“I don’t want to buy any”…”You buy two?”

Rickshaws are my new favorite form of transportation. I am constructing one the minute I get back to Boston. In IAF we always learn about acculturation and how parts of the world adapt aspects of another’s culture. I think there’s too much coming from the West. We NEED rickshaws.

Our first ride on one today happened solely out of a desire for local friends. Kelly and I ventured out of the hotel this morning with two goals: 1. To buy some Bengali clothes (fail), and 2. To cross a street alone without hugging the shadow of Samit and Moe (fail).

New goals:

1.       Find out my dress size in BD

2.       Find out how to cross a street.

3.       Learn bangla

I think we were overly ambitious in believing that we would walk out today western style, and walk back in looking like Jasmine from Aladdin. Every other woman here pulls it off with grace, but Kelly and I butchered even the remote possibility, by alienating relationships with shopkeepers via nonsensical gestures and long torsos.  AND we had a new friend allied with us to translate. Still failed.

Let me skim back. On the drive into town yesterday the Colonel had pointed to a shop called Grameen Check, which is the textile arm of Grameen that sells very cheap cloth items. Its sign is on the second or third story of a big building about 20 minutes from our hotel, near embarrassingly-easy to remember landmarks such as a gigantic stadium (keeps reminding me of quidditch..but shh) and a rotary. Figures a place with no traffic rules would have a rotary. We still lost it. We weaved in and out of traffic, sidewalks, excavations, and cement pavings for over an hour on one simple straightforward street, until we ended up sitting down to people watch before round 2. The temperature here as moments of calm where there’s a breeze and it feels like spring. We relished in one of those and sat down on the side of a wide sidewalk in the shade. All day we had kind of been like a moving lantern in terms of catching every single person’s eye, but sitting down and planting that in one location drew in 10 bystanders in less than 30 seconds. Immediately people cautiously stepped closer, not with any poor motive on their face, but simply curiosity. That’s how the majority of the faces have been. One woman, wearing a BRAC ID badge (yay BRAC!) came forward and talked to us in bangla for 5 minutes. Honestly, the whys and how comes escape me, she knew immediately we did not speak any. Maybe it humored her. I just kept shaking my head and smiling, but still I could hear in her tone she was asking questions, and I’m pretty sure the breadth of my response was pointing to her id badge, saying “brac” and smiling. Thank you social entrepreneurship for making me a geek even in Bangladesh.

After the crowd got bored with the conversation, and moved away 5 feet to resume simply staring, a young Bengali woman passed us with a slight smile. I thought nothing of it—it happens now as often as breathing—but she came back. This pretty little woman walked right up to us, and in broken English asked if she could talk with us. We said of course and after a few minutes came to find out that she is studying English in school, wanted to practice, and in return offered friendship in a foreign city. Spriha asked us for our phone number, and it’s probably the most willing I’ve ever been to give my digits to a stranger.  We ended up going to get coffee, and were lucky enough to have a local accompany us in our first rickshaw ride. There was almost no choice. She got up from the sidewalk and walked right over to one, got on, and looked at us. Kelly and I looked at each other with mild, mild horror, and then kind of said, “why not”?

Now, the current record of how many people I have seen crammed onto the 3 foot wide rickshaw seat is 5. That number often includes babies. Our first ride is on their tail, with three: Spriha and I squeezed together, and Kelly—clutching like a woman giving birth—on my lap. These thin, strappy young men whisk the rickshaws directly into traffic with one push and your life is suddenly surrounded by bells, horns, shouts and well...me swearing. Sorry Allah—these vehicles of choice are insane. You surprisingly get used to the feeling very quickly, and develop a strong, religious-like respect for brakes. I would say, after day one without a private driver, that the worst part yet of rickshaws is when you tell them you need to go in the other direction. Without much hesitation, and only one or two habitual glances to their blind spot, the drivers whip the whole thing onto the other side of the street where they dodge oncoming buses, rickshaws and pedestrians. Actually, scratch that, what does pedestrian even mean to me anymore? I think people in themselves count as vehicles here. We fortunately arrived for coffee without a scratch, and had transformed into worse adrenaline junkies. We proceeded to ride them a few more times that day, until Kelly told me no more for now, when I suggested taking one just for the hell of it. That was probably a good decision for my wallet—I have a hunch that Spriha (who insisted on paying) had to argue quite a bit for the driver to drop his on-the-spot “American discount” earlier in the day.

