Advent

It's the first day of Advent.

Just under a year ago, I stood on Alvechurch station, sucking in iced air and trying to appreciate the delays.

I didn't know it then, but I'd just had the last Sunday roast I'd ever share with my Grandpa. I stamped my feet and cursed London Midland Trains and felt, in the silence, like I was on the edge of everything, lost in intergalactic cold, and felt coolly at home.

Grandpa - Neville James Burton - caught flu that week, and never recovered. He was 89. Good innings. But it was a bleak day when he died, and the family home lost a supporting wall.

He paid, out of a lifetime's savings, for me to do my master's degree. It was an act of extraordinary generosity, which left me (and leaves me still) gobsmacked with thankfulness. He wouldn't have heard a word of the respect and praise he deserved, he would just have smiled and muttered and changed the subject, and we would have spoken about the cricket instead.

Without that degree, I would not be in Bangladesh, trying to work out how to bless people. Without spending that extra year in York, I would not have met some of the people closest to me, been given the honour of being a best man to the best man, found a home, or worked in the theatre. Without the time my Grandpa paid for, I cannot conceive of where I might be today.

Winter is about death. But it is always, always followed by life. There's nothing any of us can do to change those things.

So I hope I'm out here making him proud; I hope you enjoy this poem.

Advent

Summer's gone, the nights are now
All the day can really do
The whole world's turned inside itself
As heat recedes, the air is held
And stilled, past animation, on to death

We wait like juggled planets
Caught in coldness, frozen on the curve
Before exhilarating force comes up
To claim for us once more; we believe
As we flash out, go numb against the black
That we are done; that birth will be no more

We're wrong. But we won't know we are
Until we've held some breath, until
We've lost the way to gasp, and make
The sun stay where we want, until
We've waited

While the world shows us a different, distant face
And crows cry on cold country
With single voices yelling from the barren land of home
Of life we can't remember and don't want to be reknown; we'll stay
Inside, and wait for warmth to die around us
The sun's a shade of what it used to be -

Then birth. We learn again that
Physics' grace must carry us round orbits we can't change
And see the atmosphere remake the seasons
We cannot escape - life is despite us
All around us
In the turned air, we awake.

The Language

Salaam aleikum, bhaiera. Or, indeed, nomoskar, for those who feel more in touch with their Hindi roots. Ki khobor? Bhalo? Oh, I am glad to hear it.

Apologies for this vexing variation of vocabulary, but I’ve been faithfully studying Bangla for a few hours a day (except weekends and holy days) for (shockingly) a month now. It’s got in my head a little bit.

I’ve done the first little course, which packs a GCSE’s-worth of Bangla into 2 hours a morning, 5 days a week, and does it all Bangla-style. Not as cool as it sounds. Bangla, not banzai. More’s the pity.

The teacher stands at the front and says a phrase. Then you repeat it back at her in the rainy-early-morning-in-a-British-preschool corporate monotone you once used to say ‘good morning Miss Fenton good morning ev-ree-bod-ee…’.

Then she says it louder and you repeat it back at her louder. The she yells it, you yell it, she says ‘khub bhalo’ (‘very good’), and You Have Learned That Bit.

It’s not the most effective way of teaching something. But of course, that doesn’t matter, because I work with Bangladeshis, which is a bit of good fortune. Imagine how well you’d have done at French in Year 10 if the dinnerladies, the bus driver, everyone in the corner shop on the way home and everyone you speak to in between only spoke French, and imagine how well you’d have done at the exams even if the teacher had taught you via Morse Code.

Everyone at the office is being very nice about my Bangla (and I’m doing better than I was before), but I’m still just saying ‘hello, how are you, I’m okay, I am learning Bangla’ then, for anything more complicated, communicating by the time-honoured means of wildly waving my hands around.

But, like I say, I’m making progress. And I actually feel pretty good about the progress I’ve made. Because, my word, this language is a piece of work.

I think the best bit has to be the numbers. One to ten go as you’d expect – largely unrelated but memorable, not least because ‘seven’, in Bangla, is pronounced ‘shat’ (no sniggering at the back there). In fact, the Indo-European-Sanskrit-using peoples who developed Bangla in the first place must have really had something against 7, because 70 is ‘shiyt’. Say it aloud. I kid you not.

