Life in Britain is in many ways just as I remember it, but now I notice the little side shows, the vignettes of life that make Bangladesh so enthralling a lot more. I find Britain ridiculously over-bearing and constrained compared to Bangladesh, and also a lot quieter, but I can cope with the calm. I feel like we are so reserved and acceptant – when I arrived at Heathrow there was a queue of about a thousand people waiting for immigration, but it was an orderly queue, restrained and decent – when I think back to trying to cross the border to India with a few thousand Bangladeshis at Benepole, the comparison is hilarious.

The biggest difference is that everywhere is smoke free, which I don’t approve of at all – this is why – but apparently it makes public places more sociable. And yet when I was in a pub recently, they started to play ‘Lifted‘ by the Lighthouse Family, which I find incredibly anti-social and instantaneously vomit-inducing. In fact I’d rather be forced to eat a packet of Marlboro Reds and then smoke my excrement than listen to the Lighthouse Family. So the world’s gone mad, in pubs anyhow.

And that’s it. My life has returned to a constant battle against the clock, trying to fit in ways to earn money and then spend it, fueling my body with nutrients, poisoning it with toxins all under London’s big grey sky. The thing I appreciate the most since I’ve returned is having drinkable water on tap, I still think that’s absolutely marvelous and feel excited every time I have a drink – but otherwise, I’ve ceased to be exceptional; the only white man in Sylhet, and am just another man in the multi-coloured pulsing universe that is one of civilisation’s greatest cities, a civilisation in itself.

But I still have the Desh, that’s the main thing. And yet now I can go off and play football. So it’s the best of both worlds, and I’m happy with that.

I’ve seen things here that you would never see in the ‘West’, not because people are necessarily so poor or the country so incredible, but because Bangladesh really is like the unsynthesised manifold of human life. Here, I find one can see things in a way that you wouldn’t be able to in Europe, that both the presentation and the perception holds an almost absurd blinding clarity. Bangladesh is what happens if you cram far too many people in to a ridiculous part of the world, prone to flooding, earthquakes and with terrible weather, and don’t provide any kind of adequate infrastructure or governance to accommodate them. In the slums the density is around 200,000 people per square kilometre. There are pockets of shiny Western ‘modernity’ and convenience, but large areas that resemble a Dickensian candlelit world of stories amidst shadows, as if you might concentrate a whole soap-opera in to one little shack.

I feel like our lives in the West now are so packaged and buffed, protected; everything conforms to a health and safety standard, operates in a more or less uniform manner; high streets are dominated by the same shops which look the same, everything is tucked away behind plate glass and packaging and lit properly and cooled artificially, we define ourselves through numerous codes and identifications, online profiles, we communicate through browser windows and other plastic boxes, so all our life is seen through various physical or mental artificial barriers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I appreciate and value the benefits. But take all of that away, and you get Bangladesh.

Your phone breaks? In England I would register online, send it off in a special package, fill in a numerous forms and ‘track’ the status and wait weeks. Here I can just get some kid in a shack to take it to pieces and fix it in five minutes with his little fingers, who can’t read or write but has taught himself Nokia. You want to buy some meat? You can either order it online, or go to a big supermarket and have something that’s been flown maybe 10,000 miles and slaughtered, cut, packaged, processed, cooled, weighed and labelled by a machine, scanned by a machine, and then paid for through machines. Or you can go to the butchers where carcasses hang outside in the hot sun like washing lines of flesh, and either get a cut off that or point to an animal tied up outside and have that slaughtered for you there and then. There’s no middleman between life and reality.

I think Bangladesh is like life behind the scenes, if you take away all the regulations and codes of practice and charters and just let the world get on with it. You don’t actually need to wear anything more than a loin-cloth to operate heavy machinery. You don’t actually need traffic lights. It helps, but you can manage without it. All our ‘mod cons’ and advancements, to paraphrase Milligan don’t really bring happiness, just a far more pleasant form of misery. Whereas Western living is so controlled and managed, synthesised through numerous cultural/physical/psychological boundaries, life in Bangladesh is glaring out at the world in High Fidelity, High Definition, and I’ll really, really miss that. It doesn’t make things easy, but it’s raw. What happens just depends how you prepare it.

It has occurred to me now that although I have dreamt many times of going back to England, the actual process and events of arriving home and seeing friends and family again, I’ve never imagined the process of leaving Bangladesh; the concept that to arrive in England means I have to depart from Bangladesh didn’t combine for me. Going back to my home didn’t involve leaving my other. For this place has been my home, and despite the lack of organised events, it’s the cacophonic chaos of disorganised, spontaneous life here that makes Bangladesh the most exciting place I’ve ever lived in. I shall certainly return.

What I will return to though, is hard to predict. When I arrived last September 2006 Bangladesh had an elected government. This government stood down, constitutionally, and since then the country has politically been dissolved and diluted in to a collection of squabbling factions in suits and in uniform, whilst millions continue to suffer in lunghis. Two weeks ago whilst I was on holiday there were mass protests against the military-backed civilian regime for the first time, as the idea of suffering in silence becomes increasingly impossible. The problem for the protesters though is that the current military-backed regime is the best currently available; Bangladesh is already at the door of the last chance saloon, peering in to a murky abyss of either martial law/fully-fledged military rule on one side or a vicious, elitist self-obsessed ‘political’ old guard who surely would take every step to gain revenge on those who’ve humiliated them and grasp power this time even more tightly than before. They have to step away from that. I think Bangladesh has been a dramatic lesson for any onlooker in what can happen when power is dissolved in an atmosphere devoid of moral authority.

