Sylvia's Journal

With five members of the facilitation team, we spent the morning in the large and empty hall we had rented pretending that the workshop was actually happening. I facilitated the program with them as participants. We did a micro version of the workshop and it succeeded in making the design come alive for the team. They realized that cutting the workshop in two parts – one of our previous plans – would not have been a good idea as ownership and energy would have been compromised.

In the end we agreed that we should start afresh in July, after the government’s new fiscal year has started and the frenzy of end-of-year spending subsided.  We discussed how to move from alignment to leadership training and moving the common agenda forward. It’s an exciting combination of activities I love to do.

Rumors are circulating about the strike being extended even longer. I have heard of evaluation and fact finding missions that have come, and left again after having been waiting in hotels and guesthouses for the hartal to end, not able to see or interview any of the people on their lists.  One of those teams in town was from the ‘What to Expect Foundation’ (from ‘what to expect when you are expecting’ fame); such irony. I was told they returned home.

Now, after the brief training this morning and seeing the enthusiasm of the local team my trip felt not so useless any longer even though one could argue about the costs versus the benefits.

I was not the only one who had come from afar; a colleague from Johns Hopkins had flown in from Baltimore for the occasion. We decided to have our nails painted at a local spa so we’d had something to show for our stay in Dhaka.

The strike got nasty last night and cars and buses were set on fire, people died. These things happen here. This is the reason people don’t want to drive after dark. And this is the reason why my date with Sayeed was also canceled this evening. He tried to leave his house to pick me up but he returned when it was clear that the demonstrators had not stopped creating mayhem. The strike was extended by a day.

The consequence of another day of strike is that our two day workshop has now been reduced to one day, Tuesday. Whether we will even be able to have that one day remains to be seen. I hear a lot of incha’llah talk about the end of the strike. There is much at stake with the opposition’s threats that the hartal last until their kidnapped leader is returned. But some people fear that he cannot be returned because he may already be dead.

Not knowing quite how to behave under hartal circumstances, and with the restrictions of movement in Kabul still freshly imprinted, I was happy when my friend Fatima offered to come and get me for an escape from the hotel to have lunch at Nando’s. She came in a bicycle rickshaw and then negotiated in a mix of Urdu and Bangla our trip to the first circle in Gulshan where one has to transit to another rickshaw as the territories are clearly delineated. The presence of a foreigner by her side put her in a poor bargaining position – a difference of 80 cents.

We had lunch at Nando’s where I opted for a ‘mildly’ spiced meal, fearing that spicy would be unbearable in this place where most food is very spicy (mild was just right).  Over lunch I learned that Fatima hails from Hunza, of Three Cups of Tea fame, up in the northwestern corner of Pakistan, the place so eloquently described in Kathleen Jamie’s book ‘Among Moslems.’

She told me what it was like to be a midwife there, something she did for many years. I got a glimpse of the stress she endured of not having people die on you lest the health center’s (and one’s own) reputation be damaged; a heavy load to carry by a young midwife in a place where people usually don’t come to the health center after they have tried everything else. Death is usually around the corner at that late stage.

Now she is studying at BRAC University’s school of public health. She confided in me her struggle on  how to connect a difficult bio-statistics course with her practitioner’s experience of public health. The school used to be good at making that connection for the students.

Back at the hotel I had a vegetarian thali while watching a TV channel that seems to show only one movie, over and over again (The Bridges of Madison County). No matter where you start in the movie, eventually you get to see the whole thing.

The BNP, opposition party, last Friday, threatened a non-stop shutdown, here known as a ‘hartal’ if the government failed to produce its kidnapped leader Elias Ali alive. The hartal started already and forced us to start the workshop a day later. This will only work if the strike is called off tomorrow at the end of the day. If not, we have to scramble, along with lots of other people in Bangladesh who made plans.

I had forgotten about these hartals that are so common and yet catch everyone by surprise. Here too, like in all the countries I have worked in, politicians are the great spoilers and there is great disdain and dislike for them. Yet they can’t all be bad. Bangladesh has made some great strides in raising literacy rates, increasing family planning and reducing the growth rate of its population.  But with so many people it will take awhile before that reduces actual numbers. A hug bulge of too many babies born over the last 40 years has to work itself through the life cycle.

