Four Weeks in Bangladesh - By Susan Harb

She went to the impoverished Asian nation to help. A month later, she'd fallen in love with it.
By Susan HarbSpecial to The Washington PostSunday, September 3, 2000; Page E01
You awake to the chant of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, and the urgent cawing of the crows. The prophet Mohammed said it is better to be praying than sleeping. The crows, like the rest of Bangladesh, simply are saying they are hungry.
It is 5:30, and the Muslim world is stirring at daybreak.

Clap, clap, clap.
Next comes the sound of the housegirls making chapati for breakfast, rhythmically patting the unleavened bread into circles that will be rolled thin and puffed on a hot griddle.
The soft clapping resounds throughout the country. It is a ritual repeated by servants in the marble-floored homes of the privileged, by poor women in bamboo villages along rice paddies, in makeshift slum dwellings as 127 million people awaken and the lucky ones have a warm piece of bread to eat.
The streets are still quiet at this early hour, a moment worth savoring in a country where you are never alone.
Then it begins. First one, then another brightly painted bicycle rickshaw twists and turns down labyrinthine alleys, gathering force and numbers until they form a colorful rivulet that finally empties into a roaring road and jostles along with pedestrians, laden handcarts, three-wheel taxis, mini-buses, big buses, chauffeur-driven cars, overloaded trucks, thin chickens, sacred cows and an occasional water buffalo.
The daylong musical tunes up. Bicycle bells jingle. Chickens squawk. Brick chippers chink, chink, chink. Vendors haggle. And horns honk.
"The horn is everything," said a Dhaka driver gravely.
It means I am passing, I am stopping, Get out of my way, I am bigger, I am bewildered . . . by the world's most densely populated country trying to move about on the equivalent of a secondary road in dire need of repair and further obstructed by a flourishing curbside culture of bamboo hovels and open-cooking fires, of fishmongers and roadside welders, of brick piles and trash heaps, of one-room shops selling everything from herbal remedies to fan belts, prayer rugs to glass bangles, single cigarettes to mosquito coils and condoms.
But move it does.
Street stalls do a brisk breakfast trade in rice, chapati and chai, the universally loved sweet milky tea. Sari-clad sweepers, squatting and scurrying like crabs, brush up piles of refuse and debris that quickly will be gone over by garbage pickers and children, cows and crows. Street repair crews ignite smelly asphalt cookers for the day's hard labor. Neatly dressed children with backpacks wend their way to school. Rickshaw wallahs ferry workers to stores and offices. Fruit and vegetable peddlers display artfully stacked pyramids of oranges and papayas, potatoes and carrots, eggplant and okra. Baskets of eggs and chickens reach towering heights on the heads of delivery men. Rolls of rebar destined for countless half-completed construction projects dangle dangerously over handcarts, ready to impale the unsuspecting when traffic comes to an abrupt halt--which it does every 10 yards or so. Two men urinating in the gutter carry on a conversation and smoke as they go about their business. A Land Rover with tinted windows and oversize bumpers, appearing as out of place as a water buffalo on Pennsylvania Avenue, makes its way down the street, horn blasting to part the riffraff and get to where it's going ahead of everyone else.
This is what one wakes up to each morning in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is best known as a country of extreme poverty, overpopulation, disease and one natural disaster after another, the latest being the slow and potentially fatal poisoning of some 18 million to 24 million people by ground arsenic in rural tube wells.
The equivalent of almost half the U.S. population lives in a nation the size of Iowa, except during the monsoon months, when two-thirds of Bangladesh often is under water. Population density is 2,200 per square mile. Fifty percent of the people are below the poverty level, only 38 percent of adults can read and write, and the country cannot grow enough food to feed its citizens. It has to import rice from India. Add to these woes deadly seasonal cyclones and floods, extreme lead pollution in cities that is crippling young children at an alarming rate, a social and religious climate that keeps many women secluded in their homes, and an increasing exodus of the educated--the country's potential leaders--to seek advance schooling and jobs abroad, and the problems appear insurmountable.
