What is that alien creature?

The first thing that strikes you in Bangladesh is just how much people gather around and stare at you. Six, eight, or maybe even fifteen people, men,boys, and women alike, circle around you like hummingbirds on a nectar nest, at a  distance between two and four feet. They stare at your face without blinking, without saying a word. No shame. Not for fifteen or twenty seconds, but for several minutes, if you stay in one place that long. They seemingly do not move their eyes. They just look at you!

Who/what is this alien creature, they seem to be saying. Taller than anyone I know, and with a light skin color that I rarely see. They seem, in their own way, to be trying to make sense of all that I visually represent. And so they stare, some of them maybe breaking into a faint smile. 

We are, for a lot of these people, as close as they will ever come to having traveled to a foreign land. For many we are their first geography of those white people far away that they will, perhaps, have heard about from a friend or a parent, or seen on TV. If they have a TV, have been able to put their eyes on one for more than brief moments when not hustling and moving about to make enough to buy the day’s rice.

The formula for a successful hartal

In order for a hartal to succeed a very precise recipe has to be followed. The ultimate goal is for the majority of citizens to boycot work, travel and other normal activities.
The decisions to call a hartal are made at meetings of the AL’s Presidium Committee or the BNP’s Steering Committee. After a hartal has been declared, the parties initiate pre-hartal activities for three or four days before. The student wings of the parties (the BNP’s Chatra Dal and the AL’s Chatra League) are usually the ones in charge of making this happen. Rallies are organized around university campuses and members of the armed cadres are present with the purpose of instilling an element of fear by letting off “cocktail” explosives. Also, on top of the student wings, different city wards carry out similar activities, staging rallies and setting off small explosions.


On the hartal day, students stage rallies starting on the campuses. The first task is marching close to police barricades and try to antagonize police personnel. Then, bombs are thrown towards the barricades causing the police to respond in force. And then the "fun" begins. Party activists have similar tasks all over the city, focusing on specific areas and streets. Violence include letting off bomb explosions, burning tires and ransacking rickshaws, CNGs, and cars. Buses are set on fire.

A large mass of people is also key to a successful hartal, therefore people are hired to participate. The hired hands generally come mainly from the slums via the mastaans, the middlemen. This practice is being used both by the AL and BNP.

B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet

If you have not experienced the Dhaka traffic and unless you’ve been in one of those demolition derbies, you can’t appreciate what a traffic jam really means.

According to the CNN Travel site, the city can "proud" itself on having the world worst travel. In Dhaka, congestion gets to bad "rush hour" is what they call the least busy times, when rushing is somewhat possible.

A 2011 government report stated that traffic stands still for more than seven hours a day.

Traffic lights, if they exist, are nothing else then decorations as hundreds of thousands of rickshaws, buses, carts, bicycles, farm animals, pedestrians, cars and motorbikes fight each other for space. Crossings, roundabouts or one-way roads are there to be used in the wrong direction, traffic lights and policemen are abundant, but rather broken or ignored. Everyone moves at his own idea or takes the shortest short-cut, no matter what’s in the way. There are about 30 deaths on the roads each day in Dhaka and the only way we try to cope with this is to lean back, watch the chaos and pray to God that we will not be the one of the people who end up in these statistics.

As for getting around, it’s almost certainly quicker to walk, hop or crawl.

I think these pics sum it well up!

                                

Top things we are missing

Last night it rained really hard and it gave me a chance to think about what I am missing the most while we are in Bangladesh. Here is a feeble attempt to capture it:

1. Clean air. It does not matter I quit smoking a long time ago, my lungs feel just as bad as they did when I was.

2. Clean and blue skies. I have not had one day here without the sky being gray and hazy.

3. Clean water. We even have to brush our teeth with distilled water. Forget about just washing a fruit with tap water and just eating it.

4. Watching Netflix without masking my IP address

5. Starbucks coffee!!!!

6. American style supermarkets.

7. Quiet moments. It is impossible to get away from the city and its noise. And even getting outside Dhaka does not seem to help a whole lot. 

8. Not being able to get what you want when you want it. And when I order online to get it in days vs weeks.


There would be more, but I do not want to come across as whinnying.

Dog hair everywhere

We have not been able to find a reliable dog groomer in Dhaka. That is not to say it does not exist.

Most of the expat pet owners we know prefer to do the grooming themselves. The results vary widely to say the least. In the couple of months we have been here, I have noticed some the most hilarious dog haircuts. So, armed with a machine we ordered online from Walmart, Cristina and I got to work on grooming Oreo this morning. We are fortunate that his size is small, so we did not have to sedate him like our friend Amber had to do with her dog. It took her three hours, two more people to help and a sedative slipped in the dog's food.

Our result? We are not really proud of it, but then again we do not plan on turning it into a full time career.