Elections are promised before the end of 2008, but what the people will have to elect, and what they will be electing for is extremely unclear. Democracy is far more than divesting one’s political will every 4 or 5 years, and until Bangladesh can reform it’s institutions to accommodate this fact, the farce of ‘democracy’ in certain countries, preponderantly in the developing world will continue. It’s interesting to me how the words ‘democracy’ and ‘corruption’, with meanings that would traditionally oppose each other have in Bangladesh come to equate to the same thing. This pollution of concepts and ideas by human greed and malice, at the expense of tens of millions of people is overall the saddest aspect of my year here.

But whether there is a free and fair election in 2008 or not, Bangladesh’s rulers will still have their work cut out to save the country from further hardships. The economy is teetering, dependent on the garment industry, remittance and international aid, none of which can be relied upon and is subject to external forces. Flooding has caused a humanitarian crisis this monsoon, and climate change will increasingly ravage Bangladesh over the next thirty years as the seas rise, the rainfall increases, and the flow from the Himalyas in to the country rises also. The country can’t generate enough electricity, or an adequate health or education system. The legal system still suffers from corruption and political bias, and the government still insists on denying fundamental human rights, including the freedoms of speech and association which are so crucial to lifting Bangladesh out and away from its problems, if that is possible. Meanwhile the government’s security forces continue to arrest and detain people with no regard to due process, and assault and even kill people with impunity.

The alternative that is increasingly presenting itself is fostered by religious extremists who are capitalising on people’s misfortune and disempowerment. This alternative must be met and countered by the Bangladeshi centre, for the presence of religious extremism and political militancy only attracts the wrong kind of world attention. Furthermore, when Bangladesh really does become fatally affected by climate change, where in the world can more than 150 million people go to? A country that was previously held up (falsely or not) as a fine example of a Muslim democracy can not be dropped, otherwise we will face a refugee crisis and these refugees will be met with suspicion rather than compassion.

I feel that Bangladesh’s internal problems today will have external implications tomorrow, and affect everyone’s problems within the next twenty years. That’s why those who can make a difference have a responsibility to act now to help others, before it becomes a question of how can we act to save ourselves. I certainly feel that this might be a place I’m leaving today, but it’s not a country you can say goodbye to.

Bangladesh in a sentence? Michael Palin in his ‘Himalaya’ book went through the country and remarked that when watching workmen, it’s impossible to tell whether they’re putting something up or breaking it down, and I think that sums up Bangladesh really well. But it’s alright. 150 million Bangladeshis just about manage, and I have too.

It doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to coming back to London. I’ve read a lot of books here, the best being either ‘Middlemarch’ or ‘Midnight’s Children’ (the worst being ‘Come in Number 37’ the autobiography of mediocre 1990s footballer Rob Lee. I’m a connoisseur of footballer’s autobiographies but that was buying toilet paper with the shit already smeared on it). Yet there’s a passage in ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Elliot, at the very end of chapter five which is maybe my favourite bit of prose ever – Elliot writes “what novelty is worth that sweet monotony where is everything is known, and loved because it is known?

“The wood I walk in on this mild May day… – what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows – such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind …our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.”

So right now, much as it’s great to have incredible experiences, it’s going to be good to get back to that sweet monotony where the stimulus talks your language, and you’re not translating anymore.

Fast forward 146 years from Elliot and there’s a song ‘Fire of London’ by a South London based hip-hop group called ‘Why Lout?’ which basically sums up everything that I feel about my city, a place that isn’t just a large urban monster but through accident of birth is my home, and contains the mother tongue of my imagination. You can download the track here.

Another tune that has been something of a soundtrack for me in Bangladesh is ‘Factory’ by Martha Wainwright, a beautiful lilting lament that begins with the couplet “These are not my people I should never have come here”. But I’ve found as the last year has gone on that whilst I could never say that I am Bangladeshi, there’s no reason to think that different people can’t take pleasure in the same life. I’m separated either through my education, upbringing, culture, wealth, health, spiritual or temporal beliefs from the vast majority of Bangladeshis, yet there’s much less of the artificial barriers and constraints that separate people in the West. I’ve felt obviously completely distinct from Bangladeshis over the last year, but also strangely in solidarity with the country here, I think because there are so few places to hide. You get swept up and embraced whether you like it or not, but if you can manage to stop struggling, abandon your own lenses of perception and accept that those lenses are useless here – perception is irrelevant, the country has one layer, one screen that everyone is pressed against to make up the pixels of a bigger picture of Bangladesh. That envelops everybody; it’s a shared common space. It’s a very crowded space, uncomfortable at times, but its one layer.

Over the year, I’ve also learnt a bit of the Bangla language. So this, as they say in Bangladesh, is now shesh.

