Hartals ruin weekend plans, heading to India later this week!

I was holding off writing this blog entry until after I returned from a weekend trip to Banderban arranged for the fellows by AUW, but as the title would suggest, hartals ruin weekend plans. So instead of going to the beautiful Chittagong Hill Tracts region last weekend, I laid around my apartment pretending to accomplish things.

But I've been told people are curious about what hartals are and what happens during them, so this will be more text-based since I haven't been out taking pictures recently. I'll include pictures that aren't at all relevant just to break up the text.

Check out the sunset from the roof of my building!

If you google hartal, the definition comes up as "Hartal is a term in many South Asian languages for strike action, first used during the Indian Independence Movement. It is mass protest often involving a total shutdown of workplaces, offices, shops, courts of law as a form of civil disobedience."

Here's a guy selling guavas on the street. Yum!

Hartals are almost always called by a political party who is protesting some kind of government action or court decision. This latest hartal was called because of a court ruling sentencing a major revolutionary figure to death, later amended to life in prison. Nobody should take my relaying of this court case and the figure as fact - everything I know about it I got by scanning Daily Star articles posted on Facebook! Hartal was called for Thursday and Sunday, leaving the weekend open and clear but apparently in the past hartals resulting from court cases tend to be more volatile so AUW's security head decided it would be too risky trying to get a bus full of foreigners out of the city. This hartal was national too, which means just getting out of the city doesn't mean we would avoid the protests. During hartals motorized vehicles (so basically anything other than rickshaws) are banned from the roads so trying to haul a bus full of people through town isn't necessarily the best idea.

Here's a view of Chittagong from the top of a green hill we walked up one afternoon.

Luckily this hartal was pretty boring - as far as I know Chittagong was fairly calm although news reports did say it got messy in other cities and villages. Most of the time I find out about hartals through Facebook, funny enough. I follow the Daily Star which is the major english-language newspaper here in Bangladesh. They'll report pretty immediately when a hartal is called and it'll pop up on my newsfeed. Otherwise I'll get an email from the US embassy in Dhaka, where I registered my location after I moved here, or an email from our security department here at AUW.

I might have already posted that picture, whoops. Here's a rickshaw!

Last year the hartals were pretty regular and much more uncertain in terms of violence and damage, so campus was closed more often and movement for people here got pretty restricted. Generally it's safe to go out during hartals if you stay in the neighborhood. I feel fine walking down to the grocery store and picking things up. Many people will take rickshaws into school if the campus is still open to get to work, but since I only have class one night a week it's pretty easy for me to just work from home and skip the hassle on hartal days. The main issue is trying to get through GEC circle (actually more of a triangle, but whatever), which connects a few major roads and is sort of the center of town. Where I live is on the opposite of GEC circle from school, which means crossing it is a must. When things do get hairy during hartals, it can be the worst around GEC circle. 

Every time I go out I get mobbed by children. This guy had pretty good english so we chatted as we walked. 

For the most part though, hartals just sort of ruin any weekend plans we make, and give me an excuse to stay home and work in my pajamas all day instead of having to come into work and look presentable. 

No idea what these say, but I'm pretty sure it's the "father of the nation" who was a major player in the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971.

Not much else to say here on this one other than I'm going to India on Thursday for the duration of our fall break! I might update again before I go, I'm thinking of bringing my camera into school to take some pictures of the campus to put up if anyone's interested. But I'm busy trying to get everything done before fall break.

I'm trying to get out of here before the Eid break starts and the cow sacrifice that will be taking place all over Bangladesh. Eid al-Adha (Festival of the Sacrifice) is celebrated by Muslims worldwide to honor the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his promised son as asked by God. Before he could finish the dirty deed, God intervened and told Abraham to just sacrifice a lamb instead.

IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH, DON'T KEEP READING

To honor that sacrifice, families who can afford it are expected to sacrifice their best halal animal which in Bangladesh is expected to be a cow. Some of the meat from the slaughter of the cow is given to neighbors and the poor or needy so that nobody will go without the sacrificial meal during the holiday.

What this means for me as a vegetarian and animal lover though, is several days of public animal slaughter throughout the country. It's difficult for me to try and write about in a culturally respectful way because it is a longstanding tradition that has benefits for the economy and health and welfare of impoverished populations, but from a western standpoint it's pretty brutal. If you're curious you can google Eid cow sacrifice Bangladesh and see some of the really gruesome photos.

The animals are killed by slitting their throat, which is supposed to be very humane, but the cows generally know what's going on and so apparently you can hear them crying as they are slaughtered. The slaughter usually takes place in the garage of the family's apartment building or home, and the blood is allowed to run into the streets.

We were warned about this holiday pretty early on once we've arrived and I've made very sure to leave the country before it gets going. Hopefully when I come back from India the whole deal will be over and I can go on pretending that a couple dozen cows didn't have their throats slit down my street.

Early morning at the fish market!

I should preface this by saying this was about two or three weeks ago, but I've just gotten around to writing up the post and adding pictures. Sorry for the delay, people I promised to!