Which, happily, gives me a nice clean way of expressing bad things, now that I am no longer just some punk gobseventy, and am in fact a grownup who is trying to live a visibly gracious life.

So there are some pretty seven parts about this language, let me tell you. The numbers are not sequential. There’s a kind of logic to them, but basically the numbers one to one hundred have unrelated names (which is a bit of a dog in an economy where most things are paid for in odd quantities up to a thousand or so). Twenty-five (pon-chish) sounds almost exactly the same as fifty (pon-chash), which is fun when negotiating prices with taxi drivers who are just desperate to have mis-heard you.

Then, friends, there is the alphabet. There are 39 consonants, and eleven vowels, except there aren’t. Actually there are 7 vowels, but sometimes when they are written down they have different forms, which you can’t guess at from what they sound like out loud.

These vowels appear differently at the start of a word than they do in the middle of the word, or when following a consonant. Which is good, because they rarely appear at the start of the word and the letter for them when they do is invariably complicated enough to make you seven yourself. When simplified, they are always pronounced after the letter, but occasionally when written they appear either after, before, underneath or around the damn consonant in question.

I sense at this point I do not have your full attention, which is fair enough because I struggled to give the teacher mine this morning. And I know that when you’re learning a language, there are any number of interesting exceptions and loopholes and rules which demand to be broken more than they need to be kept. It’s what keeps a language interesting. And it’s not as if my own mother tongue makes itself very easy to read or write anyway. I know this.

But I tell you this: I no longer feel any need to guiltily admit that as a Brit I am part of a nation who lazily refuse to learn anybody else’s language. It’s true, but what we fail to recognise, we well-meaning and apologetic Brits, when we say this, is that everybody else’s language is as difficult and illogical as ours.

Except the Finns and the Hungarians, who grace the world with 13-case verbs and other linguistic practical jokes.

All of which is why I am happy I live in Bangladesh. Because in the final analysis I could be in Helsinki, and wouldn’t that suck?

In any case, I’m terribly sorry and I must go – there’s been a powercut, so I’m off to my friend’s house for some muffins. Don’t try to tell me about living on the edge.

A Digression

Now then now then - I wrote something today, but it was a bit long and mostly to do with creativity and art, so I've moved it to my other blog.

Go and have a look if you're into that sort of thing.

In other news, how's this for a quote, from Kim Fabricius, via the ever-insightful Maggi Dawn:

Ministry is that wonderful vocation provided by the good Lord for displaced Christian intellectuals who are useless at proper work.

I'm doomed.

Oh man, I wish I'd got a photo

One of the things that happens in the aforementioned Traffic Of Dhaka is that you spend a lot of time waiting a major junctions. A lot. And in these traffic jams, it's not unusual for you to have a tap at your window and find someone trying to sell you a book or two.

These always seem to be the same books, though I imagine there's a seasonal rotation of whatever these guys can get their hands on. At the moment, everyone's got Steven Covey's 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People', 'The Idea of Justice' by Armartya Sen and 'The Lost Symbol' by Dan Brown. So I suppose, unless the free-marketeers have lied to us, there must be a colossal demand in Dhaka for re-packaged ancient wisdom, obscure-but-brilliant political philosophy, and crap.

And nothing else, or so I thought. But when I was stuck in a traffic-jam last night on my way to a nice end-of-the-week meal, a Bangladeshi guy came up to my window and tried to sell me something else.

Mein Kampf.

Crazy Nippy Gadabouts

Now then. Before you read any further, I'm afraid I've got to ask you something. I’m writing this post in the interests of giving you a full picture of what life in Dhaka is like; but you’ve got to promise you won’t be alarmed, or worry too much. This means you Mum. OK? OK.

The other day I said I parachuted out of a snuffle-bound and culture-stressed day by taking a CNG home.

Unless you read the comments on that post, the inherent foolishness of doing that may not be immediately clear, so let me explain. CNGs are eye-poppingly dangerous but environmentally-friendly motor-tricycles painted green and encased in tinfoil and fake leather, designed to travel – to your destination, which may or may not turn out to be on this plane of existence - at about 50mph, until they get hit by a bus. CNG stands for Compressed Natural Gas, which sounds to me like a fart joke but is actually and officially a good thing for the environment.

