A Very Foolish Plan

HILLS!

2012-02-02T05:48:00.000Z

On the coast road, south of Kuakata.

This is not terribly notable if you're living somewhere other than a country-sized flood-plain. But if you are (and I am), seeing any kind of hill, cliff, waterfall, or boulder of any description - anything that requires the ground to be more than muddy dust - is enough for the air to be torn with the joyous cry. 'Topography!' I bellow, to the mild confusion of those around me. 'Landscape!' I exult, as they look towards me with alarm. 'ESCARPMENT!' I rejoice, giggling uncontrollably as they back away and find the nearest police officer.

I know, I know, I'm swimming in synonyms just for the sake of it, and alienating those around me to boot. Inexcusable. But my excitement is sincere.

I like variety, and there's no variety like seeing a hill when you haven't seen one for a few months.

Oh Lord, Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

2012-01-30T04:41:00.004Z

I made a mistake.

On top of a boat, bathing in the most extraordinary post-sunset, my brother and I had just mistakenly intruded upon some people finishing their evening prayers. They were friendly and devout, and very curious about us. They asked us about our religion.

Now. I do not have enough Bangla to discuss theology or spirituality (or, for that matter, politics, medicine, home-improvement or cookery); but at the same time, I don't like simply describing myself as a Christian and leaving it at that.

The global reality of bad evangelism over several centuries has meant that to most Muslims in Bangladesh, Christianity is just a particularly violent strain of Hinduism, which limits itself to three gods, starts wars with good Muslims, and believes that God had sex with Mary (if you will forgive indelicate phrasing). Worse, it's a polytheistic heresy which at the same time has the illogical front to claim that it worships only one God, and all the while allows the existence of a culture of pornography and moral dissolution (for, as we know, America Is A Christian Nation).

And in the face of this complex web of ethnic, religious, spiritual and historical uncomprehension, I stand, with my ability to buy onions and direct a rickshaw.

Hence a misunderstanding.

I tried to explain to our open-faced new friends that I also believe in God (there is no distinction to be made between the word Allah and the word God), and that I am a Christian, that I also worship God for the beauty of his creation, and that I follow Jesus Christ (Isa in the Muslim tradition, an important prophet).

I thought I did pretty well, actually. Since I had neither time nor language for an ongoing discussion of our different cultures, I was trying to leave these nice people with an image of Christians that is respectful and devout. This is hopelessly naive, but it's a hell of a lot better than perpetuating the great shame of Christianity's historical engagement with Islam: an endless, arrogant, condemnatory yelling match. Where Christ is supposed to be in such encounters bewilders me.

And I thought they understood me. They responded with words which I took to be rephrasings of what I'd said, so I agreed with them. A dumb mistake if ever there was one.

My Bangla is now at a point where I can understand most of what's said to me. Just don't, as the Comte de Frou-Frou said, ask me to take a physiology class or direct a light opera.

However, that is a dangerous place. You think you're following what someone's saying. You think. And, compared to the agonising months of complete ignorance, this comprehension is a soaring height indeed. So you nod and smile, and repeat what you said, and go away wrapped in the warm sensation of successful communication.

Which is often the purest poppycock. As I learned when we climbed down from the roof of the boat. An elderly, serious-looking man in loose robes and a tupi prayer cap stopped me at the top of the ladder and asked my name.

'Dave...David,' I said.
'What?' He was abrupt, but this is normal for elders in Bangladesh.
'David. My name is David.'
'What sort of name is this?'
'It's a Hebrew name.'
'Yes, yes, I know.' He grabbed my arm and addressed me firmly. 'Why do you still have this name? Why are you not with a Muslim name now?'

Er, what?

I tactfully took my arm back. 'Um, say that again?'
He leaned in closer and spoke as though addressing a moron. 'If you are a Muslim, why are you not Daud?!'

Clearly, my pacific attempts to surf the boundaries of inter-faith dialogue had failed. Daud is a prophet in Islam - poet, warrior, king, terrible husband and slingshot genius, Christianity and Judaism know him as King David. This rather intimidating pensioner had assumed that the only explanation for my acknowledgement of the power and glory of God was that I had converted to Islam.

Not so. God, in that moment, in that place, was evident both to me and to this bloke. There are (doubtless) thousands of differences in our understanding - and one of us will, one day, turn out to be more right than the other - but where we started was this. God is great; look at the things he makes.

I am not a Muslim, I said. I believe in God.

I can understand why the kind of clever-clever distinction I was making would come off like mealy-mouthed, quisling twofacedness to one whose world is made up of 'people who believe in God and are like me' and 'everyone else'. To this guy, I might as well have said 'I am not a vegetarian, but I refuse to eat meat'.

I tried to explain.

'I follow God, but he doesn't care what kind of name I have.'

This, I thought, was fair enough. I'm named after the same guy, just in a different language, so what's the problem?

A big problem, to this Muslim. Fair enough. Islam is a very located religion. Wherever you are in the world, Arabic is the language used by the Angel himself, and Mecca is the holiest place on the planet - no exceptions and no arguments. Who was I to say what name God wanted me to have? God speaks Arabic!

'What? You should have an Arabic name!'

I repeated my point, but he didn't get it. To him, I could not claim to worship God and ignore the primacy of the Arabic language. I, conversely, am very thankful that God is equally true in all languages. And I would have liked to have found a way for us to explore this difference together; but my Bangla had already reached its limits with an embarrassing flop.

I caved. 'I need to go downstairs now.' I looked him in the eyes, tried desperately to communicate fellowship. 'May peace be with you.'

I turned, and started to descend the ladder. He paused, then roused himself once more to the sacred business of getting my signature on the celestial dotted line. An aim in which, I note, he had a lot in common with my hit-and-run evangelical brethren.

'When will you tell your parents you have converted?!'

To which there really is no answer at all. I carried on down the ladder, and went back to my cabin.

Perhaps to find common ground, both interlocutors have to acknowledge that it is both possible and desirable.

So it goes. But today's moral is as follows, and if you're learning a foreign language I think you should get it tattooed to the inside of your eyelids.

Smiling and nodding is not always the best thing to do.

Be told.

Stop: Rivertime.

2012-01-29T05:06:00.013Z

The journey back from the south coast was leisurely, which was just what my brother and I needed. Two days of clinging to the back of motorbikes as we hammered across dirt-roads and shaky bridges had been exhilarating but exhausting. The ferry-launch home would take 14 hours to reach Dhaka against the majestic, broad current of the Meghna, and as far as I was concerned it could take 24. Time, I thought, for a little relaxation.

And as we chugged out of Patuakhali, the odds were good. In a couple of hours the sun would be falling through unimaginable shades of yellow, orange, red and purple, towards the magical (and equatorially brief) moment where it would kiss the horizon before falling out of sight. Out on the stunning span of the river, there would be no dirt, no smog, no Dhakan misery. I was looking forward to it.

We settled down in our cabin to read in the blessedly mosquito-free mid-river breeze, and listened to the soft sound of the Meghna as it langourously dragged Himalayas back down to the sea-floor. This was the life.

So relaxed were we that I failed to notice that dusk was gathering quickly. This far south, sunsets are almost over before they've begun, so we moved with haste to find the best place to watch the sky go to glory.

We climbed up a narrow steel ladder to reach the roof, which was an open expanse of steel plates and rivets, painted light blue. This was a win. I'd never got up on the roof before; they're usually caged-off. Four stories up from the surface of the river, we saw the sky. Oh man, we saw the sky.

And we were not alone. As we came off the top of the ladder, there was a sense of a gathering having just finished; a recent vacation of the space up here. A few people remained, all looking East, standing at the foot of small, carefully-placed mats, kneeling and rising in unison while they muttered their soft prayers.

We had missed the sunset; this was maghreb prayer, the prayer directly after the sun has left the sky, and the start of the Islamic day. And amongst the spectacular colours of the gathering dark, it was easy to pray.

Public prayer is no longer really notable for me. I hear the muezzin 5 times a day if I'm sleeping particularly lightly, and 3 if I'm not. It's normal to see people taking the time to direct themselves towards God. I try not to be too obtrusive a presence when it is going on nearby, because I have discovered that in general piety is trumped by curiosity in Bangladesh, and I am one curious-looking individual - especially in rural areas.

We loitered out of eye-line, and I made my own prayer to the creator of heaven and earth, looking at one of his more spectacular incidences.

As piety was satisfied, curiosity returned, and some people came over to talk to us. Flushed with their devotion, they asked us what religion we were.

Hence a misunderstanding.

Of which, more tomorrow.

Terribly Inappropriate

2012-01-27T04:37:00.001Z

Seen in KFC. I think - I think - what they meant was 'please make sure the glass door doesn't hit an unsuspecting urinator on the back when you go through it'.

I bloody hope so, at least.

God forgive me, though, the best bit about this is that this palpably inappropriate sign was on display in a town called Cox's Bazar.

Yours might be, mate, but I'll thank you to contain your curiosity about mine...

Textures

2012-01-26T03:31:00.001Z

I had a lot of fun taking photos this winter. The light was a bit more whitey-grey and a bit less copper-gong-nailed-to-the-heavens than it is the rest of the year.

This is important because, when it comes to photos, I am a surly Celt to my core. Give me all that bleak, glorious northern-ness, ceilinged by grey cloud - at once desolate and uplifting, and too sparse to do anything but speak of heaven. It soaks into the grain of everything you see, and it is almost a crime not to take a picture of the warp and weft of its shadows.

Bangladesh doesn't really do this sort of thing much of the time; it's much more colourful, and often overwhelmingly bright. It's beautiful, but you see it through squinted eyes. Winter light makes it less of an effort for me to recognise the beauty that's in this environment all the time. This, in turn, inspires my inner photographer to take terribly arty and totally purposeless photos like these.

The Mosquito, a tale of misery from the depth of winter's night

2012-01-24T09:06:00.006Z

Once, upon a midnight dreary
As I curled beneath the sheets
And I grumbled, weak and weary
Then, great glory, fell asleep
All at once there came a noise
That dopplered and laid waste my cheer
Twas a mozzie, ever buzzing
Buzzing in my sodding ear.

Roused I was from restoration,
Writhing like a serpent doth,
Lest the little bugger bite me
Turn me to a dengue-pot
Light-switch sought and found and hammered
All to naught but mozzie’s sneer
As insistent, swooped he, bladdered -
Drunk on blood from in my ear.

Laid I wakeful; waxed I wrathful
Clutched at th’electric swat
Sleep receding, anger seething
Rest and tranquil soul forgot
Till by inches, tiredness took me
Back to sleep and rest's arrears
Back beneath the blankets leaving
Innocent and still my ear.

Oh, the noise! Again! In evil
Zooming with a loathsome sound
Came the pointless parasite and
Bearer of disease abound
Went the mozzie, made but ghostly
Ere the light did re-appear
Cursed I baldly, stomped I loudly
Swatting at my open ear!

Till the grey light broke the curtain
Lay I, robbed of sleep, ablaze
Good for nothing come the morning
Naught but insect-focussed rage
And should I ever roll to ceasing
Take a moment’s rest, I fear
Again will come that sodding mozzie
BUZZING IN MY SODDING EAR.

Now I sit 'fore curtains open
Madness swivels both my eyes
Clutching at the weapon useless
Pointless to this bug's demise
Ever-rocking, back and forward
Backwards, even then before
Yet my skin is supped and punctured.
Quoth the mozzie: evermore!

(with modest acceptance of Edgar Allen Poe’s gratitude)

Snake! It's a snake!

2012-01-22T06:29:00.002Z

A day visiting a theological college ends with a time gawping at snakes.

There has to be sermon illustration in there somewhere, but I'm damned if I can find it.

However, I note this with gratitude for my life: I do get to do some rather fun stuff.

Facing Disaster Together (via Women of Action)

2012-01-20T07:37:00.000Z

Forgive me for talking shop, but this photo (taken by my brother, the disgustingly talented Jonathan Burton), hides a story in the lives of the poor. I got to write it up, and you can read it at the Women of Action blog here.

Older Than High-Rise

2012-01-17T06:34:00.001Z

Last weekend we made a visit to the College of Christian Theology, Bangladesh. Lovely people, I knew, but I must confess that I went along mostly because it wasn't going to cost me very much. Opportunities to escape the cycle of home-office-club-home-church in the Dhaka bubble really aren't very plentiful, and you tend to take them wherever they are to be had - even in the not-terribly-enticing prospect of treating a seminary as an interesting day out.

Well. Let me be forgiven for such dismissive nonsense. I haven't had a day as pleasant as that for quite some time - a reminder that time spent in nice surroundings with good people is a tonic all of its own. It is a pervasive lie (not least amongst we soft westerners who live in The Noise) that you have to spend on creature comforts in order to be relaxed.

Not so. The world, even in Bangladesh, is capable of being beautiful all by itself.

The traffic was sparse and the temperature tepid, which helped. I love this time of year - just right for jeans and t-shirts, full of bright sunlight that doesn't cook you and the feeling of cool air against your skin.