Maslenitsa celebration

Today we were invited by our Ukrainian friends, Svitlana, Andrei and Masha to celebrate Maslenitsa.


Maslenitsa, also known as Butter Week or Pancake week, is a slavic version of Fat Tuesday in the US. You basically have to stuff yourself up before you begin to fast during the Great Lent. In Slavic mythology, Maslenitsa is also a celebration of the winter end and the arrival of spring.

Everything was so delicious, the crepes in particular!

I struggled a little bit with Andrei's push for me to shoot vodkas at 11 o'clock in the morning, but did all right in the end.

Learning the word hartal (general strike)

The first word a Bideshi (foreigner) must learn when he arrives in Bangladesh has to be “hartal”. What is a Hartal?

According to the Wikipedia definition, Hartal is a term in many South Asian languages for strike action, first used during the Indian Independence Movement. It is mass protest often involving a total shutdown of workplaces, offices, shops, courts of law as a form of civil disobedience. In addition to being a general strike, it involves the voluntary closing of schools and places of business. It is a mode of appealing to the sympathies of a government to change an unpopular or unacceptable decision. The term comes from Gujarati, signifying the “closing down of shops” or “locking the doors” with the object of realizing a demand.

The hartal has very honorable roots, in Ghandi’s civil disobedience against colonialism. The thing is colonialism ended a long time ago, and the current leaders in Bangladesh are trapped in the past. They are fighting present wars with the arms of yesterday.

Bangladesh seems to have elevated the hartal to a new level and today here is usually associated with the stoppage of vehicular traffic and closure of markets, shops and offices for a specific period of time to articulate agitation.

There are many proponents of hartals who claim exercising rights such as freedom of assembly and freedom of expression is perfectly acceptable. But the present day hartals are associated with intimidation, coercion and infringement on other people’s freedom of movement. They inflict severe costs on the nation. So, I am having a hard time trying to justify hartals on the principles of freedom.

The issue in Bangladesh is that legislation is meant to be discussed, debated and decided in the nation’s Parliament. Time after time, however, opposition members find themselves excluded from dialogue. As a result, Parliament does not function as the forum for dialogue and the fight shifts to other arena, it moves into the streets.
What the political parties fail to understand is that this country needs some fresh blood and fresh thinking. No outside investor will come here knowing that the country is closed for democratic dialogue, because that means it cannot possibly be open for business.

And no, I am not taking credit for the pictures.

 

Dhaka fit or Training with the Marines

Every Sunday and Wednesday, the Marines of Detachment Dhaka invite everybody in the mission to the Dhaka Fit!,a training program at the US Embassy Annex Field. Since it is an excellent way to support, motivate, and spend time with our favorite Marines and at the same time get in a good work out, the whole family joined, including Oreo.

No, we do not look like this, even though some of our Marines come pretty close

We look a little bit more like this:

And, yes, we did almost get killed by one of our favorite Marines the first time we joined the program. He pushed so hard and tried to motivate me with quotes like: "Pain is just weakness leaving the body!" :)


And here is Oreo, after the training program is over and we are home:

Bangladeshi beer?

In terms of the law, Bangladeshis are not allowed to drink or carry alcohol without an alcohol licence. You can get a licence with a doctor's prescription, so possession of alcohol can be legal for `medical reasons'. There are a few bars in Dhaka that serve alcohol, however if you are not in a expat club prices are just prohibitive. A beer at the Westin bar in Dhaka will cost you around $13. As a foreigner you are not required to possess such licences and you can drink all you want at any of the expat club.

Amongst ethnic minorities, because such people are either Buddhist or Christian, there is not only an acceptance of alcohol but there is often a culture surrounding it. You do need need a license to prove that you are a Christian or a Buddhist, but hey, that comes with benefits!


And yes, Bangladesh has its own beer. Hunter! And why bother trying to design something when you can just copy somebody else's design, logo and colour, and shamelessly I might add, steal the look and feel from Australia's Foster. The taste? Do not ask me. I try it once at the Nordic Club and, well, you get what you pay for…Lets just say that Hunter taste like....

There is soccer (football) in Bangladesh

I will start with a story about South Africa and apartheid. Robben Island was an isolated island where South Africa's white regime imprisoned many for opposing the brutal system of segregation that denied basic rights to the country's black majority from 1948 to 1991.
South Africa sent its political prisoners to the isle off Cape Town to serve hard time. The prisoners' job was to break rocks. Their captors' job was to break spirits. But the prisoners kept their spirits, and soccer was part of that. For years, prisoners demanded a right to play sports, including soccer. And for years, prison authorities said no, but eventually they caved in under pressure from the International Red Cross. The league was operated in three divisions — A, B and C, based on players' abilities — complete with trainers, managers, referees and coaches. The league had several standing committees to deal with a range of issues, including discipline and maintenance.
Running is freedom in physical form. The prisoners could forget about prison when they were playing a game, as physical exercise to keep their minds and bodies sharp — and as a way for those from differing political factions to work and play together. It was a unifying factor. Up until football, every activity on the island was self-segregated not by race but by political party. Then, for the first time, as football was established, the parties began to train together and play together in prison.