So writing a blog sometimes really does work in your favor. About a week before this excursion one of the Access Academy (AA) faculty, John, apparently saw my blog and thought my photos were halfway decent (my words, not his) and thought I'd be interested in checking out the fish market one early morning. Backtrack for a moment, AA is the first year for students joining AUW where they do intensive courses in the basics (reading, writing, math, science, and history) so when they actually start their first year of undergrad (UG1) everyone has the same foundation in classes. So it was one of the AA teachers who took me out to the market.

Well as any good fisherman would tell you, the early bird catches the, well, fish in this case. That means these fishing boats are out early early in the morning and we needed to be by the fish market early enough to catch them as they brought their daily catch in. I woke around 5AM and walked down to meet John at the other AUW faculty buildings and we grabbed a tuk-tuk to the other side of town.

We got there just as the sun was rising and had to pass through open market areas where baskets of shrimp and fish were being slung from wagons onto tables. Huge, square blocks of ice were making their rounds on vendor's carts throughout the market. Honestly it smelled exactly as bad as you would expect an open-air fish market in a country with open sewage problems. After about a five minute walk through the crowded market, we emerged to the other side where the docks and boats were, and I was absolutely stunned.

The following is terribly picture heavy, and I'm not really sorry about that. You came to this blog, so now you get to look at these photos. It's the closest thing I can get to making someone sit down with me and go through photo by photo (which, incidentally, I make my roommate do... sorry Minoli).

Here I was thinking that we would see small metal trawlers not dissimilar from those professional fishers use in the US to bring in their daily catch. I was pleasantly surprised to see that every boat was a beautiful dark carved wood. John mentioned they were Portuguese style and I have no clue either way, so I'm quoting him on that.

We walked around for a couple hours, then got tea in a small local tea stand and headed back home all before 9am. Can't beat that for a morning excursion!

Back of one of these boats, not a great photo for the lighting but gives a good idea of the shape and materials of the boats. You can also see the carved paneling in the boathouse. Is that a boathouse? This is an exercise in how little I know about boats.

By this time, the ships had come in for the morning and so those who weren't hauling in the catch were working on de-tangeling and mending any nets that had been damaged in the night. 

The sun rising gave a really pretty golden tint to everything. 

Loading fish onto a cart for market

Woman holding a baby in waist-deep water talking to fishermen. 

Hauling in a load of shrimp(?)

This kid saw I was taking a picture of the boats, and at the last minute ran and jumped up into my photo. Probably the best picture I got that morning. 

All generations out mending nets and helping out. 

View in towards the city from a bridge on the edge of the market area.

Final small canoe loading to meet a larger boat out in the water. 

Until next time!

The rough side of things /rant time

Here I'm not going to be talking about what I've been doing (I'll update with another post on that shortly), but rather I'm going to list some of the things I struggle with here on a daily basis. These are individual actions as well as just facts of life that come from living in developing countries.

I want to note clearly that these are my personal experiences. Everyone experiences travel and living abroad differently, and I don't experience things as everyone else would in my situation. It is important to note some of these come from my gender (female) and appearance (very white, very blonde). Both of these factors make me stick out even more than some of my companions who are male or can blend a bit better.

I've struggled with posting something like this, but this last week has been especially tough in these regards and I want the catharsis that comes with writing something negative out. Before starting I want to clearly state that the negativity included in this post is a present part of my daily life but is certainly not the only part of my daily life. For every negative experience there's positive ones to help bolster my spirits. In between sections I'm going to inter disperse pictures of things I've seen that make me happy so you can have a happy break too.

Look at this sheep.

1) Animal cruelty

This is something that I really struggle with, especially when you see animals in the city. Animals are not treated nearly as well as they are in the global west (North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.). The first time I saw an elephant out on the streets of Chittagong I was excited - how foreign, how exotic! A man riding the elephants through the streets, it's exactly what you would think of if you closed your eyes and imagined colonial times.

The second and third time I've seen an elephant haven't been nearly so exciting. I think it may be the same elephant, but it's hard to tell. The chains wrapped around its front leg make it pretty clear that at the end of the day this elephant doesn't get to go home to a huge grassy paddock with a little pond and other elephant friends. The man riding the elephant meanwhile wales on it with a stick, directing the elephant in and out of traffic on the chaotic, polluted roads. Imagining what kind of life such an intelligent and emphatic animal leads here in Chittagong is an exercise in depression.

The elephant isn't alone. Tons of feral dogs and cats wander about, often diseased and hungry looking. They're not loved companions, they're pests on the road. You can't eat them, they don't work, they really don't have much point here.

Cows, goats, chickens, ducks and geese are treated relatively better because they have value in their eggs, milk, or consumption. But they're still animals living in crowded, dirty, loud, chaotic conditions. You see old men carrying tiny baskets of songbirds and parrots for sale, packed into the baskets so they can barely move. Chickens and ducks are tied by the feet into groups of four or five while still alive and carried upside-down to be sold or slaughtered.