When I’m in more of an analytical or insightful mood I’ll try and capture Spriha in all of the detail that this girl deserves. We ended up spending the whole day with her, which improved her English a lot and gave us a lot of insight into the dreams and longings of Bangladesh’s youth. At only 14 with a face and grace of most people’s twenties, Spriha is a hardworking student of science—the daughter of a government official and a beautiful mother who manages the home. A lot of what we talked about today danced around race and privilege, and the desires that are born out of living in a society where you must obey certain societal norms and suppress the longings for difference. Sadly after only maybe 6 minutes sitting down with our coffee, Spriha, in very, very fragmented English, told us that she is often very sad, and suffers greatly. Despite her innocent vocabulary, she actually used the word suffering—which itself helped me realize what must often capture her thoughts and studies.

It took us the course of the day, and many, many smaller conversations to find pieces of the puzzle that would explain these statements earlier in the day. The youngest in the household Spriha seems to be extremely influenced by all of the themes in liberal media that have become cliché in the west…the effects of predominantly white ads and models, globalization, advertising campaigns, etc….All of the things any student in the states at this time hears about and sees themselves, about how white is portrayed as beautiful and powerful, and how that has led the viewers in other countries wishing for those attributes. Now, I would never bring up any of these things simply to talk about it. They were all screaming in my face all day as conversation would move from favorite movies (Spriha loves Terminator, Titanic and Anaconda)to her sincerely asking us if we could take her with us to America, help her find a foreign husband, and leave this country behind.  I would predict someone joking about this, but sometimes her earnest seriousness would almost bring her to tears when she explained how hard she studied, and how she saw that has her only way to improve herself…and then hear her talk whimsically about America and all of its greatness. It made me sick. One, because there’s much more to my home than its stereotype, and two because I knew that my telling her that her working hard would help her, was a lie. There are hardly any jobs in this country, and the sick part is that she is one of the lucky ones. The majority of the country is not able to go get education because of an inefficient number of schools. As the daughter of an assumingly powerful man, Spriha’s very clear desperation to put herself on a successful track ripped the country’s education statistics  out of my head and slapped me across the face. After talking for almost an hour about her reasoning for wanting to go to America, it seemed that she truly connected that image with happiness. In much simpler terms, she explained that she only wanted an opportunity to make something out of her own hard work that she was happy to do. It also hurts to know, but was impossible to relay to her, that even if I were to bring her with me to stay in the states that it would be near impossible to find her a job—especially with her imperfect English—and the legality of it would delay the possibility months, if not years. What opportunity is that?

Obviously brain drain isn’t the answer. Growth within the country is. But theory aside, this one individual account of trying to cope with a bright mind and absolute dismal prospects makes you feel like selling a kidney to help her. Another disgusting part of the situation is that she said she would be able to sponsor herself financially if she could just get there.

 As she said herself, it’s all unfair.

If I were her, I would probably be slightly resentful…but this girl was beautiful. She spent the entire day with us trying to get to know us better, and helped us try and find Bengali clothing (couldn’t find anything under 2000 taka—weird—and spent literally 30 minutes trying to explain to shopkeepers that we did not know our size in BD, but he still neglected to measure us, even though he had a measuring tape around his neck). We quit, because the colors were starting to speak illogical sense to me and convince me that I didn’t mind spending 30 USD on one outfit. We’re going to beg Samit, or more likely his wife, to take us shopping this weekend.

After stopping in for a quick bite to eat, and some absolutely horrid, monstrous excuse for orange juice that tasted like I was sucking an egg yolk through a straw,  we said goodbye to Spriha and promised to call her next weekend as we’re busy at Grameen all of this coming week. She really wants us to come see her home and meet her mother—who she describes as a saint, and looks up to because she was born with very fair skin and is often mistaken as a foreigner. (I didn’t ask any questions regarding that because that sounds, well, a bit scandalous to me).

Since then, Kelly and I have been sneaking a few shots of Mirpur, Dhaka on our cameras, and stalking school buses to find Bengali babies to play with. The children here are so great—as is most of their English, because the private schools here teach lessons in English. So far at least 20 children have run up to us proudly saying “Hello, how are you?”, shake our hand, and run off embarrassed. School girls in uniform drive by in rickshaws and when we catch them staring we hear 5 high-pitched “hi’s” flowing to us in unison. I’ve become an excellent waver. It’s helping me cope with all of the staring because people know I see them and either smile back or quickly avert their eyes.

Moe and Samit wanted us to come out to a hookah bar tonight but we put it off to another night so we could get to bed early in preparation for tomorrow’s trip out of the city. But, thinking I would write a blurb about rickshaws and roll over, I have now blabbered about all sorts of nonsense and have thus defeated my reasoning for blowing off a perfectly fun evening out. So I’m shutting up—I’m going to upload a video soon of one of the rickshaw rides so stay tuned. In it you can see a glimpse of our hotel front, Spriha, a bit of a calmer road in Dhaka, and probably me swearing.