"Ah, Bangladesh, Bangladesh." You could hear the despair in our driver's voice as we sat in gridlock on a street leading into the capital city of Dhaka and watched the sad, colorful, heart-stopping, courageous parade of humanity carry its burdens home at day's end. On that night, it took 2 1/2 hours to drive 12 miles. We had three minor collisions--two with rickshaws, one with a bus.
It's easy to report on the poverty and problems and to understand why 90 percent of foreign visitors, mainly businesspeople in the garment industry, never leave Dhaka and, once there, rarely venture beyond one of the city's two tourist-class hotels.
But Bangladesh is so much more than the "basket case" of Asia, as Henry Kissinger called it 26 years ago. It offers the hearty traveler a worthwhile challenge and a rare look at a world lodged in another era. From the window of a train, the countryside is a beautiful mosaic of rice paddies and widespread fertile delta plains. The cities, albeit dusty and downtrodden, have charm, too, in their ancient Mogul style and ancestry. If you look beyond Bangladesh's hardships and celebrate its spirit, you will find resilient, hard-working people with a distinctive cultural heritage of poetry, music and dance and an incredible hand for weaving, embroidery and pottery.
I visited Bangladesh as a member of a Rotary International group study exchange team, spending a month there in February, its dry springtime. I stayed with host families throughout the country, living in Muslim homes, sitting at their tables, playing with their children, listening to their stories, learning of their modest hopes and monumental frustrations, and again and again hearing fierce pride in their voices when they spoke of their beloved Bangladesh.
The contrasts that occur in a country with many very poor, a few very rich and very little middle class still managed to jar my four teammates and I, though three of us had spent time in other developing nations and have seen the disparity between the haves and have-nots. But the commonality of our religions and cultures--Christian and Muslim, Western and Asian--reminded us of the universality of love of family, of striving for betterment and of the hopes we share for our children and the world they will live in. And, as everywhere, we were united at the dinner table in our mutual enjoyment of food.
"This will be the last meal you eat with knives and forks," declared Sadeque Ali, our Dhaka host, as we sat down to our first repast in Bangladesh. Like most of the meals we would eat in the next month, this was a family gathering--three brothers and their wives, their six children, a sister and her children, plus three guests.
"Watch how I do it," continued our host as he mixed rice and dal (the daily staple of lentil and spices reduced to a broth) with his fingers and deftly brought it to his mouth.
From family breakfast to formal banquets, the Bengali approach to food is essentially tactile, adding another dimension to the pleasure of eating and requiring a personal technique. Since rice is the universal food, it is a major player in one's style. Some ball it up with other foods and pop it in their mouths with Michael Jordan finesse; others mash everything together and slurp it.
We Americans often reached for the chapati as a means of transport. One team member would end up licking his fingers up to his elbows at meal's end. Mealtime never lost a sense of adventure or playfulness when you had permission to eat with your hands, especially when dressed up at a banquet. It was fun.
A typical Bengali meal would be a variation of a lunch we had shared with our host family in Sylhet, an area in northeast Bangladesh known for its terraced tea gardens and pineapple plantations. This midday menu, usually served around 2 p.m., included fish curry, grilled chicken, beef kabobs, cooked red cabbage, fried potatoes and cauliflower, dal, bhat (plain boiled rice), biryani (Muslim-style rice cooked with onion, spices and mutton), a salad of cucumbers, onions and carrots dressed with fresh lime juice, chapati and naan, olive chutney, mango pickles and a dessert of rice pudding, which we ate with a spoon.
"Bangladeshi people like to eat," said our hostess, smiling. She brought the meal to the table with the help of two housegirls. "Most every Indian restaurant in America and England has a Bangladeshi cook in the kitchen," said her husband. Like other well-to-do Muslims, he was not sinewy and taut like the rickshaw wallahs and street laborers. Neither was his wife. I came home 10 pounds heavier and feeling gluttonous about gaining weight in a country where many survive on a daily bowl of rice and chilies, and where, at a picnic, we watched village fathers pick the chicken bones off our finished plates and pass the leftovers to a line of eager children.