Cheers.

But whenever there is an opportunity for idiocy, I tend to be near the front of the queue, and last Friday I managed to get away with possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. As a treat to my friend Kobir and a thank you for all his help to me over the year, I said that we should go out of Sylhet and visit the Madhabkunda Waterfall, which is famous as one of the few natural wonders of Bangladesh and something that would be a shame not to see given that I was only three hours away from it, and not exactly spoilt for choice in terms of things to do.

However, I woke up on Friday morning with a streaming cold, and was not in the best of moods when we set out at 8am in a little CNG towards Madhabkunda. I then got badly sunburnt on the left side of my body which was sticking out of the CNG and facing East the whole way down, so when we finally arrived, I muttered to myself that it had better be worth it.

And it was. The waterfall lies about a ten minute trek through the foot of a steep jungle valley, filled with dense lush plants and insects buzzing around, the air thick with fresh oxygen. It was a fantastic break from Sylhet, and when we turned the final corner to see the source of the rising roar of water, it was nothing less than spectacular. Under a brilliant blue sky, the waterfall dropped about 150 feet down solid rock, taking up about a quarter of a narrow horse-shoe shape, which framed at the bottom a nice pool which just away from the turmoil of the water was full of about fifty Bangladeshi tourists messing around and enjoying themselves, and inevitably one poor ‘guard’ who was hopelessly ill-equipped with a whistle and a long twig to try and stop thirty kids from getting to close to where the water was hitting.

I went for a bit of a wade, and then got rushed by almost 20 young guys who scrummed over me, standing barely ten inches away and blocking off the light as they peered closely at my white skin as if they’d never seen it before. It took almost ten minutes of ignoring them before they finally left, and a few well placed sneezes, and I realised that this was one aspect of Bangladeshi culture I’m definitely not going to miss.

I then had to wait around an hour in the hot sun gently burning up whilst Kobir’s dad Mockshed prayed at the mosque, but in that time I was able to observe that at the very top of the waterfall, some people had climbed up round the back somehow and were able to stand almost at the lip of it. I thought that having come all this way and paid quite a lot of money, it would be a shame not to try and get up because the view with such good weather must be fantastic. So when Mockshed finally came back I announced that I wanted to get in to the jungle.

The five of us (including the two drivers) set off first up some steps which took us maybe two hundred feet up the valley, and I initially thought that this was going to be relatively easy. However it was oppressively hot and humid, probably around 35-40 degrees and because we were in thick undergrowth it wasn’t the most comfortable of walks. But I started to get my ‘bus-stop’ mentality, as in the longer you wait the more likely it is to come, so you might as well keep waiting regardless of how late you’re becoming. So the further we went on, although it was becoming more and more difficult it would have been even more stupid to turn around, particularly as we were theoretically very close to the waterfall and the view, if there hadn’t been quite so much forest in the way.

A small boy came out of nowhere and said that he could guide us a long, and after about twenty minutes of slipping around very narrow muddy paths, we met the river, which was obviously a good sign. It wasn’t cold at all, so we waded in to it and followed it along for about half-an-hour. It was never more than about waist deep and the current wasn’t too strong, so I actually, in spite of feeling dehydrated and sun-burnt and ill with the flu, began to really enjoy myself. I slipped at one point on a rock in the water (barefoot by now) and hurt my toe and knee a bit, and it occurred to me I should be careful given that I was supposed to be going to Tibet in a few weeks. But everyone else was ok and enjoying the beautiful scenery and sense of adventure; the little boy kept on telling us we were close, so we pressed on.

Eventually we could begin to hear the sound of the waterfall again, and the shrieking from the people at the bottom. We were practically at the highest bit of the hills, and in a brief clearing you could see maybe thirty miles, right across India (all the hilly areas in Bangladesh denote border territory). We were so close now to the actual waterfall itself, and as we turned the last corner I could see it, and the mounds near the lip that people earlier had been standing near.

I was only maybe 10 feet away, but to get there you would either have to scramble through very dense vegetation, or climb along a large piece of exposed rock that was rising up out of the river, at an angle of maybe 50 degrees (or imagine a clock face pointing to about 10.30). The rock looked pretty wet, and I was feeling pretty rough and unsteady, but I was also so near to my goal, and having got that far, I felt it would have been ridiculous to not even try. My conscience then reminded me of a day about two years ago when I was climbing a structure without a rope and got 30ft up before realising I was in trouble, and had to make a small lunge to get to the final hand-hold. It had been a very smelly ten seconds, and I’d sworn to myself never to take risks like that again. But I tend to think it’s better to regret something you did, than something you didn’t do, so displaying the kind of attitude that has possibly got me to Bangladesh in the first place, I thought ‘fuckitttt’ and reached out along the rock face.

Within thirty seconds, I was about two yards away from the safe ground, and totally stuck, feet sliding around for a foot-hold, the rock being like glass. I was gripping on to two hand-holds by the ends of my fingers, which weren’t secure, so I tried to stretch with my right hand for a better one. And my left hand slipped. I cracked my face against the rock. And slid down two and half metres and dropped in to the river.

