Unheard Voices

Whatever else you can say about Bangladesh, it’s a country in which it is impossible not to feel, to reflect and react. To live in Bangladesh is to slowly come to understand the landscape of the self: there you discover your own map and your own borders: the things which delight, horrify, enlighten and move you. Nothing is hidden from view, nothing is sanitised. It’s a place which offers up to you the best and the worst that you can be. (more…)

Happy New Year and Eid Mubarak to all Drishtipat readers! It’s been great to become part of this community this year, to hear from you, read your comments, and get to know some of you. Here are a few cheery thoughts on consumerism and inequality to start off the new year. (more…)

An evening in the company of a bitter man isn’t an easy prospect. And make no mistake, our old colleague T. is both bitter and angry. But his eyes shine with a fierce intelligence and his stance is shot through with a defiant pride, so on such an evening at least you’re never bored.

We find ourselves in his little house on the campus of a provincial teacher training college. The walls have been painted police-light blue – a forbidding shade which somehow makes them close in. A glimpse into other rooms offers a marginally less gloomy vista: there the walls are moss green, with dark patches of damp. A light bulb hanging from the ceiling stutters weakly. The furniture is basic, a few scattered cane chairs and a simple table, and the only decorations on the wall are family pictures, just slightly askew, and a calendar. You will always find a calendar, it seems, in a Bangladeshi living room. Are we all counting the days here?

Read more here

This piece is based on my professional experience of classrooms across the country. My work has been in public sector schools, both urban and rural, serving the vast majority of the population rather than in the private, well-equipped English-medium schools which cater to the elite.

What is education for? Is it to transmit our collective social wisdom from one generation to the next, to pass on the best that’s been said and done? Is its main purpose perhaps to promote socialisation: preparing the young to work together as a society, follow its customs and achieve social harmony? Or is it to equip young people with the skills and knowledge they need for independent adult life and the demands of the labour market? It’s a basic but vital question, and yet on my many visits to classrooms up and down the country, I’m not sure it’s one we’ve fully thought through in relation to the way we actually teach and learn here.

Classrooms are microcosms of the whole education system, and indeed in many ways of wider society. When all the conventions are implemented, policies drafted, plans made, training given, it’s here that the real thing happens. So what goes wrong?

Read more here

Yesterday, I spent three hours in the humble pursuit of reaching workplace and driving home again. I have slowly become aware that I spend more time in a car in an average week than on any other single activity except sleeping. More than eating, certainly, and it’s rare I have three hours per day in which to write, learn or read.

So I decided to turn my eyes fully to the life of the streets, and this is what I saw.

8am. The first intersection of the day. As usual our minibus was besieged by the halt and the lame, the blind and the limbless, their cries and imprecations just audible within our sealed bubble, above the orchestra of car horns and the sugary pop music playing on Radio Today. But wait a moment. There was a man I had never seen before, being led by a young girl in grimy rags. As he approached I looked at his face. It was unlike any living face I had ever seen. This man had no eyes. No, not the milky, opaque stare of the merely sightless: I am telling you he had no eyes.

In the sockets there was a leathery curve of emptiness, and at the back of the emptiness two livid holes of crimson. They were the colour of human insides: this was not a colour you should ever see on the surface of a human body. I was looking into a man. There were no acid burns on his face: my driver quietly offered the suggestion that perhaps his eyes had been gouged out. We wound down the window and tremblingly offered him a shiny coin. He blessed us, wandered on to the next car. His face was turned upwards, towards the sun.

Read more here…

Here is an article I had published in the Star today. It follows on from Madhabi’s story. We are visiting Madhabi today (Saturday), now that she is in safe keeping and will be reporting back tomorrow.

Powerful things, words. They have the potential to create beauty, to inspire, to liberate and to conjure up lasting monuments to the best that humans can achieve. They can also start wars, offend whole cultures, curse individuals and destroy confidence. In both cases words have energy, strength and vitality. They can be savoured, attacked, defended and justified.

But what happens when words are simply ignored? Here are some particularly splendid and, in our context, spectacularly well-ignored words. Take a look for yourself. Admire their strength. Be stirred and impressed by them:

“[Every] child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding…The child should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity.”
Recognize these?

Read more here

This little tale concerns an event in the sleepy provincial town of Rajshahi, where we lived many years ago during our first stay here. Recently, Jules and I were asked to be godparents to our former cook’s elder brother’s daughter. Here in Bangladesh, where every family relationship has its own exact title, there’s probably a term for cook’s elder brother’s daughter too, but I haven’t learnt it yet.

After a six-hour car journey and a short night’s sleep, we turn up at the neat little Christian Mission church at dawn, the cross up on the roof silhouetted against the expanding morning sky. Long shadows intermingling with gold lozenges of sunlight on the ground. Ducks and geese waddling past, pecking at the earth. The service, we’ve been told, is to begin at 7.00. It would appear the British concept of a Sunday lie-in is a little lost on the Church of Bangladesh.

Read more here and view photos here.