There's not so much active cruelty towards animals as there is overwhelming apathy. No consideration for the feelings, the needs, the comforts of the animals we share this city with. It's difficult to expect impoverished people to try and account for the comfort of non-human creatures but as someone raised in a western country and a great animal lover, it can be really trying.

These geese are just chilling, like NBD BRO.

2) Poverty

That brings us to the second difficulty. The intense poverty. It's present, it's obvious, and it's everywhere.

Every country has poverty. Certainly the United States does in many urban and rural communities. For the most part though we keep ourselves separate from poverty in the global west. Even living in one of the nicer Chittagong neighborhoods we see people who are painfully thin, children asking for food constantly. One of the hardest moments I had here was about two weeks ago. After stopping in this bakery for a few savory pastries, I got into a rickshaw with a Bangladeshi friend of mine to head back home for the day. As she was climbing in, she dropped her box of pastries onto the street. The box flew open and the pastries were on the dirty, disgusting street. As she bemoaned the loss of her snack, a woman holding a young baby came up and excitedly started talking. As we pulled away I asked what the woman had been saying, and my friend told me that she had asked whether she could eat the dropped pastries.

This mom was thrilled at the prospect of having pastries that fell and broke on the filthy wet street. Presumably, she would be giving some to her young child as well. I'm not embarrassed to say I went home and cried, and even in writing out this here I'm brought to tears again.

Living here not only brings awareness to the privilege of having enough to eat every day, but also just impresses the helplessness of the situation. If I had known, I could have given that mother my pastries too. Or bought her something more substantial from the grocery store. But they would still be hungry tomorrow. The child will grow without proper nutrition. Its siblings will too. Even if you find food for this one family, there's literally thousands, millions more that are just as hungry, just as needy. The cycle of poverty is so overwhelming that it can make facing it quite difficult. Which brings me to my next point...

I stood here for three minutes and couldn't get this cat to look at me. Kitty got attitude.

 3) Beggars

Anytime you leave the house, you will be accosted by someone begging. Oftentimes its children, packs of them roam certain busy streets or intersections and they'll crowd you, tugging at your clothes, yelling "madam, madam please" and follow you for blocks. They'll follow you across the street, into traffic, down sidewalks. They'll crowd you as you climb into a rickshaw and continue to ask until you start to pull away.

Even if you take school vans, at stopped intersections people will come up to the windows and tap against the glass. Always begging for money. When it's not children begging, it's mothers with small children, the elderly, or the disabled. They often carry small pans where you can throw bills into. It becomes a real ethical dilemma though... especially with the children. They are reckless, prone to running into traffic after you without looking where they're going. I haven't seen any of them get hit yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it happens. Giving them money not only encourages reward for recklessness like that, but it also shows them that pestering foreigners long enough will pay dividends. If you walk through a certain area regularly and you give someone money once, they will pester you for it every single day. Worse, other beggars will see that you give and will begin harassing you as well for it.

It becomes a real struggle walking fast away when you're swarmed by children under 8 who are calling after you, begging for money for food. I've had them grab both ends of my scarf, nearly choking me. They'll grab and pull quite hard on my top. They'll grab at my arms or my bag hoping for something. It's exhausting and emotionally draining to yell sharply at them to stop. Literally nothing you can do will make them stop unless a more attractive target appears to take their attention, but unless another group of foreigners appears and starts throwing money around, that seems extremely unlikely.

Look at the size of this tree. That's a full grown man standing next to it. What a cool tree.

4) Catcalling/harassment

This one is just coming from a women's perspective. Surprise surprise, women are not treated well in Bangladesh. Culturally women are just second place in everything. My biggest moment of culture shock happened in the Dhaka airport as I was in line for customs arrival. Guards pulled every single man out of line behind me and brought them forward. Every. Single. Man. Even as a foreign woman I am shifted into lesser treatment. Worse actually because the reputation of western women is not a good one.

We are considered slutty, to put it simply. Western women have sex before marriage and wear scandalously revealing clothes in public around men that are not their husbands. Some women never get married and have kids. We drink, we smoke, we party just like our male counterparts. And it is this perception that follows us regardless of our individual choices or behaviors.

Thus when I walk down the street, I get a constant barrage of "hello madam" "where you from?" "hey what is your mobile number?" "hey sexy" "I want to kiss you" on a daily basis. It's never ending. People asking to take their pictures with/of me. Some of the other fellows will consent but I never do. They're not taking a photo because I have a nice personality or they like my fashion sense. They take a picture because I'm a spectacle, like a two-headed calf or a really cool looking car. I know it's a common phrase to say if you stare too long, take a picture so you can enjoy it longer, but that doesn't seem like an improvement to me. Photos get posted on social media and comments are made that I can't understand or control. Comments about western women are generally not positive, and not something I want my face connected to.

 The staring is constant and obvious. People make no pretense of hiding their stares, instead gaping with mouths open from their rickshaw or bus as I pass. Even inside the school vans I get this constant attention. It's extremely uncomfortable. It's the life of a celebrity without any perks. No privacy anywhere. Ever. Always representing and putting your best face forward.

It can be exhausting.

Check out this tiger statue. It guards the Tiger's Pass intersection.