Miraculously, the river still wasn’t deep and so I dropped off the rock like on a conveyer belt and landed on my feet, and I didn’t get swept by the current over the edge. I also hadn’t been knocked unconscious, so I didn’t drown in the water/then get swept over the edge. I looked up and saw my glasses and hat slide down the rock towards me, so managed to grab them, and raised my hands and shouted to my alarmed companions that I was ok. And then my vision on the left began to turn red, and I realised that actually I was in a spot of bother.

I waded around the rock and found a place to lift myself out, and then Kobir’s dad pushed some overhanging branches down for me to grip on to and haul myself up to firm ground, where everyone immediately rushed to make sure I was ok and check the cut on my face. Mockshed found some leaves which he squeezed up to make a sort of dressing, so I held that over the cut and then, establishing that everything else was more or less alright we set off back towards the main path at the bottom of the valley. The little kid was still with us and said he knew a short-cut so we made a rapid descent, which was a bit unnerving on my now shaky legs, but in 15 minutes had made it back to where we’d set off from an hour earlier.

The Polish side of me takes great delight in bitterly complaining about the most insignificant things, but my English side, after numerous youthful escapades with my Grandfather along the lines of ‘just because it was in the fire it doesn’t mean it will be hot’ or ‘just hold it there whilst I chop it with the axe’ and ‘during the war we didn’t complain’ has taught me that the worse a situation is, the less use there is making a fuss about it. So at this point, I thought it best to sit down and have a cigarette and to take a few minutes to work out what the best thing to do was; and whilst we all got our breath back, another party of Banglaeshi tourists came along and peered at the foreigner sitting on the ground in sodden, muddy, bloody clothes holding leaves over his face and a Benson to his mouth. The party were all very smartly dressed and incredibly, one of them was from New York and had a first aid kit. So he immediately offered to try and clean me up, I accepted and we spent another five minutes getting through a few bandages and swapping our stories. He advised that although the cut, just above my eye wasn’t too big, it was deep and would definitely require stitches. It turned out my Good Samaritan was also a tax accountant, so I ended up being saved by cigarettes and financial service providers. Let no-one speak ill of their kind ever again.

With a clean bandage on, we made it back to the main gate and the CNG. After a quick cup of tea for everyone we set off back to Sylhet, and I had three hours to think about how monumentally stupid and phenomenally lucky I’d been. By the time we got in to the city, it was Friday evening and private medical centres were closed, so we had to roll up to the main government hospital. It was huge, crowded with people and very dirty and dilapidated, but Mockshed and the two drivers bustled me about, and trading on my white skin – now it being a definite advantage – and liberal amounts of small bribes to porters and registrars, I managed to get admitted and sent up to one of the main wards.

It was like an air-craft hanger, just a big floor space full of rickety beds with people lying on them looking sick and depressed under the dim lighting. The only noise was from the fans and people groaning, but at one end of the room was a table where four youngish doctors were sitting taking down details. They said, via Mockshed that they would try and see me as quickly as possible, and told me to wait on a bed. A porter got me a sheet from a ‘special’ cabinet, as in a clean sheet, but it was still stained and tattered. I hadn’t been able to wash even my hands all day, and was really feeling filthy so found the toilets but they were abysmal and didn’t even have any soap, so I just had to sit and wait and again feel lucky that I wasn’t in for anything more serious.

They had sent the drivers off with a list of the things they would need to do my stitches and drugs to give me, saying once they arrived I could then be treated. I had a look and saw there were several pain-killers, so asked why they were there, because I don’t like taking anything unnecessarily and wasn’t really in an unmanageable amount of pain. “Yes, but you will be”, came the reply, so that began to make me feel a bit unsettled. Once the materials came back, I was then taken up pretty quickly to an operating theatre. I had assumed I would just get some stitches applied by a nurse, but this was a far bigger deal, and I was led through some doors, to progressively cleaner surroundings and was met by a full team of doctors in their green surgical outfits. No-one was really telling me what was going on, but they let Kobir come in with me which made a slight difference, although we were both still filthy; I had a mixture of snot and blood and river water still all over my hands and clothes. I had to lie on a bed and they switched huge over-head lights on me so I could barely see, and the doctor told me to lie with my arms outstretched, “like Jesus Christ” he laughed. “And look what then happened to him” I thought, but instead wanted to know the doctor’s name, just to make me feel a bit less of a test-dummy.

The doctor, who spoke broken English immediately asked me why I wanted his name, and wanted to know if it was so I could sue him for negligence. This alarmed me even more, because when you’re lying flat out under lights with someone holding you down and someone else about to start putting needles around your eye, you don’t want them to talk about things going seriously wrong before they’ve even started. But they told me their names, then told me to close my eyes and they switched to speaking in Bangla.

Minutes after I could hear someone else be wheeled in, who was obviously in a far worse way than me so they moved to anaesthetise him and while he began to heavily breath away I focussed on being in a peaceful place. I couldn’t see even if I opened my eyes now because the lights were too strong, so just had to try and listen very carefully for when they might start doing something, and not flinch when something touched my skin. I was also concerned that I wouldn’t sneeze, so I lay there sweating away whilst the doctors stitched me, for what seemed like an age, and was certainly long enough for me to consider my all-time top five favourite cheeses.