But what really made the day was the fact that the college has been there for longer than Bangladesh has. Now just outside the city limits of Dhaka, it was once miles out, surrounded by rice-paddies.

The significance of this is easy to explain. Whereas today each square inch of land is worth more than ten people's lives, the college was built in more expansive, simple times, when Bangla builders had not totally abandoned the idea of space. The campus is nice enough, but after two years in the concrete-sardine-box environment of Dhaka, filled with trapped filth and haste and hopelessness, it was spacious enough to feel like the promised land.

The college building was designed in a way which I'm coming to recognise as classical Bengali. It's concrete, but there is open-ness, even greenery. Rooms are simple, cool and sparse, but clean and without all the smoke-soaking filth of the more coarse concrete used in the buildings I've lived in in Dhaka. Open balconies run along the front of all the doorways, inviting breezes. It's not luxurious, but it has space. You get the feeling that the primary aim of the architect was to create a living environment, not just a place for stacking human beings while they sleep.

This, I realise, is much closer to the Bangladesh that my colleagues and Bangla friends are familiar with, than the concrete jungle I came to in 2009 and felt ashamed for loathing. Buildings from decades past have a more open aspect to them; Dhaka University is the same. As little as ten years ago, even central Dhaka was a combination of a few high-rise buildings and a blanket of the two- or three-storey buildings known as 'bungalows', each with - gasp! - a plot of land around them. Unimaginable nowadays.

Now, there is just too much money in overcrowding for the owners not to demolish such human dwellings and put up a six-story high-rise instead. Property developers run adverts 24-7 on Bangla TV - 'you should see what we can do with your land...' they purr, and you can almost hear Kaa the snake hissing in the background.

I don't want to romanticise Bangladesh's past. There have always been slums. I'm certain that things were just as miserable then for the poor as they are now, and I know for certain that progress has been made in the availability of clean water. And of course, the further you get from a civil war as poisonous as the one in Bangladesh in 1971, the better. Rose-tinted spectacles should melt in Bangladesh from the wattage of their own shame.

Nonetheless, this was a glimpse of a Bangladesh which has almost gone. Non-rural, but not so toxically urban as it has become in the last decade or so; a Bangladesh I can get right alongside.

Hopefully, there are living remnants of this lost Bangladesh in the new, brash, person-minimising filth of modern Dhaka. Hopefully, understanding how it has been is a key to understanding - even loving - how it is. Hopefully, I can continue my own journey away from the piteous poison of culture shock to something more open and celebratory.

It was nothing more profound than a happy combination of factors that made it a good day, but such combinations rarely seem to be benign in Dhaka. I'm very thankful that it all came together, and I understand Bangladesh a bit better.

The best news of all came from my boss today at lunch - we're about to go away on a staff retreat, all 200-odd of us, and apparently the destination is similarly old-fashioned, pleasant, and open. But for the RC Cola factory next door.

What an incredibly Bangla juxtaposition. I'll let you know how I get on.

Beautiful Bangladesh

2012-01-15T06:01:00.006Z

For some reason, an axle and its tyres lie deserted on Kuakata beach, as the tide rolls in.

I love this stuff.

The Surprising Articulacy of Wayne Rooney

2012-01-12T04:50:00.007Z

I wish I knew how to quit you.

This from the Independent is a very interesting story. Not only for the ongoing tempestuous bromance between Alex Ferguson and Wayne Rooney (and their egos), but because of something rather interesting about the way Wayne Rooney seems to be talking.

The quotes in this story are taken from an interview Rooney did with an Italian newspaper. And, as the Independent report notes, he seems to be rather more expressive for the Italian market:

Interviewer: 'How do you score a goal like the bicycle kick?'
Rooney: 'You stop thinking with your head and start thinking with your gut. Just like when you bring a child into the world.'

Adorable. I've read quite a few interviews with Rooney and this is the first time he has displayed a whimsical desire to meditate upon the emotional parallels between fatherhood and the footy. Some might, indeed, describe this as almost Italian phrasing.

And of course it is so. Whoever transcribed the interview - unless Rooney really did express himself with hitherto unglimpsed eurosuavity - polished it up a bit. I get the exasperation which must afflict all football writers (who have the phrases 'at the end of the day', 'good team performance all round' and 'take nothing away from the lads' bound to single key-strokes), and I understand why you'd want to pep up your copy a bit.

Of course, this is a serious ethical failure, as the once-mighty Johan Hari discovered last year. Your responsibility, when reporting someone's words, is to report the words, and explain them elsewhere; not edit them so they become punchier, pithier or more meaningful.

What has this to do with me and Bangladesh and development work?

I write reports. I travel a sod of a long way to get them, on death-trap buses and terrifying roads. I sit with people, careful to conduct myself in a way that jars them as little as possible, and allows me to serve them by telling their story. A few days ago I got back from a trip which involved 3 days of travel for a total of 60 minutes interviewing.

I understand very well the temptation to, shall we say, finesse the words used in an original language by someone whose opinion you really, really want to hear. The temptation comes, simply, from the fact that you really, really want people to hear it too.

Maybe the phrasing isn't very smooth. Maybe it uses an idiom that doesn't translate. Maybe it's just tantalisingly close to being the killer quote that sums up your entire success, but for a word or two.

And, after all, you've travelled a long way to get here. Petulance (and preposterousness) kick in. How dare they fail to reward your effort with a perfect soundbite? Don't they understand what Twitter is?

But no, they're talking in frustratingly vague terms. Again. You know what they mean. Since you're not using their actual words anyway, what's the harm in smoothing the passage of their meaning past the spiky rocks of Babel?

At which point I have to have a stern word with myself, and not only for being so childish.

Truth isn't optional. Tell the truth; we have enough myths as it is. It might offend your aesthetic sense, but for heaven's sake, there are ways of giving context without completely surrendering the rhythm of a piece. And if you can't see them, sweat until you've learned them.

[Photo from The Independent/Getty Images]

Dusty plants, and other things you don't get in Bromsgrove

2012-01-08T09:06:00.000Z

This image has not been altered in any way. On the road to Kuakata, Jan 1st 2012.

O Brother...

2012-01-03T08:27:00.006Z

SCENE: My brother and I are on a boat, crossing one of innumerable rivers to reach the south coast. I am contentedly drinking in the peace that is found in Bangladesh only in the middle of very wide rivers. A Friendly, Inquisitive Bangladeshi Chap is engaging my brother in conversation.

FIBC: Hello, friend, your country?

BRUV: England!

FIBC: (looking round at the broad horizons of rural anonymity): Why have you come here?

BRUV: (gestures towards my back) To visit him.

FIBC: He is your father?

BRUV: (manfully suppressing a snigger) no...he's my brother...

This is not the first time my age has been misoverestimated by a decade or more, but it's probably the first time the guessing has placed me in my fifties.

There is nothing that can be done about my cowardly, fugitive hairline. But it does occur to me that it might not be such a bad idea to keep my beard off until my birth certificate grows into it.

Not even thirty, since you ask.

Flying Home for Christmas

2011-12-30T09:47:00.007Z

...is precisely what I didn't do this year. Weddings cost money, don'tcherknow; so a Dhaka Christmas it was.

My brother will go down in the annals of brilliance yet more permanently, however, for using up all of his holidays to come and visit me. A good, if unconventional, Christmas has been had, with sunshine and green coconuts and nonsense and coral islands and beaches and other things profoundly unwinterish.

In this, a rare moment of connectivity before we disappear to the south coast (think less 'riviera' and more 'storm-damaged community visit'), I'm posting something I wrote after my journey to the UK last Christmas, in the waxy-mouthed grip of insomniac jetlag, and promptly forgot about.

Vive la difference, I suppose. Hope you enjoy it.

Wake. Wheeze. Shiver. Rise. Look at clock. Mutter darkly. Return to bed. Wheeze further. Give up unequal struggle between sleep and cold. Collect bags. Leave home. Marvel at that rarest of precious findings: quiet in Dhaka. Reflect pensively that, though possessed of a filigree fragility which is quite touching, the stillness comes necessarily low on taxis. Hear low-grade buzzing in middle distance; conclude (correctly) that for once pessimism and public transport have not gone together. Flag down taxi. Negotiate price down from the upper reaches of fantastical larceny into the realm of the merely unaffordable.

Shiver in the breeze blowing across Airport Road. It’s 10 degrees. Ponder nervously what my metabolism will do to me when faced with -5 in London. Give metabolism a stern talking-to. Metabolism still asleep; leave a message for it with my volition, which is surly but conscious, functioning on a skeleton staff.

Arrive at airport; attempt irony when driver asks for a tip on top of the fat fare previously agreed to. Dial down from irony to sarcasm. Dial down from sarcasm to plain sentences. Abandon sentences, smile and say ‘no’.

Feel the thrill of communication.

Security guard astonished at my ability to exchange pleasantries in Bangla; for the first of several times today, I explain that I have been in Bangladesh for a year, that (to even greater surprise) I will be returning shortly, and that no, my wife is not Bengali.

Walk through security barrier; find announcements screen. Walk further, and find working announcements screen. No desk yet. Find trolley, sit, read Wodehouse.

Desk is open. Check in. Check in has been suspended for my flight. Fog has prevented the aircraft from arriving in fewer than 9 pieces. Will miss connection. Jet Airways sportingly decide to allow me to get home anyway on an Emirates flight. There are 4 of us bumped in such a manner; they give us one, magic piece of paper to get us all on a plane in Dubai. Warily accept responsibility for this precious document.

Bags are (supposedly) transferred to our plane. Henning (a Norwegian) has responsibility for the paperwork which will indicate this, and will ensure that our bags don’t get sent to Delhi. He and his father have been visiting, deciding whether to move their garments business from China to Bangladesh. Consider, as they are talking to me, the possibility that I am talking to 21st century equivalent of slavers; since Henning is large and Viking and his father (easily 65) is even more so, and both could take me in a fight, I decide not to argue the point until I’ve got my bags back in London.

Our fourth is a Bangladeshi named Mahmoud; we thus make up the oddest school-trip crocodile you’ve ever seen. We don’t hold hands though.

Wait. Join a queue. Wait. Discover it is the wrong queue. Wait further. Check in. Call girlfriend. She is confused that I am not on a plane; touched by her naïveté, I remind her gently that this is Dhaka. Board plane.

Minority Report, The IT Crowd, Get Shorty, cheesy biscuits, complementary wine, chicken biryani. And, glory in the highest, emergency-exit-row seats. Very impressed.

Land. The scramble for hand-luggage begins at the ‘scr’ of the screech as the tires hit the tarmac, because this is Bangladesh. Even though it’s Dubai. Air hostess deals with this with a magnificent display of reception-class classroom control, all stomping feet and indignant demands for order and the resumption of seats. Works, too.

Deplane (a horrible word for a routinely cattleish experience). Negotiate airport. Forget to place MP3 player in security-scanner tray; ask the gent behind if I can put it on his. ‘As long as it’s not a bomb’. I assure him that it is not. Standing behind him in the queue, a representative of that beleaguered but heroic order, Americans Without Stereotypes, mocks him quietly to me. Smile appreciatively.

Mahmud and I get to the next flight, joining our Nordic Cousins. I hand over The Precious Paper, but unfortunately Mahmud has been stopped for travelling whilst Bengali (since this is Dubai, he looks too much like a slave who couldn’t possibly afford the ticket in his hand). After some bureaucratically rigorous examination of the gold lettering on the front of his passport, the man on the desk seems reluctant to admit the validity of that orthography and the document it adorns; then, seeing that Mahmud is travelling with 3 white guys, the nice Emirates man allows his misgivings to evaporate like labour rights in the dry desert breeze.

Strewth.

Replane. Father Ted, Daniel Kitson, David Crowder Band, more wine, chicken with potatoes of some kind.

Land. ‘Welcome to Heathrow Airport, where the temperature is minus 5 degrees’. Hurriedly unpack and assume emergency layers.

Mahmoud is way ahead of me, in a t-shirt, a jumper, a thin hoody, a thick jumper, a leather jacket, a coat, a beanie and an overcoat. On the escalator to immigration, he is shivering.

Lose my companions as I go to the orderly, unimaginably long queue for British citizens as they go to the Queues For Foreigners. My queue snakes around a boxed-off area which joyously declares that they are improving Heathrow for my convenience. Ponder the many appropriate applications, and the tragic public neglect, of the word ‘eventually’.

Reflect that this sort of low-level internal bitterness is entirely too British; and that lionise it as I may, there are as many undesirable things about ‘home’ as there are quiet glories. Play ‘Politicians’ by Switchfoot to underline the point to myself. ‘I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians’, wherein I am part of something whose primary expression of itself is not self-righteous corrosion of the soul.

Collect bags. Wave goodbye to the multilingual crocodile. Get on tube. Go to my sister’s house. Wake up to torrential snow and the news that Heathrow have neglected to buy antifreeze this year (twenty quid says it was a moneysaver in this age of austerity). My flight was probably one of the last to land (which it did, incidentally, with absolutely no histrionics whatsoever).

