We finally reached Dhaka on January 29th. We will call this home for the next two years.
We strongly felt we were mentally ready for Bangladesh and for Dhaka after making our best efforts to familiarize ourselves with the language and culture. We talked to Bengalis, read books, ate Bengali food, and studied the language and culture for two months. Still, Dhaka gave us an overwhelmingly eye opening and sense of rattling experience that we could not prepare ourselves for. To quote Cristina: “Landing here feels like somebody hits you in the face with a brick.”
Walking thru the airport was not much different than doing the same at most US airports. We even breezed thru the customs and immigration (thanks to our diplomatic passports). Outside, however the general feeling changed on a dime. There is no sense of organization and/or reason. Waves of people and cars streamed in and out from all directions. There were farm animals alongside pedestrians. Seemed all drivers honked at the same time. The road from the airport was paved, but dusty, filled with papers and was neither controlled nor marked.
Dhaka is a very third world country capital, some would say maybe a fourth world. It is densely populated. And mean I say dense, you can’t really comprehend the word unless you live here. It feels like God played this game where took as many human being as possible and confined them to as small a space as you could find. If you would like to replicate this in a Western country, maybe what you could do is next time you go into your doctor’s office, try to get into the waiting room with fifty other people, place a bag of fish in every corner, turn the heater to the max and have somebody throw papers and dust around like a maniac. That will come close to experiencing Dhaka, but it would not include the traffic jams or the dirt roads or the animal carcasses or more traffic jams.