The doctors didn’t say any words in English apart from the phrase ‘severe pain’, which made me a bit more tense but in fact the guy doing the stitching was perfectly skilled, and I never really had any doubts over his technical/medical competence. I just wish he had some sense of bedside manner. However, as he stepped away and I opened my eyes, another young female doctor came forward with a syringe. I asked her what she was doing and she looked irritated, said it was for tetanus and then injected me in my left arm. That was a shock, and pretty sore, but before I could ask her if she wouldn’t mind not hammering it in so much, she switched sides and then gave me another one in my right shoulder. This time it was agony, the most painful thing anyone’s ever done to me on purpose.

I was lying there gasping for breath, and could feel the vaccine swimming in to my arm and around my shoulder and back, hurting all the way. It was a shock, and finally when she tried to stick one in the vein of my arm, I was too staggered to protest whilst she messed around with it. It turned out she was a trainee doctor, but I wouldn’t let her practice on a cushion. So when I finally left the theatre I felt a lot worse than when I went in, and I forlornly trudged out of the wards looking a sorry site, not the best advertisement for those waiting to go up. I then had to get a translation of the drugs they’d given me and proscribed, which took a while so eventually in another flurry of small bribes got discharged.

I made it back to the hotel at 11.30, desperate to finally be able to wash myself after a long, long day. I gave the drivers an appropriately gigantic tip for all their help, and assured Kobir and his Dad that I was in their debt forever, as without them in the hospital I really would have been in trouble.

And ultimately, after a long shower and a meal of antibiotics, I was able to stare at my bandaged face, masking an extremely embarrassed and fed-up volunteer. The plus side to the day is that I got to explore not just some beautiful scenery but also the Bangladeshi health service, which operated pretty much as quickly as the English one, and I’m sure as competently, although something to do with making the patient feel human should be in the training manual. Moreover, the people I was with, and the people who helped me on the way really went out of their way to do everything they could for me, despite the situation being entirely my fault. Their total kindness to a relative stranger I’m not sure you would necessarily receive in England, and it made me feel really lucky to be surrounded by such caring people. Sometimes I find the lack of personal space and privacy here frustrating, but it also means that a problem is always shared, and that’s no bad thing. In the West, increasingly problems tend to be shared only once celebrities think they can resurrect their careers promoting it.

Now a week later I’ve got the stitches out and I’ll just have a scar to remind me of a very stupid accident. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I’ve certainly gained more than just a scar from my Madhabkunda experience. I think you can learn a lot about a society by how it treats its sick, and how it treats its outcasts. I’ve now needed some care from the Bangladeshi state and its people, and I’ve certainly got it, and I feel really grateful and a bit more appreciative to ‘Bangladesh’ than perhaps I did earlier – they’ve directly helped me, whereas sometimes it seems with all the power cuts, the weather and various other petty frustrations that the place is against you. So whilst I wouldn’t recommend climbing close to waterfalls or needing healthcare, there has been a positive aspect. All I need to do now to complete my learning is end up in a Bangladeshi prison.

Please download the Rickshaw-Development-proposal.pdf

The challenge was to propose an idea which would have the greatest impact on poverty alleviation in Bangladesh. After nine months of living and working in the country as volunteers, my colleague Thomas Wipperman and I realised that the answer was all around us. There are many marginalised groups in Bangladesh; indigenous people, farmers afflicted by the Monga famines, HIV sufferers – but they compromise a tiny minority in a country of over 145 million. When the purpose of intervention is to reach as many people as possible at the lowest end of the social scale, the stand-out constituency is the rickshaw pullers. Rickshaw pullers are the essential cogs in Bangladesh’s machine. And they deserve better.

Therefore, through the nationalisation and rationalisation of non motorised urban transport, we propose to incorporate the two million rickshaw pullers in Bangladesh into the formal economy as public workers within a sustainable, pollution-free, low cost urban transport network. If the rickshaw industry were nationalised, passengers would not simply be paying someone to cycle them around, they would be contributing to Bangladesh’s biggest public service, a bigger transportation economy than Biman and the Railways combined. By formalising this enormous economy – 6% of Bangladesh’s GDP – we believe it would be possible to bring economic and social uplift to rickshaw pullers, bring better public transport to Bangladesh’s cities, and reach nearly 15% of the total population. Our proposal is sweeping in its scope but efficient in its implementation. It is a feasible and equitable way of bringing positive change to some of Bangladesh’s most marginalised communities

If an intervention wishes to make as large a social impact as possible then taking account the combination of the community size, and its economic and social contribution and position, targeting the conditions of rickshaw pullers has to be a priority. As bideshis, it seems to us that considering their importance to Bangladesh’s economic, social and cultural life and how hard they toil towards this, the scarcity of reward enjoyed by rickshaw pullers, their lack of rights and lowly status is astonishing. Our proposal would aim to raise their social status, increase their income and ensuring that this is secure, and rationalise the transport of Bangladesh so that it can be more efficient and effective, which is essential for any country’s wider development.