Complaining seems to be a habit I must try harder to break. Snow helps.

The girlfriend has not been so fortunate, and is stuck in Doha until someone boils the kettle at Heathrow. A sinking feeling in my stomach tells me that I’ll be back....

Whose Vigor Hurled A Universe

2011-12-25T04:58:00.000Z

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest …
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

- Luci Shaw, via Maggi Dawn (here)

Happy Christmas, peeps.

Off

2011-12-18T04:05:00.002Z

Now then, my dear friends.

I am aware that it's been an embarrassingly long time since I last wrote anything here. Real life - and the pressures of conducting my business in Bangladesh - have left precious little time for blogging. This saddens me deeply, since I like writing, and all of you who are charitable enough to read what comes out when I do.

But Christmas is coming, and I need a rest.

With the exception of a beautiful poem by Luci Shaw, which will post here on Christmas Day, there will be no posts now till the New Year - notwithstanding any particularly urgent news/spectacular cascades of inspiration.

You are all incredibly wonderful, attractive people, particularly those of you who think you aren't. Have a great time this Christmas.

The Sheer Blast Power of the Ringtone

2011-12-06T04:09:00.002Z

I found myself recently sitting in the office, listening to a podcast while I edited photos for a future promotion. This was lovely.

Not so lovely was the sound of a colleague's ringtone, sounding again and again (and again).

Ringtones are cherishably odd in Bangladesh, and I have no objection to them most of the time. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen conservative Muslims slowly fish out phones trilling with beepy renditions of 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas' or the like, which is of course very amusing and benign. Weirdness like that is one of the reasons I like Bangladesh.

Similarly, the common Bangladeshi habit of taking your phone out of your pocket and poring over the number on the screen for 30 seconds or so before answering is understandable, given that many Bangla phone users can't read English and so have to identify each caller by comparing the (European alphabet) numbers on screen with the list of numbers they have memorised for their nearest and dearest and vaguest associates. Understandable. I mean, I'm saying I can go along with that, even if the sound is so loud that their faces seem to distort at the edges as they peer into the sheer blast power of their ringtone. Perhaps this north-face-of-the-Eiger experience is why it's normal to leave your mobile phone at your desk in Bangladesh.

However. It is in this context that I humbly submit the following. A ring tone which is loud enough to drown out in-ear headphones from the other side of the office is too bloody loud.

I SAID, TOO LOUD!

Oh, balls...hang on, I'll write it down for you....

Paint Job

2011-12-04T07:09:00.003Z

The more low-status a vehicle in Bangladesh, the more likely it is to have been intricately painted. Buses come a close second to lorries as riots of amateur colour, frequently bearing slogans of the painter's choice - usually religious, sometimes political.

Of course, the, um, acrobatic nature of driving in Bangladesh (where might is right on top of you) means that buses get to barge all other comers out of the way, leading to some uncomfortably close encounters.

It's quite terrifying, as a driver, to find yourself in a canyon of hot, dented steel, each wall of which is being driven by someone whose wing-mirrors may not give him, urm, an entirely full view of his surroundings (ie: you). Happily, they are driving ever forwards, meaning that a close encounter with a bus generally does you no more damage than you'd usually get from inhaling a gallon or two of carbon monoxide, as the buses sweep across you in a cloud of poorly-burned diesel. Head spinning, you are left with the dizzy impression of having been assaulted by an absent-minded stegosaurus with 'God Is Love' painted on its back.

Or, as the case may be:

I agree. No, really. But a driving school would still, I suggest, do wonders.

Listening to yourself think

2011-11-30T03:58:00.001Z

I've recently been revisiting some briefing documents I wrote shortly after arriving here, summing up the history of Bangladesh.

Obviously, a few months into this kaleidoscopically smoggy sensory overload, I had no idea how to write this place down (as you will see if you read the archives from late 2009), so I took a lot of advice. The short history I wrote then ended in 1991.

This time I've spent two years here, so I have enough savvy to attempt a draft of my own, and I tried to update the story of the last two decades (from a rather conventional perspective on the high-level politics of Bangladesh). The first thing that spilled out of my cursor was about political riots and widespread corruption. I looked at it, but found I couldn't honestly sum it up better than that.

There is (woefully) nothing new about violent politics and corruption, but it was an illuminating way to sneak up on myself and find out what I think of when I think of power-politics in Bangladesh.

I think of violence, and clientelism, and entitlement, and the effective alienation of millions. The voice of those who do not hold positions of influence in the government or the economy is heard only when it is tightly controlled and directed by patrimonial elites. Money is might and might is right. It's all rather sad.

Quintessence

2011-11-29T09:17:00.003Z

Spotted in Bogra. This is like a one-photo summary of daily life in Bangladesh. Green, brown, rivers, dirt, delays, and crowds of very resourceful people making the best of it. Click to enlarge it; it tells the story better than I could.

I scream?

2011-11-27T06:32:00.001Z

Bangladesh as genius-level absurdist performance art, part 31245:

Hope and Love

2011-11-24T07:30:00.005Z

A short walk around rubbish-strewn streets ended at a small gate in a crumbling brick wall. Stepping over the open sewer, I didn't notice myself ceasing to breathe; it's an instinct and an impulse by now.

A rag hung from a string over a gap between the low, small brick houses in this colony - a sort of long-term refugee camp, where a forgotten and mostly despised group of people had been stuck in limbo for so long that it had become home. I pushed the rag aside, and walked through.

Ethnically, the people in this community are Muslims from the north Indian region of Bihar who moved here in the 24-year gap between Bangladesh's bloody separations - first from India, second from Pakistan. They made home here but, when the civil war came in 1971, they picked the wrong side. The Bangladeshi government, without much grace, has shunted them to these slums and described them as 'stranded Pakistanis', leaving them to the consequence of their bad decisionmaking. 40 years and counting, largely forgotten and legally ignored.

I sat down on some reed mats on the beaten-earth floor in front of one of the houses, in a gathering group of curious men, women and children. In the middle of the group sat 10 women from a Savings and Learning Group that I was there to report on.

Normally, groups as young as this tend to be feeling their way into the rather revolutionary idea that they might be able to change their own circumstances, and lift themselves out of poverty. It takes time for people to get their heads around the idea of hope. But these ladies were animated and engaged - there was less hopelessness around. I wondered why.

As I sat down, a little girl scampered over and sat on my lap. I was astonished. In this culture, generally one interacts unselfconsciously only with people of one's own gender. And in this country, foreigners are so rare a sight that when they see me, people hide behind each other and often don't respond even to direct greetings.

But this girl - who, by the way, could only be described as a total cutie - showed no such fear. Her mother was the group president, and throughout the meeting, the girl was throwing herself over her mother, over me, over my colleagues. She was playing with her mother, and her mother unabashedly and confidently led the group and played with her daughter throughout, switching effortlessly between mothering and leading her community. Everything she said and did to her daughter - including affectionately batting her hyperactive attentions away - seemed to settle on the child like another embrace. The kid smiled, visibly secure in her mother's love.

As part of my group interview, I asked what their dreams were for their children. The president did not hesitate. 'She can be a doctor, a teacher, anything. She is so intelligent!'

It was sad to leave, and as I did, the little girl ran ahead of me. I never would have imagined that a visit which ended with a little girl skipping blithely over an open sewer could have been uplifting. But it was.

I hope this isn't a sign that I'm becoming inured to the horror of poverty. I think it is not making light of someone's situation to say that the love they showed to their child was a bright thing in a dark place, and that there is visible hope for them.

When you're writing about poverty there is a great temptation to be lurid and shocking. You can make poverty big, simple, horrifying, and awful, make it loom insurmountable and, in so doing, deny that everyone everywhere is a human being of extraordinary nuance and depth.

No. The lives these people lead are currently defined by a poverty which is horrendous, and should not be denied. But neither should the love they show to each other. If we want beauty to blot out all ugliness, we are asking it to do too big a job. But if we do not acknowledge its presence, we are asking it to be too small, to go away until it can give us a fairytale.

I've never seen a fairytale, but I've seen beauty, and I saw a good amount of it in that group.

Where people love each other, hope resides. Even - especially - in the dark places of the world.

Field Trip

2011-11-22T05:23:00.007Z

I've been up north for a few days, doing project visits. A lot of time in the car, but time outside Dhaka - visiting people who are committed to each other in some of the worst circumstances imaginable - is balm to the soul.

Bad Money

2011-11-19T16:37:00.000Z

A slightly queasy coda to the Eid experience a week or so ago.

Shopping today in the supermarket near my house (the one with the cockroach-infested veggie section and the waxen Twix bars for a pound each), I handed over my money and waited for my change.

A pile of notes returned to me, topped with a 20 taka note that was, even by the permastained standards of normal Bangladeshi currency, surprisingly filthy. It reminded me of the secret note hidden in a disreputable piece of street food described by Terry Pratchett in Night Watch - 'stained with unknowable juices'.

Or perhaps not so mercifully mysterious. I asked the man behind the counter to exchange it for another, and, without moving to replace it, he told me that the stains were cow's blood. Presumably this note had fallen out of someone's pocket in the midst of the gore.

I gaped at him, then asked politely if he could indeed therefore give me an alternative. Looking somewhat surprised, he obliged. Which was nice.

Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like

2011-11-17T03:07:00.000Z

This post is rather uncomfortably accurate, from a blog I was pointed towards today named 'stuff expat aid workers like'.

This particular post is about 'field cred', and all the different ways one can fluff oneself in the opinion of others at home by casually mentioning the most adventurous place you've ever worked (as if you did anything other than turn up, check the mattress for bugs and contract a tropical fever). My favourite bit is this:

'You can also drop hints that you’ve got field cred by always pronouncing the names of cities and countries the way a local would (eg., Nee-ka-ra-wa instead of Nik-uh-rah-gwa).'

Oof. I must confess to that one myself, as you will know if you've ever heard me speak excitedly about 'Bongladeysh'.

I've mused briefly on the idiosyncrasies of rich people being professionally Good in far-flung parts of the world before (here), but this blog seems to be devoted entirely to it. I'm not certain I'd be able to stomach the upkeep of such a blog, so kudos to whoever it is that's working to keep us all honest (or at least, vigilant in our pre-emptive cynicism - stuff expat aid workers like, #108). We need it. International development has its quota of unconscious hubristic self-importance, but probably no more per person than, say, the fashion industry.

I don't want to dismiss the sacrifices people make to live away from their families and native cultures. And, as the withering #108 above indicates, there is such a thing as too much cathartic irony - I'd go crazy if I tried to avoid these stereotypes, and never do any good at all. But I would like to take this opportunity to let you at home into the dirty but embarrassingly blatant truth about western development workers - we are doofuses, like all humans everywhere, not saints.

Globally Privileged Babies

2011-11-14T09:44:00.005Z

Today, finally, I announced our engagement to my Bangla colleagues at morning prayers. They haven't really known about this relationship - an uncomfortable situation, which I'll probably explain later on - but for now, I want to note the reactions around the table, because I think they sum up some things about Bangladesh rather well.

1. Where did you meet? (meaning is she a foreigner, and how on earth do you people organise marriages anyway, without your uncles and cousins around to do it?)
2. Can we see a photo? (I had a nice one of us at a cricket match, a quintessentially Bangla pastime which drew much approval)
3. What passports will your children have?

The question of passports gave a bittersweet flavour to the moment. Most Bangladeshis will never leave Bangladesh, both for want of money and because most countries look down on Bangladeshi passports as though they have smutty jokes written all over them.

I felt, in the middle of the bonhomie and happiness and relief of finally telling my colleagues about this relationship, a quiet and dismaying distance as I told them that my children will have both Canadian and British passports, if they want them.

'If they want them!', I wouldn't blame my colleagues for repeating later to their husbands and wives in astonishment. Many Bangladeshis spend the savings of their entire family, then live miserably for decades, risking deportation at every turn, just to get the same thing that my children will get for drawing breath.

Some children are trapped forever, and some can go where they like. And all because of where they're born and who their parents are.

Last Post

2011-11-13T06:35:00.003Z

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

[Poem by Carol Ann Duffy; photo by Ian Britton, courtesy of FreeFoto.com]

What Does It Look Like?

2011-11-11T14:04:00.004Z

Eventually, you just have to face it. As a writer, you aren't a camera.

I didn't take this video, but I could have done. I've been in that situation a hundred times, and never captured quite what this video allows you to see.

I can describe the hush next to the broken tarmac, stuttered by the passage of dirty air and tiny explosions under the tank of a rusty Honda bike. I can talk about rice-paddies skirted with coconut trees, gentle breezes, and suffocating heat. I can talk about the smell, and the sight of cow-dung squashed into fuel-patties on mud-walled homes.

I can talk about how it makes me feel, about what it reminds me of, and I can weave a complex web of explanation and allusion. I can rejoice in and weep over the past and future as they are found in the present. I can conjour endless worlds of wordy etceteras, and I do.

