On Bangladesh and Contentment

I’ve recently returned to Sri Lanka from a nine-day trip to Bangladesh where I observed a dizzying array of conferences and workshops. I’ll probably end up reporting on their content as part of my internship duties, so I won’t go over those details too much here. In a nutshell: The conferences were a mixture of positive and negative elements. Some were quite inspiring and productive, others less so. They were also not the predominant reason I traveled to Bangladesh.

I now find myself in a difficult spot: to recount the details of my nine days in Bangladesh would be difficult enough had two days of sickness and fever between now and then not obscured the crispness of my memories. In many ways, the trip was a path-determining experience, one that will undoubtedly shape my approach to life from now on. I have two regrets: first, that I contracted some sickness there, manifesting itself upon my return to Colombo, and second, that I didn’t make the time to travel to the slum village across the river from my inn.

If you are not expecting them, the crowdedness and overall debility of Dhaka may blindside you when you arrive. You will see urban poverty in so many dehumanizing ways, and it will unease you. You will see wrinkle-faced women shoved away from your group by gruff security guards because they were begging from you too aggressively, and you will be relieved to see them go, despite your conscience’s outcries. You will see diseased dogs nipping at equally-diseased centipedes amidst piles of discarded plastic and Styrofoam on the shores of a grey river. You will smell piss and shit at every depression in the sidewalk and you will wonder why the hell no one has taken care of any of these things. Then, you may be ushered to your air-conditioned room on the third floor of your inn (high enough above the level of the streets that you can avoid looking at them), where you can take refuge in cookies, tea, and at least eight minutes of hot shower.

If, however, you know that there are always too-many layers to every story for them to be fully told, you’ll try to take some steps towards unpacking a city like Dhaka. The culturally-shocking scenes will not so quickly distract you from what you would otherwise immediately begin to see: human life, living with dignity however it can, despite hardship and suffering, deliberate neglect and disregard. You will see the corruption of government in its manipulation of LDC status to line the pockets of a tiny elite. You will know that the local mafia somehow has a stranglehold on the lives of almost-every beggar you come across, and that if you give the beggar a taka, it will go straight to a criminal. You will notice that the simplest infrastructural upgrades could easily be handled with at-hand resources and the abundant labor, and you will see that there must be powers working against having usable sidewalks and public sanitation. And later on, outside the city, you will see hectares upon hectares of rice paddies, vegetable farms, and coconut plantations, and you will know that in a land with so much productivity, no one should be going hungry.

Something is wrong here.

To you, my reader, I will admit that I vacillated between the extremes of an exhausted, culture-shocked tourist who too refuge in coffee and hot water, and a critical observer who hopes to see an end of the misery of places like Bangladesh. So much of what I’d been shown and told about Bangladesh has been the story of disaster, poverty, and source-less deprivation. What is not shown in media, particularly in the US, is the story of the peoples’ resilience in the face of disaster and deprivation, as well as the real sources of these disasters and depravities: a climate spun into chaos by uncontrolled (Northern) greenhouse gas emissions as well as the double-punch follow-through of a malfunctioning development mechanism and a corrupt local governing elite. Ordinary Bangladeshis are, from what I could tell, tired of being labeled “Least-Developed”: in their view, as long as that label sticks, their state will not improve. Ordinary Bangladeshis are also, from what I saw, some of the most hospitable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. You don’t see on CNN just how brilliant their smiles can be.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I come from one of the most-contradictory cultures on the planet, the number of contrasts Bangladesh takes in stride is startling. Ultra-rich/ultra-poor. Urban “investment”/rural neglect. One of the highest concentrations of development organizations on the planet/LDC status. Tri-axle dump-trucks FULL of fruit barreling down the roads/inadequate calorie and nutrient intake in the hinterlands. What all of it seems to boil down to is an obscene maldistribution of wealth. But even more than wealth, per se, it is the (deliberate?) denial of necessities to those at the bottom of the hierarchy of capital. It is the domination of the poor and powerless by local and international elites, local and multinational industries and corporations, and an international development project that counterintuively benefits from never-quite-alleviating poverty.

What’s upsetting to a self-critical Western psyche like my own is that my complicity in such a system has heretofore implicated me as an accessory to these crimes. Investigations into Bangladeshi sweatshops for ready-made garments put a spotlight on the West’s guilty, greedy consumption habits a few years ago, and there the story seemed to end. We’ve not yet matured, it would seem, to being able to question the validity of the economic system wherein setting up sweatshops in Bangladesh to produce items for sale in the US makes fiscal sense. How much misery must be stitched into our clothes for us to demand a different way? Must we feel such misery ourselves?

My trip to Bangladesh was too short. I intent to rant about NGOs and their conferences a little while later, but I can excuse myself for a moment by saying that such conferences had my hands thoroughly tied for most of my ten days in that beautiful country. I was present enough to see, however, that there is something thoroughly offensive about building elevated highways above slums instead of building meaningful livelihoods for those who live in them.

I would like to end this short, disjointed post on a more moderate note. Most people I saw in Dhaka, Chittagong, and in-between were healthy-looking. They were also remarkably easygoing.

There was a quiet sort of friendliness that exposed itself as joy in the muddy, roadside game of football, in the explosion of laughter at some internal joke from the crowd of brilliantly-saree’d women returning to their bamboo-stilted village, and in the basic generosity of those few-dozen shopkeepers who saw the rain-drenched foreigners trying to keep themselves dry in a monsoon and offered plastic bags or the shelter of their awnings. Misery and contentment are surely at odds with one another. Now, I see just how important it is for us to seriously examine the systems that produce misery and rob people of happiness all over the world. This is the most important task my generation faces.