 Crucially, the behaviour of users will have to change very little, and the economic cost to them of the change will be zero. Service users would simply find that what was once a private service is now a public one, and they would need to purchase tokens from local retailers, a viable and already tested system for other services. At the same time, every single person who uses a rickshaw in Bangladesh – almost the entire population will become a stakeholder; will directly contribute to the alleviation of poverty, disadvantage and inequity amongst the people of Bangladesh. The beauty of our proposal lies in its simplicity, and economic sustainability. After living and working here it is obvious that Bangladesh, despite the challenges it faces, has some of the hardest working, most patriotic and determined people in the world. It also has wealth, a fluid cash economy – but like most countries, too much cash ends up concentrated in tiny minority. We have tried, therefore, to devise a scheme that can harness that passion, commitment, and surplus capital with the minimum disruption to the cultural fabric of the nation. Nationwide approximately $4.1 million flows in to the rickshaw economy every day. $2.9m remains the property of the rickshaw pullers. The excess $1.2m is therefore money that, were the rickshaw sector nationalised, could flow back every day in to the Bangladeshi state – $529m per year. Given that the Bangladeshi national budget for 2007-2008 totalled $12.63 billion, with $3.83b allocated under the Annual Development Plan (ADP), our project would effectively introduce an increase of 14% to the ADP. And the cost of implementing our proposal? We estimate this to be around $160m, which set against guaranteed annual revenue of over $500m, is certainly justifiable. 

This proposal’s five main objectives are designed to have as wide an impact as is possible without causing disruption to this vital transport network. It will bring economic security to the rickshaw puller with the creation of a regular income stream; it will facilitate the raising of rickshaw pullers’ social status by making them formal public workers with rights and responsibilities; it will generate substantial, sustainable capital for investment into upgrading rickshaw garage infrastructure, bringing health and other social benefits to rickshaw pullers; it will incorporate rickshaw pullers into society by making their garages centres of development activity and education; and it will improve the standard of public transport in Bangladesh’s urban centres.

Whilst an intervention of this scale would require careful management and meticulous organisation, we believe that it is far from utopian, or unrealistic given the challenges faced by the government of Bangladesh. On the contrary, an intervention on this scale could only be managed by an authority with the scope and power of the State, and the political incentives to the government for pursuing an eminently realisable goal are obvious. The legitimacy of any government, especially in a democratic system rests on how it manages the welfare of the people under its charge.  We believe that our proposal clearly would make a huge positive contribution to the welfare of nearly 15% of Bangladeshis, specifically those who need it most, and the benefits of adopting our proposal outweigh any potential difficulties.

Our proposal aims to not just improve the educational standard and the physical well-being of the rickshaw puller and their families and dependents, but also socially and psychologically empower the rickshaw puller. They would be freed from their dependency on their mechanical master, the rickshaw, currently their only source of survival and also what entrenches their social immobility. Instead they would be lifted to the level of full Bangladeshi citizens, enjoying rights and benefits, providing a service and carrying responsibilities, paying taxes, and aiding the collection of a vast previously untapped revenue for their nation and its people. By empowering the rickshaw puller and also providing them with material and educational assistance, you are providing them with the opportunity to not only take pride in their work and their status, but also to change it.

Of course, the Hill Tracts region, which stretches along the eastern border of Bangladesh with India isn’t primitive or treacherous at all, nor is it especially dangerous. But there is relatively little known about the area because for over twenty years until 1998, the Bangladeshi army was fighting against the indigenous communities who live there, as they had chosen guerrilla warfare as a means of trying to safeguard their land and their culture against the incoming Bengali mainstream communities. The main problem for the indigenous people of Bangladesh, they say to me, is that the Bangladeshi constitution affirms the rights of all people as Bangladeshi citizens, and doesn’t make any distinction for people who want to remain in Bangladesh –  which is their home – but wouldn’t define themselves as Bengali.

The indigenous peoples have a different culture, different traditions and practices and feel that this is under threat. Crucially, they have a lot of problems with their land being taken away as they often don’t have documentation for property that their families have lived on for generations. In the Hill Tracts, which is a jungle region and very sparsely populated especially compared to the rest of the country, the government has long been trying to move settlers in from the crowded slums of normal Bangladesh and obviously this causes great friction.

I wasn’t able to get as much information as I would have liked, nor was I able to speak with any people from the security forces or Bangladeshi state authorities so I can’t give a fair comment on what the situation is really like. But the indigenous people I spoke with felt short-changed by the peace-deal in 1998, and said that the terms have not been followed up. They also still felt persecuted and harassed by the security forces, unduly so, and there were lots of stories of people being arrested without charge (as is happening everywhere in Bangladesh now) and assaulted. The people I spoke with felt that they were powerless against the military, and were not positive about their chances if and when a new government is ever elected.

A third of the substantial Bangladeshi army is stationed in the Hill Tracts, on the grounds that it’s such a volatile area they need to keep the peace. Of course, the indigenous people would argue that it’s because of the army’s presence there is no peace, and so a rather typical for most territorial disputes a catch 22 situation develops, with disastrous consequences for the local people, as in Palestine or Northern Ireland. Most notably, an indigenous community leader Cholesh Richil was arrested and horrifically tortured to death by the security forces earlier this year, and no-one has been held accountable, indeed the army tried to cover it up, except the extent of his abuse was so appalling they couldn’t ignore the outcry. On the other hand, last month two officials working for the Danish development agency were kidnapped by indigenous activists. They were later released though, and hadn’t been tortured.