But try as I may, elaborate as I may versify, locquacious though I may wax, something is missing. I'm trying to get better, but I can't do the simple second-by-second reality of it; the experience - before figurative language and before interpretation - the sucking-in of air and the regular march of seconds; the experience of being physically, unavoidably lumpen in a particular place, here instead of there.

Thank God, then, for video. There are several things in this miniscule slice of roadside village life which sum up my experience of Bangladesh rather well:

1. Bikes nearly running you off the road
2. Silent stares
3. Silent stares that break effortlessly into friendly smiles and waves

My favourite bit is the end, though. Two dudes in lungis and singlets staring with grubby, bored astonishment at the crazy foreign fella with a camera. And if that ain't the story of my time in Bangladesh, I tell you, I do not know what is.

[Video courtesy of John Marsden.]

Here Be Cows, but not for much longer

2011-11-07T03:23:00.001Z

[It's Eid weekend this weekend, and I'm moving house. Normal service will be resumed next week; until then, here's a post from last year about this festival of sacrifice. Be warned: these photos are not for the squeamish and/or vegetarian.]

Look away now.

Today's the day. As you can see below, it's already been an interesting, slightly queasy experience.

Eid last year fell a few weeks after I first arrived in Bangladesh. I woke to an eerie emptiness - Dhaka usually packs somewhere upwards of 100,000 people into each square mile, but at Eid everyone goes home - broken only by the occasional alarmed honking of terrified cows. This, I decided, was too extraordinary an experience to miss, so I got on my finest Bangladeshi shirt and stepped out into the street.

I had been told that being invited in for the sacrifice was child's play - most of the killing is done on the ground floor of each house, in the driveway. Just catch someone's eye and they would happily welcome in the curious-looking white guy. Now, I know this to be very true - Bangladeshis are very welcoming and curious people. But Britishness is a hell of a thing, and I wandered the streets for a while, paralysed by incredulity at the notion of waving my arms around, palpably foreign, and inviting myself in for what was presumably a very sacred ritual.

Eventually, curiosity overcame politeness, and I poked my head over a car-park wall and was welcomed by a nice man who turned out to be a colonel in the Bangladeshi army - a small, well-trimmed man with good English, which was a mercy because my Bangla at that point was appalling.

The ritual, it turned out, may have been sacred but it was not carried out with particular decorum - decorum being something of a lost cause when you're hanging on to a cow by the penis and skinning it as it slowly bleeds out. And this is not just a colourful turn of phrase; observe:

Though the sight was surreal, the atmosphere was oddly familiar to me. The car-park was filled with the sound of Bangladeshi men excitedly directing each other as to where to kneel and what to hold down, a collabortive, physical experience teetering happily between total, inept chaos and the execution of a manly job well done. It was the same sort of barely-managed enjoyment which accompanies the execution of common DIY tasks like putting up a shed in the UK, but with more blood - an episode of Home Improvement directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Right, lads, now remember - never cut it at this end.

We stood in polite conversation, the Colonel and me, and I explained that I was not a Muslim, that I would be living in Bangladesh for three years, and that as a Christian I knew about Abraham too. He did what a good Muslim should, and started to explain to me that God was great, a proposition I have no problem with. And I tried manfully to ignore the hollerings of the slaughterer's assistants, which my hindbrain had treacherously started to translate as 'to me...to you then...to me...' as he explained to me that though Christians and Jews were people of the book, I should think carefully about converting to the faith which held the most up-to-date words of the Lord. He keenly explained to me why slitting the cow's throat was a merciful means of dispatch, and I looked over just in time to see the cross-section of the cow's trachea, a sight not to be forgotten.

Eventually, the cow was felled, and its thrashings turned to twitches, and with astonishing speed the skin was cut, the body opened, and the butchering begun. This was my first experience of being close to anything bigger than a chicken as it started the journey from animal to food, and it was arresting.

Though the smell of blood was not pleasant, and the sight of the huge Achilles tendons being cut while the animal was still alive made me wince, the rest of it wasn't too unsettling. I don't know if that makes me an awful person, or if I just lack the sort of compassion which worries about animals - but I know where my steak comes from and I've eaten from halal takeaways before. Given the choice between eating meat and not eating meat, I have made my lifestyle choice and I had no problem with being presented with this particular consequence of it. So it was remarkable - but thankfully the remark in question was only 'ugh', not 'arrgh', or even 'retch'.

I was invited upstairs by my friend the Colonel, where he fed me tea, plied me with sweetmeats, and tried to get me to marry his daughter ('she works at the British Council, you know...very good English...'), while I desperately tried to remember my lessons in Bengali table manners. I smiled, nodded and shook my head politely at the appropriate points.

It was an extraordinary experience. I'm not certain to what extent religious fervour was a part of what I saw, but then religious fervour doesn't often look like you expect it to, particularly if (like me) you're a child of the charismatic church. I was grateful for the hospitality of the Colonel and his family, and for a view on someone else's faith.

Festivals are weird ways of gauging the nature or heart of a religion. To look at Christmas and Easter as they have left their marks on British culture, you'd think that Jesus was a fat German sponsored by Coca-Cola who turned into chocolate 4 months after he was born. But there are a few interesting things in the sacrifices of Eid ul-Azha. There's generosity in it. The meat, which will have been bought at great expense, is divided into three - one for the household, one for the broader family, and one for the poor. So there's family, too.

And there's the notion of giving up a significant portion of your wealth as a religious observance. How sincere the observance is - how motivated by worship and how motivated by making sure your cow is bigger than the one belonging to the guy next door - I cannot speculate. I know God knows. But in Christianity we are not good - we are positively bad - at making sacrifice something we celebrate together. I know I am very unwilling to consider loss as anything other than a bad thing; but surely possession is not the ultimate good? And sacrifice - loss - lies at the heart of our faith. We believe that Jesus died for us. He sacrificed himself for us.

And the key thing about sacrifice, I learned at Eid, is that the blood gets everywhere. That realisation either contains something very profound, or just something very profitable for my dry-cleaner. Hopefully the first; possibly both; definitely, unavoidably, the second.

Eid mubarak, everyone.

Remember, Remember, Forget

2011-11-05T03:29:00.001Z

[It's Eid weekend, and I'm moving house. Clouds of dust have obscured my head and I am sneezing too much to be funny on purpose, so here's a post from last year about Guy Fawkes night and why I like fireworks despite the dubious roots of this particular tradition.]

Historically accurate image.

Happy November the Fifth! Or Bonfire Night! Or Guy Fawkes Night!

Yes, indeed, a happy Religious Intolerance Day to you all!

What was our problem with them again?

May all your effigies of previous religious enemies of a certain political hegemony burn merrily and long!

Odd one, this, isn't it? 405 years ago, a terrorist plot was thwarted, and people celebrated that very night. And, except when Oliver Cromwell (who apparently hated parties even more than he hated Catholics) forbade it, the celebrations have continued ever since. Such a thing feels alien. Can you imagine a similar party being thrown after the failed Glasgow airport bombing of 2007?

Of course not. But neither can you imagine those terrorists being dragged backwards behind a horse before having their knackers cut off and their guts torn out on an elevated platform in front of the general public, then being cut up into party bags and distributed around the country. I think, all told, as a civilisation, we have made progress.

And a good thing too. In 2007, no-one threw parties where Muslim iconography was burned in celebration, though I bet it wasn't far from some thoughts. Merciful God save us from our own desire to hate.

Four centuries later, as well as being a perfectly innocent knees-up, tonight provides an excuse for some truly unpleasant phenomena. The most bone-headedly dismaying of these, I think, is as the excuse d'etre of an organisation which seems to exist purely to burn someone in effigy for the sin of being in the news recently (this year its Wayne Rooney). Though that's not to mention the good burghers of the nice East Sussex town of Lewes, who will burn crosses and paper Popes this evening.

Mentalists.

I like Bonfire Night, I really do - but not when we burn people, even in effigy, even for tradition's sake. It might be meaningless now but that's only because of how good we are at forgetting stuff.

On the other hand, I love fireworks, and this seems precisely the right time to set them off. In the UK, people will shoot light far into the sky against the deepening dark, to share the sight of the extraordinary with the world. That's a tradition I can get alongside. For my money it's a far more hopeful folk practice for coping with the dying world than Halloween (which of course once served the same purpose).

Celebrating in the dark.

We want to do something about the darkness; and illuminating it seems a better approach than trying to placate whatever might be hiding in it. So have a good one tonight. I miss you all; have a toffee-apple for me.

(Lewes photo by Andrew Dunn, under a Creative Commons licence to be found here; fireworks photo by Ian Britton, via FreeFoto.com)

Changing Seasons

2011-11-03T03:36:00.002Z

It's the start of November, which of course carries great significance.

Summer's finally over, and it's finally cold enough to wear jeans.

The day-to-day experience of my life has changed in many ways since taking this job...

The Banglish Language

2011-11-02T05:12:00.000Z

Part of my job is taking stories of success from our projects and translating them.

Not to English from Bangla - would that I were talented enough to do that. No no. To English, from Banglish.

It's not boasting to say that there are many successes in our projects. The people there are incredible (commercial break: and you can donate to help them here).

Stories will, of course, be gathered in Bangla, and then translated. The staff who do this are dedicated and skilled, but also very busy, and have learned English via the exceedingly dubious Bangla English education syllabus, which I have boggled at before.

Stories like this are good for fundraising, but the attention you're trying to grab has a span measured in picoseconds. You can't waste a single word, and quotations are by far the most powerful thing in any story. Which is why it is heartbreaking that, so often, powerful experiences get lost in the grinding space between two languages.

Like how? Like so:

'Cyclone warning signal need to know everybody. When we know hearing warning signal for that time priority basis shift to shelter house most of vulnerable people as of disable, child, old man, pregnant mother'

This is hugely important - this guy has learned how to keep his family safe when the river rises and the storms hammer in from the sea. It's story that deserves - needs - to be told internationally.

How would you translate it, to keep his meaning and make it as punchy as it should be? What is his meaning, do you think?

My professional opinion is that the appropriate technique is to start with a sigh, and progress swiftly to prayer. Lots of prayer.

I usually only write up one of these stories in a day, lest my brain turn to palok paneer, but there's a deadline afoot so I'm doing 7 of them tomorrow. Pray for me...

WooOOooOO!

2011-10-31T05:16:00.005Z

Watching the footy on Saturday at a friend's place - enjoying an absolute cracker of a Chelsea-Arsenal game with defensive failures to warm the heart of any Liverpudlian - the sixth goal of the match was greeted with yells of excitement from the Gooner on the sofa, and a thump at the balcony window.

As we were on the third floor, this struck us as odd. And a moment's consideration presented the suggestion that, though mysterious thumps might make us think of poltergeists or wraiths in bedsheets, these bogies generally depend upon darkness or disquieting stillness to wreak their imaginary havoc. It is a brave ghost indeed who tries any chain-clanking nonsense at the height of the best match of the season.

Some other explanation seemed to demand itself, and it was so. Sliding open the door to the balcony, I saw - not unknowable ectoplasmic horror from the eldritch beyond, but a small onion with a bit chipped off the side.

It must have been thrown with impressive accuracy, but a quick wander downstairs showed no rioting greengrocers or further vegetable rage. I shrugged and went back upstairs just in time for goal number seven.

I love this sort of surreal nonsense. I mean, an onion?! Dhaka, the city where rice is esteemed and bomb-alarms are ignored, where even Torbay has its own t-shirt and DVD cases insist that the movie within is 'completely overrated', has outdone itself once more.

I loved it even more since today is Halloween, which is, as Dr Kelso reminds us, the mother of all non-holidays, and one I am usually enthusiastic to ignore. I don't need any plastic darkness, and nor do the rest of us - the world is quite fucked enough without our pathetic attempts to control the darkness by aping it. With red food colouring.

Far better, surely, to laugh at the sheer absurdity of humanity, to laugh at and with and for and despite all the odd things that we can see simply by being alive, and enjoy the funny stuff as a gift.

I'm making a bit much out of a random bump at the window I suppose. But I would definitely put that football match in the category of beautiful things - especially Juan Mata's goal in the 85th minute. And the onion was the weird-smelling icing on the cake.

There's more than enough darkness already. Make looming spectres wait outside while you enjoy a good football match, and rejoice in the bizarre glory of things. In short, assume your fears are onions.

Unintended Consequences of Becoming a Missionary

2011-10-29T07:03:00.003+01:00

As it turns out, buying jewellery in Dhaka is quite a challenge.

Which is why this photo shows a big lump of sugar. In a way, it was a vindication of my risky/cheap (delete as appropriate) choice of confectionery as an expression of never-dying commitment that it disappeared so quickly, after an appropriate quantity of laughter, tears and excitement. A real ring will appear forthwith, but with beautiful sea in front of us and calm surrounding, it was too good a moment to miss. And, forgive me, but it was a moment of perfectly refined sweetness.

She said yes.

We get to build an awful lot together, starting now, and I am very happy indeed :)

Soli Deo gloria (Banglaversary Photo 11)

2011-10-24T08:36:00.002+01:00

The ferry across the Meghna.