At home with just our host families, the men and women mixed freely. However, at informal dinners elsewhere, or with guests in the house, the sexes parted. The women would be in a separate room with the children or massed at one end of the living room, talking among themselves. As American women, we were exceptions and sat and ate with the men; the women and children ate when we finished. Rarely did the women join us in conversation or mix socially with their husbands and guests, even in well-educated homes.
All women, from those working in the rice paddies to doctors, wore the traditional dress of a sari or a Muslim tunic and pajama pants called salwar kameez. Never did we see nationals in Western attire.
"We wake our husbands to the sound of chirping birds," explained one wife, as colorful glass bangles jingled on her arms.
The chirping of the birds, like the cawing of the crows, is a constant melody, for even the poorest have one or two glass bangles; the rich have dozens in different colors to match every sari.
Bengali women are striking in appearance, with regal features and carriage, creamy skin, dark flashing eyes and long blue-black hair worn in a bun and often wrapped with flowers or adorned with silver ornaments.
While the women are reserved in demeanor, they have an exuberance for color in the saris they wear--turquoise, lime, purple, orange. This sense of style is obvious in the cotton saris of the poor as well as the embroidered silk saris of the rich. We called the women butterflies, for they gracefully floated in 20 feet of fabric, artfully wrapped like an exotic present. In our wrinkled linen dresses and sensible Teva sandals, we felt klutzy and somewhat abrasive. We soon adopted Indian dress.
The comfortable lives of our host mothers is far different from the hardship of most Bangladeshi women. The women we stayed with had house servants to do the cooking, marketing, cleaning and laundry; yardmen to tend the garden; drivers and security guards. (All the homes we stayed in had bars on the windows and were enclosed by high walls and locked gates.) The children went to private schools and were learning English. Our Dhaka host spent a third of his annual income on private schools and tutors for his two young children.
But whether rich or poor, households reflect the strength and sanctity of the Indian family. They live among generations. One compound housed five brothers, a sister and their parents. The three brothers in our Dhaka family had built three new houses side by side within a common walled area. Sometimes the family compounds contain separate houses; most often, it's a three-story building with a separate family living on each floor.
All the marriages had been arranged; all our hosts expected to help select the partners of their children.
"The wedding comes first, the romance second," said Waseque Ali, telling of his marriage to Humayra.
Ali brought up the topic of arranged marriages at breakfast one morning; he wanted us to understand the custom. "The people who love us the most, our mothers and fathers, aunties and uncles, pick someone they feel will match our spirit and complement us. They know us best and they want our happiness.
"Then, once we are married, we have this whole community of family who wants the marriage to succeed. They are there to help the couple, to listen, to be sympathetic."
Said another man at dinner: "Our romance starts after we are married and begin to find out all these wonderful things about each other. I come home from work and the woman I will spend the rest of my life with is there. We sit down to dinner and learn about each other. She likes roses. She likes to read. Who is this woman? I tell you, it is very exciting."
"Our homes are empty," lamented Shabee Ali, a restaurant owner whose son and daughter are attending school in Pennsylvania. "All the children are gone. Everyone's home is quiet."
For education, the children travel to Australia, England and the United States. Too often they do not return. Almost everyone we met, including the prime minister, had relatives living abroad--a brother in California, a sister in New Jersey, Miami or New York, a daughter and grandchildren in Washington.
"My daughter will get her degree and come home and marry a Bangladeshi boy," said Ali confidently. Her daughter, however, called during our visit to persuade her parents not to make her return home for summer break. She had a job lined up in London and would stay with an aunt there.
Life in the villages, where 85 percent of the population lives, is far away from schools abroad. It's far away from school, period. With an average annual per capita income of $250, Bangladesh has 2 percent of the global population but 5 percent of the global poor. The poorest of these are rural women and children.
These women, who own no land, have no voice, have no rights, are being targeted by various relief groups to bring about changes in health, education, sanitation and family planning. And to much of the world's surprise, they doing just that. A micro-loan program, with an emphasis on cottage industry, has resulted in a resurgence of handicraft arts throughout the country. Nonprofit cooperatives and international governmental organizations help market these crafts, and visitors can buy well-made textiles at low prices.