Now, there is very little resemblance between myself and a political prisoner in apartheid South Africa. I am here on my own will and I am loving it. There is nobody trying to keep me in Dhaka by force. Still, there are plenty of similarities. As I compete for the ball, as I run out of breath on many occasions and as I stand the risk of getting my knees busted again, it is the love of the game that keeps me going. Soccer is a huge part of me and being able to take this with me in Bangladesh brings such a joy to my heart. And not last, forming a "franchise" of my former Ursus team and bringing it to Asia, still gives me the chills :)

An original Mukti Bahini (Freedom fighter)

Last weekend we had the honor to meet one of the original Mukti Bahini (freedom fighter), the Bangladeshi pilot Shamsul Alam.

Mr Alam escaped from Pakistan and joined the Liberation War. The Indians wanted to help, but did not have unlimited resources, so all he was given to fly was old Otter airplane. The Bangladeshis retrofitted it to carry rockets and made holes in it for dropping bombs from inside. Mr Alam carried out an impossible mission, to bomb the Pak oil supply in Chittagong. He flew very close to the surface to avoid the Paki radars and managed to find the target with no navigation system in the plane. After dropping the 24 rockets and bombs, the most daring attack by a Bangladeshi pilot inside of East Pakistani became history.

Respect, Mr Alam!

http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=166274

A nation divided by what?

During the last month, the violence that has engulfed Bangladesh has claimed the lives of over hundred people. Almost three quarters of them were killed since February 28th. On that day, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, one of the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s biggest Islamic party, was sentenced to death by hanging for the murder, abduction, rape, torture and persecution of his countrymen.

We are now witnessing hartal after hartal. According to a lot of reports, this is by far the worst political violence the country has suffered since its birth as a nation in 1971.

But why is that? After all, this started as Bangladesh's chance to come to terms with the horrors that accompanied its birth as a nation in 1971. The “International Crimes Tribunal”, actually a domestic court, is trying razakars – collaborators belonging to Islamist militant groups who had aided the Pakistani army’s genocidal campaign.

On one side, a lot of Bangladeshis feel that the razakars not only avoided punishment, but acquired political power in the country whose independence they had violently opposed. For almost four decades, it appeared that the quest for justice was a lost cause. This was the case until four years ago when Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League government assumed office and delivered on its campaign promise of putting suspected war criminals to trial. What impresses me is that the new generation of patriotic Bangladeshis feels so strongly about the issue. When Abdul Quader Mollah, a Jamaat leader convicted of committing atrocities, walked out of the tribunal with a life sentence, a wide smile on his face and showing a victory sign, a lot of Bangladeshis were outraged. The Shahbag square in Dhaka became the site of massive public protests. The protests vehemently demanded that those found guilty of mass atrocities be put to death. The fear is that a future government sympathetic to the Islamists, might commute life sentences and set them free again.

On the other side, Jamaat is violently fighting  for its survival. Members of Shibir, the Jamaat’s student wing, and their supporters are reacting with fury. In southern Bangladesh, the fight was taken onto Hindus homes and temples. It looks to me that, BNP, the main opposition party will have to struggle with an existential dilemma. Traditionally it lacks street fighting and organizing capabilities which it secured by allying itself with  Jamaat. The popular reaction along with the very low number of potential votes Jamaat might be bringing to the table in an electoral alliance might force BNP to reconsider its strategy.

And, in the center, there are the regular people whose lives are threatened and can't make to work. The fear of the violence is sucking away all their energy. They are, after all, in what they perceive  a war zone.

Religion in Bangladesh, Part II

Around nine percent of the Bangladeshi population is still Hindu. Hinduism is a vast complex which can be identified through worship and a sense of ethics, or sanctions for actions. The following elements are included:

“reincarnation”: one lived before and will live again; how one is reborn is a result of past births, of what has been.

“karma”: right action. What determines rebirth is one's action: life is a web of what one has done in the past.

“dharma”: duty, obligation (religious). A person is good if he obeys his "dharma". One knows what duty life requires because one is in his life. A person is considered good if he obeys obligations life imposes on him.

“time”: no beginning, no end. The world is an endless process of time.

“order”: universe is an ordered entity in which everything has gone wrong: people have not done their duty. Order must be restored by changing what one does in life -a person can be changed within it, but one can't change the world.

The doctrine of "karma" and the attitude of relativism are expressions of the sense of a religious hierarchy that permeates the Hindu social system and differentiates it from that of Islam.