Sometimes, this country is awful. Sometimes it's beautiful. This time, it was beautiful.

Thanks for reading, for supporting, for praying. Stick around; I suspect there are better things to come.

Generosity (Banglaversary Photo 10)

2011-10-23T11:09:00.002+01:00

We sat in the village with a group of women in an FH project. They let us sit in on a literacy lesson, then they told us about their hopes and dreams. They were big dreams.

A scurry of activity behind us, and a teenage boy was suddenly 40 feet up the trunk of a palm tree, moving with quick, darting grace made all the more striking because of the massive knife in his teeth.

He hacked and pulled, and we watched, fascinated. Then he dropped three green coconuts to someone waiting on the ground.

We still didn't know what was going on. Then, horrified, it dawned on us, just as the boy started hacking at the top of the first coconut, calling to his brother to bring glasses.

We tried to protest - the village only has a very few of these each year, and they were giving so generously - but they persisted, handing us dripping glasses of the sweet water from the centre of the nut.

It was wonderful. I don't often talk about how often I experience generosity and welcome like this, but it's quintessentially Bangladeshi.

On the Wireless (Banglaversary Photo 9)

2011-10-22T08:39:00.001+01:00

In my first six months in Bangladesh, there were two visits within a month which kept me sane when the unbalancing darkness of culture shock seemed to have no end.

The second you've already heard about. The first was from Matt Bone. Now flying high at the BBC (no mean feat in these times), he's been privileged to be my friend since the first days of University, where he worked and succeeded while I worked less and succeeded little.

Always a man with an eye for a plan, he decided to see if he could travel to Asia and call it work (a shocking dissemblance which I would certainly never emulate). He came, bearing a digital microphone and an impressive beard.

For two weeks, I had the chance to describe my experience in Bangladesh for the dubious benefit of BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester. As we discussed what we saw - the beautiful, the shocking, the ugly, the affronting - a lot of understanding dawned for me. It was invaluable.

More importantly, though, we spent two weeks travelling around the country, visiting projects and talking about them into the microphone, working and resting while travelling. We talked nonsense, listened to music, saw extraordinary things and played cards. There are some simple things which are restorative in a way years of therapy wouldn't be, and I suggest this is one of them. It was a good trip, with a great friend, precisely when I needed it.

Miracles of the Modern Age (Banglaversary Photo 8)

2011-10-21T10:35:00.001+01:00

The ability to read will change this woman's life.

My job is to help the people who help this happen. If I forget what a privilege that is, I am treating lightly something which is close to a miracle. Thank God for the miracle; I thank God that he uses me in it.

Rookie (Banglaversary Photo 7)

2011-10-20T08:00:00.001+01:00

Soon after I came to Bangladesh, a group of colleagues from across FH came to see the project we run here. They brought years of experience from across the globe, each with their own perspective, each with their own wisdom.

It was my first time seeing our project in Bangladesh, and so the trip was dizzyingly full, as I tried to learn Bangladesh and the world at the same time. I sat on the edge of conversations and tried not to sound too foolish.

[Thanks to John Connelly for the photo]

Boats (Banglaversary Photo 6)

2011-10-19T11:21:00.001+01:00

Bangladesh often seems less like a country and more like a collection of extremely crowded riverbanks.

I do like these boats though. They ain't safe, but they are peaceful. And that's a commodity you'll pay well for after a few months in Bangladesh.

Dancing from the Dirt (Banglaversary Photo 5)

2011-10-18T09:32:00.002+01:00

This kid is a Horijon. That's the name Gandhi gave his people. Before that they were known as dalit - the untouchables of the Hindu class system.

Despite the Muslim majority in Bangladesh, class-discrimination is a language everyone can speak. This kid could, without help, expect nothing better than a life doing the dirtiest, most degrading jobs, sweltering under the belief that this is his created purpose.

Bollocks to that. We work to help him make a better future for himself, and to improve the life of his family.

The Horijon community this was taken in is a Government-built slum - a ghetto for the forgotten. A maze of broken concrete alleyways with small houses built into the walls and the sewer down the middle of the path. The smell is unbelievable.

Injustice like this makes me crazy. Yet whenever I visit I am welcomed, because human injustice does not always extinguish human goodness.

And this kid is dancing.

The Fellowship of the Saints (Banglaversary Photo 4)

2011-10-17T08:21:00.006+01:00

Just before Easter in 2010, I was visited by two people who are much better-looking, compassionate and generally marvellous than me, Benjamin and Christine Welby. I'd been in Bangladesh for slightly less than 6 months, and culture shock was hitting hard.

Melodrama would be very self-serving, but it's fair to say I was a mess. They spent far too much money on coming here, just to end up performing emergency first-aid for the soul.

Culture shock is about many things, but there are times when it's as simple as a desperate, keening loneliness.

When they came, we had a great holiday - this photo was taken over 7-colour tea in Srimangal, and my smile isn't fake - but by far the most significant thing about their trip here was the fact that they were willing to make it. I was no longer alone.

After that, culture shock continued to be a total bastard, but it changed in character, ceasing to be quite so relentlessly crushing.

I will look back on that holiday as a crucial turning point. And I am very thankful to them, and to God, for that.

Surprised by Joy (Banglaversary Photo 3)

2011-10-16T10:16:00.003+01:00

Me and my girl; she and her bloke.

Astute viewers will realise that this photo was not taken in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is somewhat lacking in soaring peaks and glacial lakes.

But my life in Bangladesh would be impossible to describe without her. We got together after I'd been here for about 8 months, and I cannot begin to list all the ways she has made my life better in this place. I could - I might - write reams of very purple prose, but it wouldn't be published here for you if I did.

So let's just say this: she is wonderful, I love her, and I am blessed.

Shonar (Banglaversary Photo 2)

2011-10-15T11:05:00.000+01:00

Golden.

The Day Job (Banglaversary Photo 1)

2011-10-14T10:57:00.001+01:00

Usually, I work in an office. Whenever I get to go to the field, the journey is invariably long, sweaty, dusty and tiring (except between June and August, when it's long, sweaty, muddy and tiring).

It is also way, way worth it. Especially now I can understand people as they describe their experience to me - learning to develop their skills, coming to understand their God-given worth.

So in this photo, you see me in standard field-visit mode. Sweaty, dusty, muddy, tired and blessed.

Banglaversary

2011-10-13T04:44:00.001+01:00

Two years and three days ago, I came to Asia. October 24th will mark two years since I first arrived in Bangladesh. Time has somehow flown and dragged in those years, and it's almost impossible to describe the confusion, the despair, the hope and the joy that have filled them.

I'm about to get on another plane for a bit of a holiday, which is lovely. In the run-up to my second Banglaversary, I'll be posting some of the best photos of the last two years for your enjoyment.

I'll be back in a week or so, then we'll be on for another year in the Noise, the Filth and the Beauty, and there will be good things to come. Thanks for travelling with me, and I hope you enjoy the photos.

Going Home

2011-10-11T18:33:00.001+01:00

Leave a bit later than you’d planned to; down two flights of stairs to the brightly-lit car park on the ground floor. Tell the guard to sit down as you glide past through the huge sliding gates; he gets up anyway.

Note the deserted streets, muse pessimistically on the odds of getting a rickshaw to carry you all the way home. Find a rickshaw almost instantly.

The driver asks how much you’ll give him; food prices have gone up. You sigh, and pay three times what you would once have haggled insistently for. He nods happily, and sets off. The narrow bench-seat is precariously constructed; the pieces are solid but their combination isn’t. Perch uneasily.

Approach the police at the gates of the district, and watch with narrowed eyes to see whether they are bored enough to exercise their absolute power over their 20-yard tarmac kingdom and demand you dismount and find another rickshaw. They aren’t. Try to ignore the fact that you are a little disappointed by this.

A car appears in the middle distance, heralding the end of the world, and keeps his uber-bright-imported-and-he-knows-it headlights on all the way past you. Squint at the purple shapes left behind and pray that your rickshaw driver closed his eyes. Hit a pothole.

The rickshawallah carries straight on where you would expect him to turn right; the route is still valid but this road is less-travelled, and that could make all the difference. Scan the shadows for men with knives, and see none. Plan, with little conviction, what you might do if someone goes for you. No-one goes for you.

Pull out to cross the major road, and grip the seat slightly as you see another halogen beast whirring towards you. He should brake; he sounds his horn. Rickshawallah hits the brakes, and young master Mohammed Vin Diesel in the entitled Toyota burns into the distance.

Cross to the other side. Brakes squeal in the distance; Md. Vin Diesel may now be dead, or may now be pulling a u-turn to complete another perfect drag.

The road is peaceful. Reflect thankfully on how laughable such a feeling would have seemed to you 18 months ago. Pull through the second roadblock, where three teenagers have been left in charge and seem to be watching Animaniacs on a mobile phone. Engrossed, they don’t notice you pass.

Outside the North Korean embassy, a young man with big hair and skinny arms lounges on a rickshaw under the neon strip-light heralding the Glorious Revolution. He yells greeting.

He (in English): ‘Ah, how are you?’
Thee (in Bangla): ‘Fine, and you?’
He (in Bangla, dopplering): ‘Ah fine, and how are you?’
Thee (in Bangla): Fine....

Another car rears out of the night, ablaze with lights. Looking back at it when it has passed, you fail to notice a speed bump, and nearly overbalance into the road when you hit it at pace. Growl your surprise; rickshawallah takes it slower next time.

Approach home, circumnavigating a plume of broken glass. Keep an eye out for muggers, out for cash as Eid approaches and cows have to be purchased.

There are no muggers. Knock on the gate of your house, pay the rickshawallah, greet the guard in the hearty English he wants to practice, and wonder why he makes a mooing noise as you go up the stairs.

Another night in the city. Weird place, this.

Me Teach English? That's Unpossible!

2011-10-05T15:36:00.001+01:00

With both thanks and apologies to The Simpsons, of course, for the title.

I'm in Bangladesh because I'm good at the English language. Some days, in fact, it seems like that is my only marketable skill; and I am quite satisfied that that is the case, because that means I get to pass this wholly unearned privilege on to those for whom English must seem a fiendishly complex and foreign inconvenience.

Today was my first session with the child of a colleague of mine, who will take his exams over the next few weeks. Forgive me a second's slump into sibilant soppiness, but I really do feel privileged to be able to help him. He's a good guy - he often comes to me to talk about England's latest cricketing brilliance/idiocy/stupefaction when compared to the might of India (which has become a more pleasant conversation for me of late). His English is littered with pauses and ums and incorrect tenses, but compared my Bangla it is a pirouetting marvel of linguistic balletics. I enjoy it, even if our topics are limited.

His family live in just a few rooms, and his parents have jobs supporting the life of our office (his dad is the caretaker and his mum is a cook) - but he has stayed in school into his late teens and will get employment that is much more secure (and well-paid) than many kids from his background could ever have dreamed of, or even heard about. It's a testament to his hard work, and the love his parents have given him.

And, as it turns out, his English is good. Better written down than spoken. Presenting me with a problem.

You see, his college uses English textbooks. And these English textbooks, they are bad English textbooks. What's worse, they represent bad exams - exams which mandate a kind of English in which I have only become fluent since coming to Bangladesh.

Banglish, we call it. It is to the language of Shakespeare what my instructions to the rickshaw driver are to the Nobel-winning poetry of Tagore. A composition question - which was supposed to test correct uses of tense - demanded that he write about when he 'arrive to the zoo' instead of when he 'got to the zoo'...

So what does the conscientous English-as-a-first-language-blaggard do? Do you teach the textbook, or the language?

Unpossible, indeed. But I back this kid's talent to endure long past his deeply questionable tuition.

I Did Not Dress Up As T-Pain

2011-10-03T10:43:00.013+01:00

The noise and haste and danger and dirt, the grinding and yelling and dying, the filthy water in the streets and the hammer that lives in the sky during the monsoon all, eventually, conspired to rob us of the happy-go-lucky attitude we usually take to living in Bangladesh. Happily, there was a boat.

Friends of mine are teachers at a British international school, and board-members of their school are part of a consortium with three boats, of varying sizes, decked out in colourful cushions and noisy diesel engines, which provide a miraculously fast means of escaping the Noise.

A fifteen minute drive takes us to the broad, builders-sand riverbank, and fifteen further minutes of chugging have us in the unimaginable depth of fecund greenery that is the Bangladeshi countryside. Compared to the 90 minutes I have spent clinging to bottom-battering, self-dismantling buses in the past to achieve the same thing, this is a snip, and we are all seized of a strong conviction that these board members are good people.

It rains. Hard enough, as we embark, to have us scurrying to shelter (and hurriedly enough that I leave my shoes exposed behind me as I leap for cover, a decision I will come to rue later).

Small boats laden with brick from the kilns scattering the floodplain around Dhaka work past us. The labourers on board are holding onto umbrellas, against the sun and the rain, which can both be vicious at this time of year. Broad barges, low in the water, and deep-hulled boats chug past, high above our heads. It's a shock to realise that they're one and the same - loaded with sand their draft far exceeds their height, but unloaded they tower above us.