People in Bangladesh seem to have an impression that the CHT is a very dangerous, primitive region, and in terms of needing to keep their military busy, it suits the (now military) government to cultivate that impression. Very little news comes out of the area, and the army vets and closely monitors outsiders coming in, there are several check-points on the access road and if you don’t have permission, you have to turn around. Once I arrived we immediately had a visit from the Special Branch who wanted to know exactly where I would be and what I was going to do for the next two weeks, ostensibly for my security, but apparently it’s because they don’t want anyone, especially foreigners getting involved in human rights issues. It’s also the only place in Bangladesh, and maybe the world in terms of populated areas with no mobile phone network because otherwise the ‘terrorists’ could use their phones to co-ordinate activity. I’m sure this will soon change, mostly due to pressure from the telecoms industry rather than the absurdity of it, but it’s just another tool to create a sense of leaving the sanctity and safety of ‘normal’ Bangladesh and going up in the hills, deep in to the jungle, to a different land.

So I went. And I loved it. I stayed in a town called Khagrachari, and it felt to me at last as if this was the way Bangladesh was meant to be. I’ve realised after nearly a year here and quite a lot of travelling around that I just don’t like urban Bangladesh. The towns and cities to me are so poorly planned and have grown so rapidly that all of the worst aspects of urban living come out. There’s no architectural style other than cheap and not-finished, everywhere is over-crowded, noisy, polluted and chaotic. The climate makes everything much worse, but so little care is taken over the environment that it’s just not the kind of place I like to be in. I find the raw energy in the streets here magnetic and mesmerising, but I also find it tiring and overwhelming. Europeans are so lucky that even places that look boring and ugly tend to have about five hundred years of history under the surface, and distinct features that complement and reflect the environment, apart of course from Milton Keynes.

But Bangladesh on the whole strikes me as a great example of what happens if you suddenly mass hundreds of thousands of people together all desperately trying to improve their situation without any of the institutions and structures capable of providing that improvement, whether it is an education system, effective town councils, transport infrastructure, health service and so on. The people’s resolve and determination in the face of all these disadvantages that so many are just born in to is inspiring and incredibly admirable, but I have a strange sense sometimes, which may be completely wrong, as if this isn’t the way that this country is meant to be, it’s all happened too quickly. It simply can’t accommodate this many people all aiming to get rich quick, which is partly why so many emigrate to work as cheap labour elsewhere.

In the Hill Tracts however, modern western ‘civilisation’ has emerged, but people struck me as far more relaxed, and content with their environment. Of course there is great poverty and all the problems that affect the rest of Bangladesh, as well as the relationship with the security forces, but there were also virtually no private cars and no CNG baby-taxis, so it was so much quieter. There was far less rubbish everywhere, so the air smelt clean, and because it there were lots of hills, excess water drained away rather than stagnating like in Sylhet. Khagrachari is surrounded by hills that were covered in mist most of the time I was there to add to sense of being cut of from the rest of the country, which is otherwise flat as a pancake and just stretches on and on. In my hotel room in Sylhet at the moment, I’m on the sixth floor and must be able to see for fifty miles.

In Sylhet the indigenous communities are scattered all around the region in very isolated communities, so in Sylhet city itself the indigenous population can’t comprise more than about 5%. In Khagrachari it’s 51%, and so for the first time for me in Bangladesh, I felt like I was in a multicultural area, which I feel much more at home in coming from London. At night, staying in Georgia’s (another VSO volunteer) extremely comfortable flat you would first here the Muslim call to prayer, and then Buddhist chanting, and sometimes Hindu singing. Because of this diversity, in the indigenous market you could buy pork, which would get me shot in Sylhet, and so again for the first time this year I had pig meat. And it was delicious.

The people I was working with were exceptionally friendly and welcoming, even as I messed around with their carefully cultivated chaos of a computer network, and I really felt valued and appreciated. I was very sorry to leave when my two weeks were up, and not just because I had a shocking hangover to wrestle on a hot bus winding down the hillsides for three hours. The indigenous people here also, being non-muslim, made large amounts of very strong rice-wine, and my last day was spent going on a ‘picnic’, which in practice meant riding off in a motorbike convoy armed with pork curry and alcohol to a remote mud-hut, and not leaving until everyone had sung plenty of songs and made complete fools of themselves, which we all did with aplomb.

Going down the Hills back in to ‘normal’ Bangladesh, I felt extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit a place that for the wrong reasons, is still so isolated from the rest of the World. And yet despite its relative remoteness, I also felt in some respects like I had more in common with the people there than I do with the people I’m normally living with in Sylhet. The good things and the bad things in CHT deserve to be made available for all to see, who wish to; in this day and age it’s simply unrealistic that an area can be shrouded in misinformation. The new Bangladeshi government, when it eventually takes shape must recognise that if people have a right to settle there, which they do, then those who already live their have a right to put their point across. I think the CHT is the best place I’ve been to in Bangladesh, and it should be willingly shared, not camouflaged by censorship and army uniforms.