And so tomorrow we are told to lie low. Not the kind of low as in Afghanistan, in fact I was told that being a foreigner does not put me at risk. But I am not sure what it means for me, this extra day of waiting.

Today I met the rest of the facilitation team, one batch in the morning and another in the afternoon. In the morning I met my MSH colleagues at the local office and in the afternoon only those local to the area could show up. Crossing town after 5 PM was not advised because demonstrators can get nasty to cars driving around. People are warned to get home before 5 and then stay put. And so we won’t have everyone in the same room until the workshop starts – assuming it will – the day after tomorrow.

The list of invitees is long, over 90 people, but no one expects all these people to show up. Only 22 replied positively. What started as a workshop for 20 to 30 people is now anyone’s guess.

In the meantime I learned that my trip to Kenya, replacing the cancelled trip to Afghanistan, is now also cancelled which means my travels will stop a little earlier than expected. As with so many other things, whether this is a good thing or a bad things is hard to tell at the moment. The focus of the work was right up my alley so I am a bit disappointed, but then again if the grandbaby comes early it would be a good thing.

The trip to Bangladesh has three segments, each one a little shorter than the previous one if you travel East, the opposite if you travel West, with each segment a little longer than the previous one and also longer because of flying into the trade winds.

Segment one and two were orderly, as one would expect. But segment three was very disorderly although the Emirates people did their best and kept their cool.  There are lots of young Bangla men working in the Emirates and there is a constant shuttling back and forth as these young men go home or try their luck. I suppose those are the lucky ones, the ones who are not bonded slaves.

After reading (Gregory David Roberts’) Shantaram I was looking for the gold that was/used to be smuggled out of the Emirates as jewelry around arms and necks but I saw little of that. In fact the Bangla customs form allows very little jewelry to go untaxed. The authorities may have wizened up after reading the book, after learning about the inner workings of the Bombay mafia and its grip on the black markets of the subcontinent.

For the final push into Bangladesh it was my luck to sit at an exit row where I could stretch my legs with an empty middle seat; it was my bad luck that that seat was across the aisle from a tired young couple with an infant that didn’t want to sleep in the bassinette and cried when not wiggled on his dad’s knee. Still, I managed to sleep most of the way – exhaustion and earplugs helped.

I woke up when we were getting ready to land only to learn that a VIP had sequestered the airport for the next hour. When you have been on the road that long such an extra hour kills. And so we circled over Dhaka until the airport opened again. Then followed another long hour standing in chaotic and ever-shifting lines of exhausted, numb, irritable but also happy travelers to get ourselves stamped into the country. I was waiting in line with a Bangla grocer from Lynn, MA, who had come by way of Newark to Dubai and was just as exhausted but in a fine mood. He was going to visit the few remaining relatives who weren’t already living in Lynn, and the proud owner of the much coveted American passport.

It was Friday so traffic was light, which is a relative concept. Still, it shortened the 45 minute ride to the hotel to 20 minutes. That was a good thing.

I made contact with Courtney, formerly from Safi airlines who is now flying out his remaining days till retirement ferrying planes from Dhaka to the US or China for repairs or lease returns. He happened to be in the country and so we had a date, fully encouraged by our two home-based spouses. He took me to the Westin and treated me to a multi-cultural buffet dinner that would have been wasted on either one of us alone. We caught up on life and adventures that we had since we said goodbye at the Barbecue Tonight restaurant in Kabul, now 9 months ago.

On our way back, we threw ourselves into the throngs of beggar moms and street urchins that are attracted to the moneyed customers of the Westin. After having been chauffeured around in Afghanistan for two years, or driven myself around in South Africa, the experience of haggling for a taxi or the motorized rickshaws was new again. The smoke-spewing baby taxis of yesterday are now called CNGs (compressed natural gas), encased in a metal cage (to keep the riffraff out I presume) and running on clean energy. I am sure it makes a difference in the quality of the ride if not of Dhaka’s air. I remember driving in these things with my scarf wrapped around my mouth as a rudimentary airfilter.