We unpack our picnics and settle down to some serious relaxation. I'm a bit worried about my shoes, but sod it. The sun is out. A book is in my hand. A picnic is making its way around the top of the boat in lots of shared tupperware, and the world is beautiful.

The river is enormous. Bangladesh is flat - unbelievably flat - and when a river floods, the only thing that's going to stop it spreading out forever is either its own volume, artificial levees, or Myanmar. Which explains the truly surreal sight, as we wander languorously downstream, of concrete pillars reaching out of water, hundreds of yards from the nearest land. Bearing carefully-painted Bangla letters, they stick out like deserted and abandoned billboards for the end of the world. With my playschool Bangla-reading skills, I translate. The slogan says, in English, 'Magnificent Housing Town'. There's nothing to do but grin and squint at the horizon.

The undergrowth only looks uninhabited. This is, after all, Bangladesh. Occasionally a makeshift monument stands out, in lurid pinks and yellows, made by the minority Hindu community of Bangladesh to celebrate Durga Puja, which falls this week. On distant banks and islands they look like miraculously-preserved gateways from a civilization long since swallowed up by the jungle; but it's been centuries since this place was empty.

We turn a bend in the river and the industrial present clangs back in at us - an enormous yellow monster of a boat sits low in the water pumping silt off the bottom of the river for use in buildings. The pipe coming off the back of it is massive, rusty and poorly bolted together, leaving spaces for mathematically perfect peacock-tails of spray to be forced out and up and all over us. You can almost smell the dysentery. As we sit up with cries of soggy protest, a boy drives grinning off the pipe and into the river.

The daughter of a friend sits down and explains to me how she likes to play Shrek Forever After on her DS (and, more intriguingly, why). She is worried about getting it wet, and I cannot truthfully give her much comfort on that one. The hammer looks like it's ascending again.

It falls when we're halfway back to the cars. The rain slams into the air, the water, our boat and our bodies with a ferocity which is breathtaking. In the five seconds between our feeling the first drop and starting to untie the blinds, the cushions around our feet are waterlogged and our picnics terminally diluted. Don't tell me you can't dilute a beef sandwich. You weren't there, man. You didn't see it.

A muezzin sounds faintly in the distance, slipping past the sound of the engine. The rain gets heavier, and the muezzin is lost. The rain slows down, and we get back to the cars. Reshod, each of my feet is a puddle unto itself. Time to go home.

I got very wet, and my shoes will probably never be the same. But in exchange for a day in the broad green fertility of Bangladesh, I would happily pay more than that.

[By the way, for an explanation of the title, watch this video. You're welcome. Thanks to Kim and Jamie for illustrating so beautifully what hardworking professionals do when they have a day off in Bangladesh, and Alicia for the pipe photo].

An Introduction

2011-10-02T07:56:00.008+01:00

Welcome to A Very Foolish Plan. As you'll see, I've been writing here for quite a while, and it has occurred to me (with customary timeliness) that I have never really explained what this blog is for, or indeed who I am at all. So, by way of introduction...

Hello, I’m Dave. I work for an international development charity in Bangladesh. This is my first posting abroad, and my first job in development, so this blog is about writing that experience down – in all its brilliance and horror and shock and ennui – and making it as interesting for you as it has been overwhelming for me.

My job is to help my Bangla colleagues, who are far more talented than I am, with writing and speaking in the English language. This means applying for funding, correcting letters, and writing promotional stuff like this, and allowing them to get on with the really important stuff, which is to say, actually helping people. I also occasionally help with my organisation’s disaster-response in Asia, to the same purpose. Despite this, what you read here represents me, not them.

I’m British, and a member (from far away) of St-Michael-le-Belfry’s Conversations and G2 congregations in the beautiful city of York. If you’ve never been, I recommend each of them.

I’m a missionary (but I do not preach), a development worker (but I do not work directly with the needy), a writer (with a day-job), and a follower of Jesus Christ; any or none of which may turn out to be mutually exclusive. I hope this blog is a truthful attempt to find out.

What you read here will take in faith, development, politics, music, films, cross-cultural living, and as much beauty as possible. I will try to be far more truthful than I am polite, so I will use ugly language to speak of things which deserve no gentrification.

If you want to talk about anything here, email me and say so; my address is daveburton84 at hotmail dot com. If you’re a troll, you’ll get deleted, but if you’ve got something to say, I would very much like to meet you.

And if you are offended, moved, or even briefly diverted by anything I’ve written - thank you. Like all writers I am deeply agnostic about the worth of my words to anyone other than my mum, so I am deeply grateful for your reading, and if you tell me about it, I’ll probably be so happy I’ll buy you a beer. Probably.

Thanks for being here. May God bless you in the shit, and may you find beauty in the truth.

Dave

Fiction Fight: I Am a Thief

2011-09-26T11:32:00.008+01:00

A departure for today. I love music, and I just got a new album, and I want to recommend it to you. A sample of it may be found on youtube here, but it won't embed properly here.

Full disclosure: if you delve back into this blog far enough, you will find that I used to live with two out of five from Fiction Fight, and Chris posted a few things here.

Perhaps it's this that makes 'I Am a Thief' knock me out. But knock me out it does. The songs take in a range of experience, all with an unselfconscious sincerity that comes from true confidence in your material and your ability to pull it off - yes, this is what I want to say, and this is how I want to say it.

It's an honesty that moves throughout the wonderful and eclectic grab-bag of ideas and influences that combine here to be far more than the sum of their parts.

The album starts with the delicately muscular synth chords of 'My Rescue', a song which is interesting for two and a half minutes. Then it turns extraordinary, opening up into a perfect, single-shot cry of confession and hope, and, so launched, the album doesn't come down again. By the end of most intros, these songs have packed in enough treasure to buy and sell irony and detachment a thousand times over. They are stubborn in their exultation.

This persistence in celebration is so subtle that you might miss it, and that would be a crying shame. 'I Am a Thief' does not just collate its influences. Each moment which recalls something else is infused with an energy that pays homage to the energy that drives everything worth listening to - the heart, not just the form, of what makes music beautiful.

'I Am a Thief' is perfect for those with more records than sense - you could play spot-the-influence for years and still be astonished at the creative vitality on show, as old ideas are mixed into a dynamism that places disparate things perfectly next to each other. The list of bands you will hear echoed here includes, but is decidedly not limited to: TV on the Radio, Bjork, Four Tet, Aphex Twin, LCD Soundsystem, and on and on and on.

The musicianship is of the highest order. Everything serves the song. Swirling bass, insistent rhythm that stutters into flows, ingenious deployment of strings and horns in what is supposed to be, for heavens sake, an electronica record, demand your attention, and justify it again and again and again. The drums, not programmed but played, are the perfect home for big electronic swells. Electric guitar and unbelievably fecund synth belong precisely where they have been placed: cheek by jowl with, I kid you not, drum n' bass. It works. It doesn't just work. It shines.

But it's the vocals that shove this album from the excellent to the inspirational. Passionate, unflinching, awe-stricken, joyous, troubled and troubling, male and female vocals intertwine in the search for something far more than cheap sensation. These are lyrics and voices and music with heaven in their sights and dirt on their souls, stretching for hope in infinity; and after they soar they land, every time, tenderly on the conclusion that they are invited to go higher next time.

There is a naked hunger for God here which is spine-chilling. This is no Sunday-morning high, and no act of endorphin-soaked self-deception. This is worship music in the truest sense, because, well, it worships.

'I Am a Thief', in a hopeless time, is about as far from naive as it is possible to be, but every verse is about hope. Despair is too cheap for the brokenness these songs exist in. For these guys, brokenness implies healing.

It won't be easy, but it sounds pretty beautiful in the meantime.

The icing on the cake is that you can get it for your own price. It's released as a pay-what-you-like album, and I urge you to get it here.

Om nom nom

2011-09-24T18:33:00.005+01:00

In Bangladesh, there is one inescapable reality.

They are in your kitchen.

They are in your toilet.

They are, unless you keep your wits about you, in your fridge.

They are cockroaches, and lizards (known, charmingly, as tik-tikis, for their characteristic chirping) chomp on them like they are chocolate-coated treats.

Unfortunately, they aren't. They scuttle insouciantly through sewers and up drainpipes, tumbling back when rain washes down, marauding upwards given half a chance, until they finally reach your home, and they are filthy. That brown coating ain't chocolate.

I've never been particularly squeamish, but I can't be having with these little buggers at all. My food should, if possible, come poo-free. I do not think this is an unreasonable position.

So this photo demonstrates so well why I love lizards:

Go to it, tik-tiki bhai. More power to your munching.

Tree

2011-09-21T08:01:00.002+01:00

Um, what country is this?

2011-09-21T04:24:00.001+01:00

HT: The Economist

I'm a bit late on reporting this, but it's only a few days. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have dragged their feet on this for 6 decades.

India and Bangladesh have completed an agreement to sort out their border. And I don't blame you for not knowing it was screwed up in the first place.

But screwed it most certainly was. In 1947, British India became India and Pakistan, (and Pakistan in turn became Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1971). The final position of the border was a secret both idiotically and closely guarded, a rushed job which was only announced a few days before it was to come into force. Whole communities found themselves in a nasty, violent and panicky scramble to get on the right side of the line before deadline day. Up to a million people may have lost their lives in the few hot, violent nights that saw 12.5 million people suddenly and vulnerably on the move.

In the chaos of partition (an innovation in continental cack-handedness which could only really have come from the colonial British, or, I guess, Leopold II of the Belgians), there were decisions made about the precise position of the border which you'd have to describe as entertainingly baroque, if they weren't so sickeningly dangerous.

People died. But it's 2011, and most people in India and Bangladesh weren't alive to witness partition; and yet for decades, some people have stayed stranded in enclaves - little forgotten territorial oddities left behind when the line-drawers went home.

This map (courtesy of Jan S. Krough and found here, at The Economist) shows most of them: little parcels of Indian territory inside Bangladesh, and little parcels of Bangladesh inside India; and in one astonishingly obtuse piece of international incompetence, a piece of Bangladesh inside a piece of India which is itself inside Bangladesh.

The existence of these aberrations dates back, if you can believe it, to the early 18th century, when local aristocracy claimed pieces of land which were detached from their main chunk of territory. And in the centuries since, they have remained - little bubbles of estranged nationette, filled with people trying to make the best of a pretty unpleasant situation.

For decades, the governments involved have failed to find a solution, leaving their (nominal) citizens stranded and disempowered. Because, of course, people living in these places have no access to government services - and that's not just about having no-one to blame when the bins are late. Development has stalled in these parcels of land (of which there are, amazingly, 201). William Schendel is quoted by the Economist (from whom I got this story), describing the difficulty for people living there:

They could not acquire passports without acting against the law. Since there were no passport offices in the enclaves, enclave dwellers who wanted a passport had to cross foreign territory illegally to reach their parent state through one of very few official check posts. The authorities of the parent state would then have to allow them in without a passport, again illegally. Once admitted to the parent state, they could try to get a passport. If successful, they could approach the consulate of the other state, hundreds of kilometres away, for a visa to return home. Once the visa expired, the illegal procedure had to be repeated. In effect, by omitting the enclave people from the passport agreement, both India and Pakistan abandoned them as citizens.

-William Schendel, 'Stateless in South Asia: The making of the India Bangladesh Enclaves'

This sort of thing makes for an interesting story, and is diverting at best for those who don't live there. But for the people living in these weird, stateless places, named but not claimed, it's a nightmare that's gone on for longer than half a century.

So we see (again) the importance of good governance. Heaven only knows how the boundary commission failed to correct such an epic problem in 1947, but they did. And because relationships between India and Pakistan and Bangladesh have been either strained or violent ever since, there has been no reason for government to do what is best for the people of these areas (who they are, in theory, supposed to be serving). The article here lays out some of the political pressures which make giving land away, even tiny pieces of negligible significance, very difficult to both governments. But basically, it's this: what government wants the headline 'Nation gives away land to other people'?

So the point is this: good governance does not happen by mistake. If we are not careful, politics and history and practicality can all entwine, all within the boundaries of common sense, and create a toxic situation in which people are required to break the law just to get medical treatment, or get a job.

The other lesson here is that good governance takes both willpower and humility. To pursue the wellbeing of your people in the face of lots of terribly compelling reasons to the contrary is a discipline shown by few politicians.

However, what prompts me to say this now is that on September the 6th, India and Bangladesh got themselves together and signed a treaty to sort this out.

The Earth Has Shaken

2011-09-19T09:31:00.003+01:00

I sat last night in the office, waiting for the car to get back, and felt an odd wobbling sensation.

It had been a long day, and it's possible to get to the end of a day in Bangladesh and discover that you are quite seriously dehydrated, so I supposed it might be a headrush of sorts. But the odd feeling of almost overbalancing went on, and on.

I stuck out an arm to see if the chair next to me was shaking, but if it was, I couldn't feel it.