It’s not everyone who gets the chance to go overseas to study for two years, and she was delighted about it. But my friend A. was also a little melancholy over coffee, two days before her departure. ‘On my way here’, she said, ‘I saw an old man walking under a palm tree, and noticed the way the tree moved in the rain. Then I realised I would not be seeing them for a long time. And of course never in that exact same way again’. And so was born a new concept for those of us who spend our lives away from home: to ‘pre-miss’ (vb) meaning ‘to start missing something before you’ve actually left it behind’.

And indeed her pre-missing was prescient, for here she is a mere two weeks later, writing from her distant new home in New Zealand: “…not only the man under the tree, I miss the things that used to make me annoyed, like traffic jams, horns on the road, domestic conspiracies, etc… Everybody likes it here, because it is quiet and peaceful. But for me, it is too quiet to bear. And here I have to be so sophisticated that I should not laugh loudly, should not stare at strangers, should not talk much…”

Click here to read the rest…

Eid Mubarak to everyone. I hope you’re all having a well-deserved break
and enjoying that quality time with your families. But as you
celebrate this wonderful time, please don’t let Madhabi slip from the
headlines and from your memories.

I wrote a piece about her today. It begins like this:

“In her dreams she soars above the streets of Dhaka. In these nocturnal
flights there are no locked doors, or fierce guards, and she can rise
up into the sky, weightless, looking down on the buildings, the trees
and the streets far below. But then she wakes up on the cold, hard
floor and remembers: she’s a prisoner. A child. She wasn’t born to
fly.”

Read more at Morristhepen …

Photo of Kalpana Majumdar who allegedly shoved Moni Mala (15) and Madhabi (10) off the 6th floor terrace. Moni Mala died on the spot.
Mrs Majumdar’s husband Sunil is senior vice president in Eastern bank. They have a grown up son who studies in BUET. Both of them failed to prevent abuse on Madhabi at the hands of the mistress of the house.

It was with some trepidation that I approached this assignment. Yes, yes, I know it’s a normal part of life for millions of people here and all round the world, but it was my first time, ever. Would I cope? Would I faint? Would I prove myself unworthy? Or sail through? Only one way to find out.

For this, my dear brethren and sistren, is of course the holy month of Ramadan, (or as many greetings cards insist, ‘the holly month’), in which my colleagues, like the vast majority of Muslims, fast from sunrise to sunset for thirty days. Difficult, from the outside, to work out what’s going on in people’s heads (or their stomachs) towards the end of each day, so I decided to look on the inside instead. Not literally. And just for a day. Call it a mini-fast. A fastlet.

To read more, please go here

There’s a family story that on my first trip abroad at the age of ten - to exotic Belgium, no less (I still recall the raw air and the excitement buzzing in my head as I stepped on to the coach outside Lakefield Junior School one dark morning) - the headmaster wearily and somewhat incredulously informed my mother, as we all tumbled out of the bus on our return, that I hadn’t sat down all week.

And so began a life of travel that has carried on to this day – a restless, breathless journey towards the new, an accumulation of experiences, memories, chance encounters, loves lost and found, on which the latest stop is Bangladesh. It’s all a long way from my schooldays. For sure, I knew I loved languages from the very first French lesson, but I was unaware of how this would translate into a life on the move, visiting over fifty countries so far for between a weekend and three years, and feeling at home in every one of them.

After all this hurtling, here and now: a rare moment of stillness, The fan’s turning slowly above me, doing its best to work up a feeble breeze. Outside the air is humid and the trees are lush, silhouetted against a sky of navy ink. It is evening: there is the occasional jangling bell of a rickshaw and the cicadas are singing, but otherwise all is silent, for once, in this tumultuous and chaotic city.

I am here in Dhaka as a teacher educator, working with teacher trainers from across the country, developing new learning materials. We’re trying to move away from the lectures which have dominated education here since the first teacher stood in front of a class, and towards a teaching approach which gives students a voice, and tries to keep them involved. It’s slow, patient and rewarding work – and it’s kept me coming back to Bangladesh for the last eight years.

But is that really why I am here? Or is it the sheer fascination of a country like this? I see my relationship with Bangladesh as a kind of arranged marriage, in which, rather than falling in love at first sight, you are first introduced to your partner, get married, and then learn to love over the years. And even though there may be lots of other engaging countries around the world, there is something special in this place. I carry a little piece of Bangladesh deep within me now, wherever I am.

And by the way, I still haven’t learnt to sit down…

I’ll be back each week with pieces for you to read at your leisure, offering a little glimpse of Dhaka for all you nostalgic expats, so please tune in!

Everybody:

We have added a new category in Drishtipat blog called I -Witness.

This will feature eye witness accounts by Andrew Morris - a ‘Welsh Guy’ living in Dhaka. Andrew has traveled to many remote places in Bangladesh, observed the life styles of the common people, captured them in his camera and had blogged about them in his site ‘Morristhepen’.

By profession Andrew and his wife Julietta Schoenmann are freelance education consultants, trainers and teachers with extensive experience in Asia, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe.

Andrew bhalo Bangla bolte pare (along with 14 other languages). He claims to be turning more and more ‘deshi’ every day. He enjoys all fruits (especially mango, but he could’ve meant his favorite café) and vegetables except ‘korolla’ (in his words ‘beshee titaa’) of Bangladesh. He enjoys the green fields and the sense of constant hubbub…and likes nothing more than to write about it.