Bangladesh #1

I spend a lot of time in my beautiful apartment walking around early in the morning and late as the sun goes down feeling the cool marble on my bare feet and looking out the various windows in the well appointed rooms. Every view is different. I enjoy the beautiful trees, the lake, the rickshaws crossing the bridge to Baridara. Gradually I am learning the neighborhood dogs and cats- the rooftop animals since I am on the fourth floor and, below, the ducks and geese in a neighboring yard. The major windows where I have the best views are facing east from the living room and dining room and there I see the crows heading east in the morning and back west in the evening to their roosts. On the roof, a couple of stories above my apartment one gets the 360 view and to the west I see a Muslim woman doing the same on her roof, collecting laundry and watching the sun go down.
Patricia serves me coffee in the morning as I play my guitar. Her English is quite good and she is very bright and competent. She is "Garo" from the hills and a Christian. Her two children are Muslims like the father. He is not around. Patricia takes care of everything about the house. She's ironing now. Then she'll shop and clean and cook. She gets paid well by local standards and I may be paying medical bills, her children's education, and her furnishings for her apartment and lots of other things I haven't heard about yet. But I don't care! Why? Because I can afford it here and it frees me to paint, to play my guitar and to write. There is a lot of beauty here. It is unbelievably interesting visually and interesting and exotic in every way. Dhaka "the city of mosques".

This place is the place to see every challenge to mother earth condensed and amplified. The holy Ganges drains continents. Her mouth is actually her anus and the Bay of Bengal, just south of here a few miles from Dhaka, the sewer. The human challenges are also beyond comprehension- overwhelming. It is amazing that 130 million people in an area the size of Wisconsin are doing a s well as they are and that they manifest grace and sweetness while struggling to maintain their difficult lives. For those of us without the thick skin- the bideshi, (foreigners), it is important to take it all in small doses and hope to attain a degree of acceptance and familiarity at some point. My way of relating is through the language, Bangla. It is very beautiful and pleasurable to speak and I talk to everybody even though I don't know more than a few phrases- Apni Kemon Achen? - How are you? But I am studying with real enthusiasm and will have a private tutor- Prakriti by name. Mostly we stay at this point within the cocoon of our privilege, a privilege replete with advantages over our life in the United States in the sense that a humble teacher here lives like a millionaire in the United States. For me the biggest benefit is more time to work on my projects-paint, guitar, and write in comfortable circumstances.

One of the last places I visited in New Hampshire was a K Mart to buy some last minute things for the trip. There I got my first lesson in how to check out all the items and pay without any help from a checkout person. It was totally automated and a new system designed to make all the checkout people extinct. Where will the unskilled labor find work? Here in Dhaka when you shop there are a million small businesses. This is also true in Madrid, by the way. And when you purchase something you get a hand-written receipt and eager help to carry whatever you bought to the car, with no tip expected.

Ricker, August 2002