I got up, and walked around the office. Nothing was falling down. If this was an earthquake, it was a bloody slow one.

Of course, it was.

Before coming to Asia, earthquakes weren't part of my life. My first earthquake was a year ago, while I was in Pakistan. Skyping in my room, I was conscious that the windows were shaking, and the light-fittings were doing some serious dancing. One of them fell off the wall. With a shock, I realised that I had absolutely no idea what to do.

I later researched (basically, get under something, and don't go outdoors, though the US government can tell you better than I), but even that advice brought home to me the basic futility of trying to do something to protect yourself when the world itself is shaking. I mean, what you are you going to do, go and find another one?

There are, of course, ways you can make it less likely that you will die, but it is a microscopic adjustment. If a big earthquake hits where you are, it is not hiding, or running, or any action of yours which will protect you from falling debris or explosions from severed gas-mains, it is chance. A girder falling this way or that way; the tie between the transformer and the wire staying strong or giving way - you could die in a second, or stay alive under rubble, or run out in the street and somehow not be crushed by falling hunks of concrete, and live to tell the tale.

As a Brit, it is still a novel and disquieting experience to live in a place where the landscape isn't necessarily friendly. Bill Bryson described Britain as basically a big back garden, and he's right. In the UK you're in little danger of your house falling down, or being washed away, or immolated in a river of lava.

There's a danger of mistaking this fact - the benign global accident of having been born where you were born - as some sort of canny planning on your part. It's not. It's luck, or it's grace, or it's something; planned, it is not. Your doing, it is not. I think the appropriate response to that is thankfulness - not to a capricious God who chose not to endanger you as he endangered millions of others, but to a God who gives good things in order that good things can be done.

I'm reminded of that this morning, as the earthquake which only wobbled me turns out to have ruined and killed others closer to it. I am thankful, and will do what I can.

I'm praying for the people in Sikkim and Nepal and Tibet; and for the people who were not hurt by the earthquake who have travelled to help those who were.

The world is dangerous, but we get to choose our response to that.

Culture Shock: It Is Inevitable

2011-09-15T09:45:00.004+01:00

A further reflection on the relief of culture shock, which I have been celebrating and writing about in the last few days.

I’ve been feeling a lot better, and I’m very thankful for that. But I think it’s important to recognise this for what it is: the next stage of culture shock.

Whether you like it or not, no matter how open you are to new experiences, or how humbly you apply yourself to learning how to relate in a new culture, you are never (as far as I can tell) a true cultural chameleon.

This may seem either 1) shocking or 2) demonstrably naive to people like me, who prize their ability to make their personalities out of ingredients from several different sources. I myself am a pinch of punk and a dollop of pretentious culture-vulture along with a much smaller, more timid morsel of genuinely awe-stricken beauty-lover, all dumped on top of a stodgily fearful evangelical quiche.

But I think that is only possible within certain broader boundaries. Each and every one of those ‘identities’ was available to me as a white Briton, and by and large there is no conflict between them. It is perfectly possible to connect and relate in the UK whilst being all of those things at once.

All of them are acceptable, broadly, within UK culture; I still have a common set of understandings with basically every Briton I meet about how conversations are conducted, decisions made, and relationships built. The language is different, and I pride myself on my ability to communicate in several different British sub-cultures, but that’s what they are – sub-cultures, not separate and extraordinary cultures of their own.

My skills as a sub-cultural multi-linguist are useless when they are removed from the broader common culture which made them. As is discovered when I came to Bangladesh.

I think that the things you’re comfortable with are only really shaped by one set of cultural norms at a time. So culture shock comes when you are removed from the broader culture with which you are familiar, and suddenly conversations are not conducted in a way which is comfortable for you, decisions not made in a way you can engage in. Relationships become bewilderingly complex and, in the end, alienating.

Loneliness and confusion are the fundamental experiences of culture shock.

So, though I feel more able to connect with people here, and more able to achieve things here, this is still a culture shock waiting to happen. Because one day I will return to Britain, and I will have changed.

My expectation of what is ‘normal’ will have been irretrievably changed by my time here (and wherever else I may live). My responses to things will not be what they were. And, for that matter, Britain will have changed, and my painstakingly constructed sub-cultural surfing skills will be useless, because each of the subcultures will themselves have been changed.

Culture shock is unavoidable, when you move between cultural contexts. There is no such thing as avoiding culture shock, any more than you can avoid the plane that brings you to a new country.

The journey can be rough or it can be easy, but you still make it either way; and I will make it again.

Dirty Water

2011-09-13T09:39:00.000+01:00

Lead me down and then
Show me how the water glides
Its brush round heaven

Alright/Not All Right

2011-09-11T09:33:00.002+01:00

So, like I said yesterday, I’ve spent the first month after my return to Bangladesh feeling pretty good.

This is for a number of reasons, which revolve around the relief of culture shock. Things here are no longer so shocking to me, and as the noise (and the dust and the poverty) lose their ability to block out anything else in my hearing and vision, I am more able to see the things which make Bangladesh beautiful.

I’m very thankful for this, and of course it is a process that’s been going on for some time (it’s hard to be here for longer than a few days without being struck by the commitment which families show to each other, amongst many other things).

But, to repeat, this is not a Hollywood ending. Though I see beauty, horror remains. The concrete is still splintering, the mother and child still living on the side of the road, and the leaf still grey with polluted dust.

I’ve got at least a year left in Bangladesh, and I don’t imagine that it will cease to be dirty, unjust, or poverty-stricken before then. Not at all. It’s important not to buy a cheap dualism in which the world is either totally horrific or utterly wonderful – a histrionic denial of both the depth of our darkness, and the glory of the God who came to save us from it.

It would be cheap indeed if I allowed the harrowing of culture shock only to teach me that eventually everything will seem sort of okay, if you squint enough.

I don’t believe in Hollywood endings. If there is a lesson to be drawn from my experience of culture shock so far, surely it is this: in this world, nothing is ever completely good. Nothing is ever completely screwed. Hope exists. Despair is a liar. And there will always be a new situation arising to question the existence of hope, or ignore the darkness which it seeks to overcome.

And I believe that the God who loves me despite my deep, deep fucked-up-ness can, has and will heal wounds worse than this. Will correct injustices worse than these.

In culture shock, I have learned many difficult lessons, most of which I would probably have avoided if I had been given the choice.

But one of the biggest and most important lessons is this. He loves me, and works for my good, and he will still be here tomorrow. Everything is not lost.

Feeling Ever More At Home

2011-09-10T09:22:00.001+01:00

I’ve been back in Bangladesh for about a month now, and I have experienced a most bizarre thing.

Walking home from work - standing on the roof at night looking out at miraculous stars and a filthy city - swimming and talking and resting; in each I have found the same phrase wandering unbidden through my head.

It is a phrase with which I used to be on very close terms – one which I could count on thinking, and believing, at least once a day. It has been absent from my thoughts for nearly 2 years.

‘It’s alright here, isn’t it?’

This is the classic British (or perhaps Northern) ‘alright’, a deeply inadequate understatement of simple contentment, the pleased internal sigh of wellbeing that comes when discomfort is absent and pleasure ceases to elude.

Yeah, that’s right. Contentment. Compared to the constant angst and spiritual pain which has accompanied me so often in Bangladesh, this is a miracle. I am very thankful indeed.

But this is no Hollywood ending. I haven’t stopped seeing the poverty, and I don’t want to. I’ve simply developed the ability to spot beauty again - mothers caring for their children, or concrete shining white against a perfect blue sky, sunlight falling gently through the broad leaves on the trees outside my office.

Suddenly, I can see how beautiful things are beautiful in themselves; not just as half-hearted equivocations against a deeper and more stubborn darkness, but light and glorious and just as stubborn.

Beauty didn’t disappear, I just forgot how to see it.

Standard British idiom has no language for expressing my response to this, so let’s do this the old-fashioned way:

All praise, glory and honour for this miracle and relief goes to God, the creator and sustainer of my fragile frame and frail mind, because through his Spirit’s soothing in my head and heart, and his Son, dying and rising to deny the darkness, he has given a way for me not to be utterly destroyed by my collision with the aching, virulent destruction in the world.

All the credit goes to God. Damn right.

What Language Would You Like Your Language To Be In?

2011-09-08T04:50:00.005+01:00

This story has warmed a fair few hearts - not least my own - in the couple of months since I posted it, and it's not hard to see why.

This guy's tribe, the Koda, were marginalised in Bangladesh, speaking a language no-one cared about, convinced that a life on the edge was all they could hope for. Now, with the help of SIL, my organisation runs pre-schools for their children, with books in their own language. With this preparation, their children enter education confident in certain key concepts, which gives them time to catch up on Bangla, their second language and the language in which mainstream school lessons are delivered.

As you can see, this Koda book is written in Bangla script. When SIL started working with the Koda to develop an alphabet, they gave them a range of options for bringing their language out of the air and putting it on paper for the first time in history. With one eye on their desire to be employable in the mainstream economy, they chose the Bangla alphabet. Hundreds of work-years of effort went into fashioning the sounds into the letters in a way which truly captured the depth of the language and its unique sounds.

But I discovered something interesting last night. We worked with another group nearby, the Kol, and they chose the European alphabet. Brilliantly, and not at all surprisingly in Bangladesh, they did this because it would allow them to send text messages with their European-alphabet-only phones.

Development, on the ground, is a fascinating, slow and extraordinary process, which is shaped by things you may not expect. For that, it is awesome.

[Incidentally, if you should think that no-one who can afford a phone should be described as poor, I urge you to read this post and this article or watch this video of extraordinary facts. 'Poor' may not always look like what you think.]

Thankfulness

2011-09-06T10:07:00.005+01:00

As I have noted before, one quotation from the canon of modern literature sums up my experience in Dhaka more than any other.

Tee hee hee. Of course it's not that.

In Season Two of The wonderful West Wing, President Bartlet is going on a flying visit to Portland, Oregon - to the far side of the country. He will turn around and come back after a few hours, spending far longer in the air than he does on the ground, and that is the life of a continent-sized presidency.

But so precious is his time that some take quite extraordinary lengths to get a moment with him. He learns that a man is travelling thousands of miles with him on the plane simply in order to get a face-to-face meeting on the way back.

'On the way back?' says Bartlet, astonished.

'Yes, sir,' says his aide.

'The day to day experience of my life,' says Bartlet, 'has changed in many ways since taking this job....'

'I would imagine, sir,' comes the laconic reply.

I am not the President, but I feel justified in nicking this quote to describe the quite extraordinary journey that I have been on since coming to Bangladesh almost two years ago.

This blog is a catalogue, among other things, of the reasons for this quotation's resonance with me. On Friday, I got another one for the list.

Outside church, I was introduced to a friendly American chap, and we shot the breeze for a bit (while the monsoon breeze tried its hardest to shoot us back). We discussed the exotic strangeness of Bangladesh and compared it to other places we had been.

He had been to Afghanistan, he said, once upon a time, with the military. I have a few acquaintances and friends who are either civil servants or soldiers in that beautiful and ravaged part of the world, so I asked on the off-chance if he had spent any time in Kabul. Not much, he said. Oh, I said, casting around for the next question. What was your corps?

Oh, military intelligence, he said.

I defy any man raised on Hollywood spy flicks to respond maturely to this answer. My brain fell instantly into two halves - which one might as well name 'I dare not' and 'I would' - one possessed by a fascinated 8-year-old and filled with questions about real espionage, the other aware that polite conversation does not permit of asking questions which may elicit the response 'I can't tell you that, I'd have to kill you.'

I sat on my inner child and observed instead how nice that part of the world is and what a shame it is that it is the geopolitical equivalent of a clown car.

But internally, I was jumping up and down. I still can't believe, sometimes, that I live in a place like this, where I have conversations like this. Even my carefully-serious choice of topic led to a great conversation, and one which I can only really engage in because I've been lucky enough to go to Pakistan (Pakistan!) myself.

Of course, that's not why the boy within was having conniptions of joy. In my whole life, in York, in Bromsgrove, in Quinton, in Coventry, I have never once met a spy. Have now.

Dhaka is messy, dirty, exploitative, stressful, oppressive and the most difficult place I have ever lived.

Nonetheless. The day-to-day experience of my life, I tell you, has changed in many, many ways since taking this job, and I am a fool if I do not acknowledge and give thanks for the glorious, shining truth that I could be doing something elsewhere that is a lot less interesting than this.

I'm shocked - shocked, I say - to discover this is not genuine.

2011-08-25T06:29:00.005+01:00

The media market in Bangladesh is booming, thriving - a victory for international capitalism and the consumerisation of culture.

Except that the money probably isn't going to the people who make the media in question.

This isn't news - the bulk of the money made by a record or a film rarely goes back to the person who made it. But now, to the wobbly-chinned wrath of record executives in the West, with forgery-happy Asia as the major growth market for Western media, it's no longer only the artist missing out but the company as well. A profound shock to us all, and evidence that the world is crumbling around our very ears no doubt.