Bangladesh: Protecting Rights as Vital as Ending Corruption

(New York, August 1, 2007) – The Bangladeshi government should take the protection of human rights as seriously as the fight against corruption, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the chief advisor of the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh (http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/08/01/bangla16556.htm). The letter addresses problems of extrajudicial killings, torture, and arbitrary arrests.

For additional Human Rights Watch reporting on Bangladesh, please visit:

· Bangladesh country page: http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=asia&c=bangla

· “Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s Elite Security Force,” December 2006: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/bangladesh1206/

· Bangladesh chapter of Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2007: http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/bangla14864.htm

For more information, please contact:

In London, Brad Adams: +44-790-872-8333 (mobile), or adamsb@hrw.org

In India, Meenakshi Ganguly: +91-9820036032 (mobile), or gangulm@hrw.org

However, the rain really has been coming down across South Asia and especially in Bangladesh this week, causing hundreds of deaths and millions of people to be stranded, and losing everything. Bangladesh in the rainy season has more surface water than the whole of Europe, but now half the country is submerged and it’s apparently going to get worse before it gets better.

As for me, by virtue of my status I’m one of the lucky ones. My house got flooded again on Tuesday, and I lost my patience and have moved in to a local hotel. I already didn’t have any power, piped water, or food because my fridge was broken, but I ventured out in to the rain at about 8 in the morning for some breakfast, and when I got back at 8.45 there was six inches of water in my kitchen.

I actually don’t mind a bit of a practical crisis, because I like finding practical solutions. So I made myself a cup of tea (Step One in any British ‘Coping with Disaster’ manual) and sat with my feet in the water working out what the best thing to do was. However, once I realised that the water had come up from my squat toilet I decided that enough was enough and packed a few things and cycled off through the floods, water coming up about a foot.

Most of Sylhet is actually ok, but my area closest to the river is gone, and with only nine more days for me left in Sylhet, I’ve decided to use my August house rent to get a cheap room and enjoy constant electricity and walls that aren’t wet to the touch, a last bit of luxury as I bid this place goodbye.

 I’ve hardly ever stayed in hotels before, and I’ve never ‘lived’ in one, so I’m beginning to feel a bit like Alan Partridge as I try to make friends with all the staff that seem to loiter at every corner, one to summon the lift, one to go in the lift with you, one to welcome you out of the lift – typical Bangladeshi efficiency. But they do provide a washing service, which is relatively expensive but they actually clean the clothes, which hasn’t happened before. When I got my t-shirts back, they were a different colour – the one I bought them in, and were actually dry. So all of a sudden it no longer feels like I’m wearing woven cheese.

“Betel-nut condom wins taste tests
NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) — An Indian firm has launched a paan-flavored condom designed to evoke the pungent taste of the betel nut and tobacco concoction chewed and then spat out by millions of South Asians, newspapers have reported.

Hindustan Latex is targeting the new condom range at prostitutes, who are among the most vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS, the Hindustan Times reported Tuesday.

The company ran taste tests with sex workers, including prototypes with chocolate, banana and strawberry flavors, but the paan flavor came out tops.

“The community loved it as most of the sex workers chew paan,” Sanjeev Gaikwad was quoted as saying at the launch in Mumbai. Gaikwad is a director at Family Health International, a public health organisations that helped develop the condom.

Paan is a mildly intoxicating preparation wrapped in a leaf, usually
containing tobacco, betel nut and flavorings, and is hugely popular across South Asia. It is chewed to a mouth-staining red pulp before being spat out.

The condoms will at first be made available only to prostitutes, but will we launched to the general public in a few months, the newspaper said.”

I’ve looked and can’t find the original article, but either way, this is the funniest story I’ve read from the region over the whole year. It’s certainly a very different approach to HIV development programmes, the polar opposite to all these pro-abstinance campaigns which are absolutely useless.

However, given how vigourously people chew paan over here, it might be great for the prostitutes but I’m not sure I’d be keen on covering my penis with something that makes people want to bite down. It’s the equivalent of smearing yourself in barbeque sauce and then waving your cock above a bear pit.

But if this really does take off, then how long before it becomes a commercial success in other countries? Not paan-flavoured, obviously, but if you could produce condoms to suit the local palate then you could be on to an instant money-maker. And now my lack of success every time I visit Poland can be simply put down to my lack of Durex smelling of boiled cabbage.

Thinking back to my teenage years in London, where nights on the pull were mainly spent standing in the back of pubs on my own, I’m not sure the boiled cabbage offer would have worked in the first place. Tragically, fashion-wise I was just too ahead of the times and it still annoys me that my unique look has since been copied and made popular by Harry Potter. But for all those misunderstood young men out there desperate for action, help could be hand. What do all young girls across the world love to suck when they go out, constantly, sometimes ten or more times a night? Exactly. Marlboro-Light flavoured condoms.

Someone please put me in touch with Phillip Morris. I think I might have just made the world a better place.