kilogramme of coarse rice, the staple food of Bangladesh's poor, has more than doubled over the past 12 months, to about $0.60 (30p).

By contrast, workers' wages have not changed.

Economic pressures
The owners of Bangladesh's garment factories, the backbone of the economy, are especially reluctant to raise wages, so as to keep the country competitive with China.

Their clothes are exported to many of the West's largest brands, such as Levis, Tesco, Carrefour and H&M.

Local problems, such as worse than average floods and the devastating Cyclone Sidr last year, have compounded global supply problems to push prices up.

The military-backed government has blamed speculators for making the situation worse, but many Bangladeshis think the authorities have been slow to handle it effectively.

At the government-run food shop in front of the American Embassy, many people told me they had responded to the price rise in three ways.

Firstly they had cut one meal a day out of their diets.
Secondly, they had stopped eating meat, fish and eggs.
And last, they had stopped saving money.

Food, they estimated, consumed more than half their earnings. Rent took up almost all the rest.

Social unrest
A former government minister has predicted social unrest if this situation worsens.
One of the shoppers agrees.

"There will be chaos, there will be demonstrations, there will be muggings, there will be hijackings, there will be strikes," Mohammed Akhtar Hossein, who works as a security guard at a luxury block of flats, said.

"If people don't have food in their stomachs they will go out into the streets to take whatever they can because they have to survive."

But salvation is not far away - by the end of April, Bangladesh's most important rice harvest, called Boro, is due.

Bumper crop
The government expects a bumper crop, so its effort now is to get enough food onto the market to last until then.

"This is the critical period; the period when the government really has to offload all it has got," says Dr K A S Murshid, of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.

"The government says it has 100,000 tonnes, but I would have preferred something like 200,000 tonnes."

But despite the short-term relief the Boro harvest should bring, experts agree that the long-term trend of food price rises in Bangladesh will continue.

"A country like Bangladesh, which imports both food and oil, is on the losing side," says Dr Sajjad Zohir, of Dhaka's Economic Research Group.

"I would call the price changes, which followed the high price of oil, as a crime against humanity," he added.