They look reasonable enough until you get in one and start moving, and the Traffic Of Dhaka (which truly merits capital letters) starts swirling around you, and you realise that getting out of a stressful situation by getting into a CNG is like escaping Stalinist Russia by accepting a position as Mao Tse-Tung’s cleaner.

See below a rather nice photo of a typical scene on the melodramatic stage which is Dhaka's highway system:

...except that's probably happening at 50mph or so.

Traffic etiquette here seems complicated until you realise that basically, you drive where you like, never do anything to help keep traffic moving, and blart your horn at everything. In fact, if you hit the guy in front of you because he brakes hard, and you haven’t sounded your horn to tell him you’re there, it’s your fault and you will be fallen upon from a great height by the insurance company, the law and whatever private-security set-up your victim may have (and if he’s got a nice car, that might turn out to be 7 foot of scowling ex-KGB muscle, you never know).

Not for nothing, friends, is the Bangla word for 'traffic' 'trafikjam'. No, really.

The traffic here is mental. Sitting in a CNG, you’re uncomfortably aware that a single lapse in concentration from either your driver, the impatient Toyota Land Cruiser behind you, or the maniac bus driver even now trying to pirouette his diesel death-box into a playing-card-sized hole in the traffic, will result in your untimely appearance in a headline in your hometown newspaper.

Focusses the mind, I don’t mind telling you.

On the other hand, I cannot deny that I've been here for nearly 3 weeks and the only accident I've seen is an American falling off his bike. So maybe there's order in the idiocy.

So what, when I fancy a more sedate means of traversing this chaos, do I go for?

One of these:

Don’t worry, mum. They’re sturdier than they look. Honest.

Armless Gymnast

By Saturday I’d already managed to get a little cold, which I’d expect in November, except it’s 32 degrees outside (sorry) – then unwisely went to explore Newmarket and Elephant Road. I wish I could have taken a photo of it from the footbridge over it – I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t 5 or 6 thousand people in my eyeline, on this not-particularly-long road. I wish I had a better phrase to hand for this, but ‘sea of humanity’ will just have to do the job. Unless you’d like to picture a forest of people – a sky of persons – a cosmos of the cosmopolitan. See, sometimes clichés are just the best words at hand.

Staggering down the road, muttering the Bangla for ‘forgive me’ every three paces to beggars lacking money, limbs or eyes, I began to realise what was bothering me about this place.

At the moment, it feels as if I’m not a person here, I’m a resource.

This isn’t necessarily wrong, after all – in this economy, even my UK-poverty-line income is far more than enough to make me wealthy. There’s no social security and a long cultural tradition of the rich giving money to the poor.

But to me, at the bottom of a tired, achy, sore-throaty barrel, it was too much. I don’t like walking out of my house and having every third person (or so it feels) some up to me to speak, not out of friendliness or any desire to relate, but because I’m probably good for a little cash. Especially when, as I’ve said, in my part of the city there are so many guilty foreigners like me that begging is a big, and franchised, business, controlled by men who are quite brutal. So I got in a CNG and went home. What’s a CNG? Find out later this week.

It’s difficult, and I’m still trying to work out my approach to all of this. I’m told that the culture outside of NGO-town (which, sadly, is where I live, a western, rich ghetto which practically invites exploitation) is very different; that people are welcoming and eager to tell you about themselves, and eager to know about you, and aren’t on the blag.

It’s a truism of travel that it’s worse in the cities, and a truism of development work that it’s worst of all in western-residency areas. So, though I’m surrounded by noise and dust and I’m spending money on Bangla things, I suspect I haven’t really seen a great deal of Bangladeshi society.

A nice corrective to this is the office. I’ve raved a bit before about FH and how good I think the attitude is; and John and Kate Marsden, the country directors for FH Bangladesh, have done what others have yet to only speak about, and find talented people from Bangladesh to head up crucial parts of this operation – which, after all, exists in order to help Bangladesh. Smart thinking, that.

Reasonably enough, since this is a Christian organisation, there’s a reflective devotional time each morning – not compulsory, but people come anyway. There’s bible study, and it has a visible positive effect on people’s relationships here.

