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Parendi and I typically travel in middle class style to Barisal--we take an overnight launch from Dhaka's main port (Sadar Ghat), sleeping in a hired double cabin that usually comes with AC, sometimes has functional fans, and always has curtains to shut out the peering passengers and curious boys who work on the boat. The older of the boats have suspiciously stained sheets and families of cockroaches, but we've figured out which of the boats are the cleanest and have the least smelly bathrooms. We can't complain. It's safer and more comfortable than traveling on the roads, and its certainly better than traveling the way most do: on the bottom floor of the launch boats, stretched out on blankets, fighting off bugs and the night chill.
But this week we upgraded. Instead of our usual overnight boat ride, we hitched a ride on a chartered seaplane headed directly for Bhola, the district of Barisal Division where we would be working. The flights are run by Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), a religious non-profit that offers flights for aid operations, disaster relief, and NGO work; a sub-component of their program is that they offer pilot training to locals. So at 9 in
the morning we boarded our 9-seater flight behind our tall blonde Swedish pilot (who had previously worked for 15 years in Cambodia) and his eager (and evidently new?) Bangladeshi sub-pilot.
The thirty minute flight (hard to believe it takes us 8-10 hours on a boat...) offered a fascinating and new perspective on the country that we have come to know so well by land and by water. When I first arrived in Dhaka last June I remember thinking that the landscape was quite similar to Sacramento's--divided into neat tracts of rice paddy and clumps of treets, criscrossed by a few rivers. At that time the main difference seemed to be the size of the land plots--whereas American agricultural is industrial and mega-scale, Bangladeshi agriculture is still very limited to family plots and small commercial operations, and the patchwork of differently shaded green fields revealed this fact.
I had these same thoughts as we took off from Dhaka in our seaplane just a few days ago, but my trained eye was able to better appreciate the more uniquely Bangladeshi landscape. Before we got too high, I could pick out herds of water buffalo swimming at the edges of the
rivers. And the more we rose the more I realized just how much water there is everywhere. The flight map on the screen in the cockpit (just a few feet in front of me) showed our southward motion as we moved into the delta--the waterways stretched out like the roots of an upside down blue tree on the map. Before I knew it we were descending in preparation for our water landing, and we circled around back north, tipping one side of the plane toward the ground and revealing a long stretch of river lined with the tall chimenys of brick factories.
The water landing itself was not nearly as bumpy or adventurous as I might have imagined, but no less glamorous. After we skidded to a halt the captain's door opened on a horizontal hinge (like a fancy car) and revealed a village's worth of children sprinting along the river bank to see what had landed on their water. Fishermen stood thigh-deep in the water just feet away, bare chested with their lungis wrapped up like shorts, staring in awe at the plane of foreigners that had just touched down on their water.
We stepped out of
the plane onto the runners that keep the plane above water, then hopped onto a motorboat that was waiting for us. It zipped us across the river, delivering us to the Save the Children car that was waiting for us. Man I love traveling with the important people...
The time in Bhola itself was mildly less glamorous. We stayed in the dingiest of hotels we've seen yet--the first place I've ever walked in and thought, "This is a dump" (and then cringed when I realized I thought that--am I getting to comfortable and losing my ability to go and stay wherever?). It wouldn't have been half bad if the night's hadn't been so hot and sleepless, but nevertheless we somehow survived on a few hours here and there. Our days were spent visiting washed out villages--villages that no longer exist (or only partially exist) because they've been flooded by annual river breakages and monsoon downpours. Their residents have moved in with relatives, or tried to make a new start in nearby towns and villages. The least fortunate have moved to the "New Model Government Town," a cluster of tin shacks built around a large manmade lake on an island
across the river. The island has no infrastructure, and children do not go to school because they cannot afford the boatride that would be required to get to the closest institution. It is breathtakingly beautiful and full of rice and chilli pepper fields, but hardly a model living situation for these environmental refugees.
Despite the heat of our days, we were lucky to be in Bhola--trees everywhere, and a kind of Midsummer Night's Eve fairy tale quality to the brick lanes and silent children passing us through shafts of light. Of course Bhola is still the conservative, isolated place I wrote about many months ago. And in fact we were reminded of this when, on a morning walk, we were cornered in a fruit market by a man who wanted us to know we were inappropriately dressed: "Where is your hijab (head covering)! Do you know our culture? You must respect our culture!" He literally was spitting with rage as the crowd gathered and eventually interceded in our defense, but thankfully he is a minority. For the most part we find the communities extremely welcoming--fishermen who squat on their haunches for 20 minutes, helping us find interim addresses for
the villagers who had once lived in washed out villages, women who let us use their bathrooms and then send us on our way with some mango achar for our lunch in the field, flood refugees who welcome us to their shoddy government-built tin homes, asking for nothing in return. This could be the last true field visit I have before I leave (my next two visits to Barisal will be office-based), and I fear that in a year or so I will have forgotten the beauty of Bhola, the kindness of the people, and even the feeling of normalcy that I carry in my life here. Sometimes I forget how truly abnormal my experiences are, and I must remind myself how lucky I am to be here.
P.S. I had many more pictures from Bhola and even a few videos (one of the seaplane landing...another of the call to prayer in a small Bhola village) to share on this blog, but sadly my digital camera battery has died and my charger is nowhere to be seen. There is a distinct chance that it is either in Scotland or lost somewhere inbetween. I'm hoping this is
not the case, and that I will ultimately find the charger and be able to post part II of this Bhola blog. On the other hand, it could be truly lost, and this could be the last blog that I post with photos.... 😞
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