Gulshan, home of our host families, is a wealthy residential area about 30 minutes from downtown Dhaka. Despite its affluence, it exemplifies the disparity of life in Bangladesh. Foreign embassies share the neighborhood with slum schools and free clinics. Slum settlements have taken over land along the edge of the lake that also is the setting for walled mansions.
In Gulshan's commercial district, there are antiques shops, newsstands with day-old copies of USA Today, craft stores, restaurants, banks, shipping offices, fabric stores and open-air markets for produce, meat and fish. Cows wander freely. For every modern restaurant, there are a thousand street cooks burning coconut shells or cow-dung patties for fuel and boiling pots of rice and dal. Everyone seems to eat. Maybe not enough, but at least a bowl of rice with chilies. Children don't exhibit the physical signs of malnutrition and starvation that one sees in many Third World young.
Despite the country's enormous poverty and need, we never felt afraid or uncomfortable when we were by ourselves in markets or on the streets. We were impressed by acts of honesty and kindness. When we quadrupled the fee for our rickshaw wallah, he was genuinely troubled at the extra amount. When we gave the street kids Frisbees, they tried to give them back.
We were reminded that dignity of spirit can rise above squalor and degradation, and that religious faith is a powerful balm in a lifetime of calamity. Said a farmer whose clay house had been destroyed for the third time by monsoon and cyclone flooding: "It is an act of God. And you can't be angry at Allah."
Everyone works. We did not see laziness or sloth in Bangladesh. Old men sell street snacks. Old women pat cow dung into fuel patties for cooking fires. Farmers get three rice crops a year, making up in labor what they lack in land. Children carry water. Women beat laundry. Men pedal rickshaws until their bodies collapse with exhaustion. But they still reserve enough energy to perk up and stare at visiting Westerners.
Never again in my life will I attract so much attention or turn so many heads. My American teammates and I literally stopped traffic. Rickshaw wallahs had fender-benders when they saw us in the streets. Old women hid their mouths to conceal their mirth at our outrageous presence. Women peered in disbelief through black veils. Little boys giggled when we stopped to buy bananas at a vendor's stall. Heads would pop out of open car windows and people would stare openly at us.
And we would stare back and whisper the Muslim greeting, "As-salaamu alaikum," and that same grim face would burst into a smile that could light up all of South Asia.
Susan Harb is a freelance writer in Lexington, Va.
DETAILS: Bangladesh
The U.S. State Department warns visitors to Bangladesh of political demonstrations and strikes that can incite violence and paralyze transportation and commerce. Overall crime is low throughout the country, but there has been a rise in armed robberies in Dhaka and Chittagong. The agency advises Americans to register with the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka (202-647-5225, www.usembassy-dhaka.org) and obtain updated information on planned marches and other safety issues.
GETTING THERE: British Airways flies from Washington to Dhaka via London; round-trip fares start at $1,500, with restrictions.
GETTING AROUND: Road travel between the cities of Bangladesh is hazardous and long; it's best to fly. There are daily flights between the major cities of Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet and Jessore, costing about $50 round trip. All flights within the small country take 45 minutes or less.
WHEN TO GO: Travel is best in the winter months, from November to February, when you can expect South Florida temperatures. The rains start in late May, and the two monsoon seasons are May to June, October to November.
WHERE TO STAY: The Sheraton (1 Minto Rd., 800-325-3535; www.sheraton.com) and Pan Pacific Sonargaon (107 Kazi Nazrul Islam Ave., 800-327-8585; www.panpac.com) are the two main business hotels in Dhaka. Expect to pay U.S. rates, about $160 to $180 per night for a single.
For more moderate lodging, Hotel La Vinci (54 Kawran Bazar, 011-880-2-911-3955; www.hotelavinci.com) offers executive deluxe rooms and suites for $70 to $90, including breakfast.
There are also lovely guest houses in the Gulshan area of Dhaka, with rates starting at about $15, but in most you will get only an overhead fan; check ahead if you need air conditioning. In February and early March, ceiling fans were adequate.
INFORMATION: Bangladesh Embassy, 202-244-0183. For news, lodging and other info, check out www.bangladesh.net.
--Susan Harb