I’m incredibly impressed by this office. The mostly-Muslim staff have got a much better hold on the basics of Godly living – compassion, forgiveness, servanthood - than many Christians of my acquaintance. It’s privilege to learn from them, and I’ve been so welcomed. A big part of my job at the moment is hanging out downstairs with the support staff to practice my (pathetic) skills at speaking Bangla. They’re patient, kind and helpful, and funny.

It's still very frustrating though. My word yes. I'm a communications specialist, right - I was hired for this skill (don't worry, I get most of the verbal diarrhea out of my system here) - yet without the language, I cannot communicate. I'm precisely as useful as a brick made of pumice. With less comedy value. So I go up to someone - anyone who looks friendly, usually one of the guards - witha head full of sentences, of things I'd like to know, relationships I'd like to build. And I just about struggle through 'How are you doing?' and 'I'm still learning Bangla but I don't know a lot' and then it's lunchtime because I've spent a few hours per word stroking my beard and feeling like a fool. People are very patient though.

So who knows what I’ll end up making of this place. It’ll be nice, when I can speak Bangla better, to get out into the country and see what life is like away from the capital – to find the Bangla equivalents of York and Bromsgrove and Coventry, instead of living in the Bangla equivalent of Kensington and imagining I’ve seen the whole country. I’m looking forward to travelling here; and of course, if anyone fancies a trip you’re very welcome to come and travel around with me.

Welcome to Dhaka

Oh, dear. I hope this isn’t the way things continue – sorry it’s been a while since the last update, it seems that getting settled in a new city is quite a time-consuming experience. Big blogs are difficult to write but micro-blogs are dead easy, so you should probablyfollow me on twitter if you want an idea of what day-to-day life is like, straight from my inner monologue to the great wide world.

I had hoped to have some photos of my new pad to post up here, but last night when I got home with my camera out, there was a powercut. They happen about once every other night at the moment, but give the government their due – they only last for an hour to the minute and then everything comes back on at once, just when you’ve fallen peacefully asleep. When you hear about ‘rolling powercuts’ in the UK within 5 years, know this – they are a pain in the euphemism.

So, no pictures for today (check back tomorrow), but let’s see if I can try and give you a few first impressions of Bangladesh, my new home.

………

Damn. Not sure I can, you know.

It’s not my fault. Everything here’s just…different. So trying to pick which particular difference to tell you about out of a thousand or so feels like letting you down; only letting you see a bit of the frame on the Mona Lisa. Dhaka may not be that beautiful but it’s certainly that remarkable.

But for you, my beloved supporters and friends, I’ll give it my best swipe.

The first ten days here have been adjective-defying. I wish I could give a single word to describe what it’s been like to be a relocated, dislocated white boy in the most densely-populated nation state in the world. The open sewers; the blued-but-broken glass on the side of still-new skyscrapers; rickshaws and delicious-but-boney fish curry. Remembering never to hand money over with your left hand. Traffic that makes you feel like pacman. Addressing beggars as brother instead of scum, but still not giving them any money. Is it right or wrong? Does anyone care?

Sensory deprivation, this isn’t.

I’ve started Bangla lessons (don’t call the language Bengali, it’s terribly rude – like arriving in the UK and asking the first guy he meets how he likes being Anglais). My flat is nice if small and has a minimum of cockroaches. I’ll say this for Bangladesh, with appropriate shamed apologies to all the people I’ve ever lived with – you don’t half get good at doing washing-up when the alternative is having bugs all over it in the morning. Eesh.

But, as I say, they haven’t been too bad. Thank God.

I’ve been very graciously welcomed by some friends of my flatmates, most of whom are teachers at the British school – meaning I’ll watch more Premier League football here than I ever did in the UK. Ditto by members of a local bilingual church. It’s happening slowly but it’s good to feel like I’m not camping here, and like I’m trying to build a life for 3 years.

It’s a challenge - there are any number of difficult things to deal with, which you’ll hear about over the next few days. Mostly I need to find a way to enjoy living here. The noise, the smoke, the crowdedness, the staring – none of these help me to relax. Without that, I’ll go crazy.

That said, I do have some hope. I went out to the roof of our block of flats the night before last, after getting home from work, to check out the sunset. And I’m glad I did:



Aaah. That’s better.