Religion in Bangladesh, Part I

The Muslims invaded what is now Bangladesh in the 13th century, but even before that Islam had been introduced by early Arabs carrying maritime trade to the coast of Bengal.

It is hard to separate in Bangladesh the nationality, religion or culture, as almost 85 percent of the population is Muslim (predominantly Sunni). The faith of Islam is “in one God, on His book, His messengers and the day of Judgment.” The Five Pillars of Islam are the behavioral patterns, the outward steps to reach the faith. Every pillar has its own significance: “Shahada” (confession of faith): to believe in the oneness of God, His messengers, His books, His angels, in the day of judgment and in His life hereafter. “Salat” (prayer): to pray five times daily in a given interval of time is a Muslim's duty to God in expressing gratitude and awareness. Total submission to God is the denominator of all action of a Muslim. “Siyam” (fasting): to fast in the month of Ramadan is a must for Muslims. To abstain from food, drink, and all desires from dawn to dusk helps to develop patience, tolerance, will power and compassion for the hungry. “Zakat” (alms tax): to provide for the poor is the duty of the rich. The amount of 2.5 percent of one's possessions per year is what is believed needed to keep the economic system in harmony. “Hajj” (pilgrimage to Mecca): to perform a pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime is a must for any Muslim who can afford it - physically and financially. Salvation is earned through the practice of the Five Pillars of Islam. There is also the concept of inescapable judgment according to one's deeds. Destiny is determined by the limited free will of man and the rest will be as Allah desires.

Islam is integrated into all facets of the Muslim's life in Bangladesh. You can see people praying during the day in places where you would expect the least, including even in front of the American Embassy entrance.

Country is burning

We are being asked this question over and over again by our friends and family. Are you safe there?
The answer is YES, so far we are. Is tomorrow going to be the same? And this time, the answer is: WE DON'T KNOW YET.


The fight for the future of Bangladesh is playing out in the streets. For a month, masses of moderate activists have camped at a Dhaka intersection demanding harsh punishment for those accused of crimes during the 1971 independence war from Pakistan. Meanwhile, the hardline Islamic opposition party that wants to install Shariah law have been attacking government buildings and setting fire to trains in a rampage that — along with a crackdown by security forces — has killed scores of  people. The party, Jamaat-e-islami, says the government is using a war crimes tribunal to decimate the party leadership, and claims it is in a fight for its very existence.


The protests for and against Jamaat, the main Islamist party in the country have convulsed Bangladeshi politics. It shows that the wounds of the bloody 1971 liberation war have still not healed. Most of estimates I have read internally estimate that three million people were killed and thousands of women were raped. Before the war, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, separated from the rest of that country by a wide expanse of India. The war pitted Bangladeshi separatists against Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators, who were known then as the Razakar Bahini. I will go deeper into the history in a latter post.

But for now, I am quoting from Jamaat's "To Do" List (from a message posted on Jamaat-Shibir's propaganda Facebook page)


1.      All train tracks have to uprooted at this moment.
2.      All launch terminals and bus terminals have to be disabled.
3.      Dhaka has to be isolated from all districts.
4.      All police stations have to be surrounded.
5.      The 'agent/traitor' media outlets have to be attacked.
6.      Images of the police's brutal firing and shooting have to published in the world media.
7.      All the embassies in the world have to be surrounded and resistance have to be built.
8.      Dhaka has to be besieged.
9.   The houses of all Ministers and MP's have to be burnt.

This is pretty disturbing , but so far, there has not been any violence directed toward foreigners, and we hope it stay the same. But everything else is getting affected and the country seems like is about to come to a halt.

We finally reach Dhaka

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.

I will miss you so much, my great (adoptive) country, USA

I am sitting in bed trying to get some rest and not having much success. Next to me, Cristina has somehow managed to forget about our morning departure to Bangladesh and is sound asleep.

I am begin hit by mixed emotions. 17 years ago, I left my home, wife, friends, family and country and went to an unknown land. It was December 1995 when I landed in New York and made my way to Michigan. The only thing I had going for me was the fact that I was so young.

I always loved America. I loved it even as a child when I had no idea how it looked like. I loved ever since I would hunker down inside of the house with my father listening to the VOA radio station. It was jammed and we could only understand every other word sometime, but yet this was our only window to freedom. I fell in love with the country even more when it welcomed me with open arms, gave me a chance to build a new life. My children were born here, I got my first job here, bought my first car and my first home. I got my second education here and made tons of great friends. I know that it sounds like such a cliché, but this is still the land of opportunities. It is not perfect, but it is still the best place in the world!

I know I will be back and that Bangladesh is going to be only temporary, and yet I still feel sad to leave this country behind.

I will miss you, great country of America!!!!!