While it does (and with apologies for such a rambling introduction) here is a photo I took the other day of a piece of very professional-looking work which, still, I sense may not be entirely legit:

That's raised lettering, shiny ink, a proper forgery. And yet you'd think they could afford a spell-checker, or at least a second look at the case they were copying.

Asia is, in many ways, pleasingly rubbish.

Photos I wish I'd taken, part 1

2011-08-22T18:25:00.004+01:00

Driving the other day from A to B by way (in an unavoidable misfortune) of Dhaka's road system, I happened across a quite extraordinary scene.

In one way, it was completely, totally, pants-on-the-head, pencils-up-the-nose, I-am-from-London-a-small-village-close-to-the-capital-of-Mars-wibble insane.

In another way, it was utterly and entirely unsurprising, and just another image of Dhaka at work.

It is 5pm, and the roads are full, as people rush through the monsoon rain to get home in time to break their Ramadan fast. As you can imagine, the hour directly before 130 million people are allowed to eat after a 14-hour wait is one of unusually heightened road-use. Delays are not unexpected at such times, but my errand was one of importance, so I resigned myself to it.

I was not expecting, however, the sight of a police officer and a driver in the midst of a heated debate. The essence of the thing, as far as I could tell from three cars back (and through the sound of Dhaka's own ambient symphony, the sound of angry car horns), was that the driver wished to execute a u-turn to join the flow of traffic flowing in the opposite direction. The policeman, I divined, whilst sympathetic to the driver's desire to be at his house in the next ten minutes, had pointed out that the greater good demanded that he (the policeman) deny him (the driver) the right to turn his large car, stopping several lanes of traffic, all in a quest to drive through the barrier which he (the policeman) was guarding. A vigorous debate had clearly ensued.

Such discussions are the essence of citizenship in a democracy with the rule of law, and I was heartened to see it happening in Bangladesh as well.

Still and all the same, I think there was something characteristically Bangladeshi about the fact that the policeman was explaining how inconvenient such a move would be whilst the car was in situ; that is to say, while the bloody car was still blocking all the bloody traffic.

Ten minutes it took him to write out that ticket. Clear road beyond.

Dhaka is a wonderful opportunity for anger-management.

An insight into the day job....

2011-08-21T10:43:00.004+01:00

Just wrote a story up for the work blog. Which, incidentally, can be found at http://womenofaction.tumblr.com, should you be interested in what I spend some of my days doing.

I'm cross-posting it here because Bangladesh is flooded at the moment, and that's not something which readily translates. But it's shocking. That there at the top of the page is a picture of someone's roof.

It begs the question - how can you hope to make people's lives better, when there literally isn't enough space for people to live as the waters rise?

That's the sharp end of work like this, and I forget it at my peril.

The story is here.

Remains

2011-08-17T05:44:00.008+01:00

This article from the BBC has got me excited.

Once, I was a history student, and history is hugely important to me. History contains great beauty and great ugliness; and I struggle to see beauty in a place without understanding how it came to be the way it seems to be.

The search for beauty in Dhaka is one which I have conducted rather hopelessly in the past - it is difficult to see past dusty roads and horrendous stench to the human beauty and dignity of those who live here.

It is, ironically, quite difficult to get a sense that people live here. As I've said before, I rarely meet someone in this city of 20 million people who will say they are from Dhaka - they just work and sleep here. Home is somewhere else.

This leaches into the city in a way which is quite creepy for a historian from the UK. I am used to seeing constant architectural reminders that, whatever my society is today, once it was different - and I think that is hugely important. Old buildings are a reminder that, as immovable as the current way of things may seem, human beings have been around for longer, and have always mattered more, than their culture. Cultures change; people remain. Our day-to-day lives seem puny and meaningless within the grand structures which shape our lives - what jobs we can get, which people we may marry, who we can talk to and to whom we may not. Yet we are more than they are. To repeat: rules change, and we remain.

In my part of Dhaka, there are no old buildings. Or, rather, an 'old' building is one built 20 years ago; even finished buildings seem somehow antiquated and alienated from the cutting-edge of things, which is constantly tearing down and rebuilding, frantic to stay on the cusp of the present.

This isn't about style; Doric pillars are not necessarily more inherently humanising than concrete high-rise. That's a different question. Neither is this about obsessively preserving the past, a sort of global humanistic NIMBYism. We move forward, and that's good; but if we don't remember where we are from and what we have done, we understand ourselves less well, and sacrifice our chance to progress.

This is about the fact that in Dhaka there are few reminders that culture is made for and by humanity, not the other way round. And I honestly believe that this is one of the reasons for the ease of human degradation in this place. High glass skyscrapers claim lives as they go up and more when they fall down, and in between they stand as enormous monoliths of corporate importance, dwarfing the lives and the significance of the puny humans who live in their shadow.

Yet the buildings will fall down, and people will still be here. And I have struggled with the fact that there is nothing in Dhaka to suggest to people that they might be more important than large banks or import/export companies. There is no visible history, just tall buildings with shallow foundations. Yet people have been here for millenia. Understanding that is important, because (to labour a point) people are important.

(Incidentally, this is an idea laid out with a good deal more clarity - and scholarship - by a professor of mine from York University, the estimable hero of history-punk, Guy Halsall. You can read it here.)

It's not as if historical buildings which survive (big, brick, palaces and mansions many of them) will represent the lives of the poor; that still seems too much to ask. All I'm hoping for is that they might indicate that once, a culture held sway here which has now almost completely changed or passed away; that things change, and people's descendants remain.

So the BBC story is truly heartening to me, even if it does, touchingly, claim that 'it’s dirty. It’s messy. It’s crowded, but that is part of its charm.' (Yeah mate, live here for a month or two and see how charmed you feel).

Nonetheless, the story it tells is marvellous. A group of empowered Bangladeshis - architects - want to appreciate and witness the remains of their history before it is torn down.

Even better, they run walks around the buildings of the old city. I've been crying out for something like this the whole time I've been here. I hope there's a walk soon.

I'll let you know how I get on. In the mean time, I urge you to go and see the whole slideshow here: all these photos were taken from there.

[EDIT: apparently the slideshow is 'BBC international content', and isn't accessible from the UK. Apologies, fellow Brits, for teasing you with it...it really is ace. Send them an email and see if you can get them to change the access, though I doubt it.]

Surprise Holiday

2011-08-15T03:35:00.004+01:00

Today is a public holiday, and thus, I am a fool.

Bangladesh has more public holidays than the UK. In fact, I understand that by law each office must observe at least one public holiday for each religious grouping in Bangladesh - a surprisingly evenhanded rule in a country defined by a single religious majority. How many Hindu holidays - even in secular Britain - are observed by law? Yet I dare you to try taking Whitsun holiday off anyone (and does it strike anyone else as odd to celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit and the beginning of the rebirth of humankind with a 3-day traffic fiesta?)

In Bangladesh, even Buddhists get their day - Buddha Purnima - and, though we have no Buddhist members of staff (to my knowledge), our office observes this day. Well, you can't break the law, can you?

Of course, most holidays are Muslim, and there was never going to be merely the minimum observation there. And holidays in Islam are defined, not in terms of the solar calendar (ie, a new year every 365 days), but by the lunar one, wherein dates move by 11 days or so each year. Even then, though, the exact date is decided only upon seeing the moon - which means that you have to keep a close eye on when, precisely, the office will be closed, lest you (I) sacrifice a lie-in, a loss that may only be regretted, never reversed.

Today, however, I very nearly went into the office for one of the fixed dates. Oops. And it is no small occasion. Today is Jatiyo Shok Dibosh, the national day of mourning for the death of Liberation War leader - and daddy to current the Prime Minister - Mujibur Rahman. You can read about him here - though as the Economist notes, there is an incipient cult of personality being built around the memory and image of Bongabondhu, the friend of Bengal - and an angry resistance-by-defamation from the current opposition - so take Wikipedia with a pinch of salt. (Incidentally, to my knowledge there are no objective histories of Bangladesh, and that is one of the great tragedies of this hurting nation.)

However, this nation certainly does have a lot to mourn about its birth, where intramural fighting and violence seems to have been commonplace. My prayer today is that out of this pain - still only 40 years old - something finally worthy of the Bangladeshi people in all their resourcefulness can emerge.

Free alcohol!

2011-08-10T08:07:00.006+01:00

One of the most common experiences in international life is explaining your culture to other people. Usually by invitation, but occasionally when someone you know is talking such egregious nonsense about your home that you simply have to correct them. Under which heading I include 'Mary Poppins' and 'U571', amongst many other crimes.

One common perception of Brits amongst, particularly, Americans, is that we are all either frighteningly erudite officer-class-types or drunken hooligans, and that football matches resemble the Charge of the Light Brigade on cheap cider. As a football fan, I spend a significant amount of time refuting such barbarism.

But events of the last few days, and particularly this piece of audio from the BBC, make me wonder if the perception of Britain abroad is so far from the truth. Perhaps what people think of us globally - confident, violent, horrifyingly dissolute, pretty countryside though - is just the same sort of image you get from looking at a picture from far away, where nuance fades and all you see are the really big truths.

I mean, seriously:

Girl 1: Everyone was just on a riot, going mad like, chucking things, chucking bottles...
Girl 2: Breaking stuff...
Girl 1: (cont)It was good though.
Girl 2: Breaking into shops...yeah (happily) it was madness....
Girl 1: (cont) It was good though, it was good fun
Girl 2: Yeah, course it is!
BBC Reporter: So you're drinking a bottle of rose wine -
Girl 1: At half nine in the morning, yeah!
Both together: Free alcohol! (laughter)
Reporter: And you've been drinking all night?
Both: Yeah...
Girl 2: Like, (firmly) it's the government's fault.
Girl 1: Yeah.
Girl 2: I dunno...Conservatives.
Girl 1: Yeah, whatever, who it is, I dunno.
Girl 2: It's not even a riot, it's showing the police we can do what we want.
Girl 1: Yeah, that's what it's all about, showing the police we can do what we want, and now we have.
Reporter: So do you reckon it'll go on tonight?
Girl 2: Yeah, hopefully.
Girl 1: Hopefully.
Reporter: But these are, like, local people. I mean, why is it targeting local people, and...your own people?
Girl 2: Because it's the rich people. It's the rich people, the people who have got businesses, and that's why all of this has happened, because of the rich people. So we're just showing the rich people we can do what we want.

I am still proud to be British. But if we don't ask ourselves how the hell we came to this, we are not worthy of ourselves. Given our track record, that's a pretty bleak conclusion.

Cities on Fire

2011-08-09T07:45:00.003+01:00

It's due to a culture of excessive entitlement and/or macho violence. It's the Tories' fault. It's Labour's fault. It's a gift for the Police to take away your liberties. It's the anarchists. Not it's not, this isn't anarchism, it's anarchy. Turkish people stand against violence for the whole community. Turkish people are beating black people. The Army have moved in. The Army haven't moved in. The Army should move in. Cash converter will have a bump in profits in the next week (ho ho ho).

What the hell has happened? And who is to blame?

This is not a riot about something any more. When was the last time Scousers and Brummies (both of which I count in my family) cared about community policing issues in London? Or vice versa?

No, this is different, dumber, more mindless. People are in danger, and it looks like it is almost for fun.

Why are looters taking tellies and stereo sets, playstation 3's and iPods? In the teeth of an ongoing global depression, why the hell are people still after a more complete home entertainment experience?

I am terrified that it might be because this is all we have been told our lives are good for - the accumulation of possessions.

The prosperity of the last 20 years - which has defined my expectations of how society functions - was lovely, and not false. But it was a veil, to be drawn over our ugly features; and I fear that they may have become more ugly with neglect.

Why are these riots all about violent acquisitiveness? Surely this is a no-brainer. When your closest, most dwelt-upon concern is having a bigger TV, who wouldn't want to get one for free? Once, we marched and voted and, yes, rioted in response to catastrophic injustice. Now we do it because we just want stuff.

When the country is booming and consumption is growing, everyone - especially the government - is very happy. What do you do when the country is no longer booming, and people's desire to consume grows and grows still?

Our public discourse is no help. We are now addicted to following the story, whatever the story may be at the time. And stories depend upon having goodies and baddies, upon giving people something to hate.

Society is no longer made up of actual groups actually interacting across actual boundaries, and experiencing peace (or conflict) based on how well they deal with difference. It is made up of individual relationships struggling to take place against an invented background of massive, alienating, proscriptive, angry noise.

The confusion on Twitter has reflected this - a lot of panic, a lot of self-righteousness and a lot of snarky blame. Not that Twitter is the problem - Twitter is the id of the nation. Can we honestly be surprised that such a culture as ours birthed such violence as this?

To draw a comparison, it is very easy for a marriage to look happy when there's enough money knocking around. Just live in separate houses and never talk. But when you're faced with the threats of lack and uncertainty - when you can no longer get the thing you value the most - that's when you find out how wide the gap between you has grown. Turns out that at the moment it's pretty damn big in the UK, and we're all surprised.

Unless, I suspect, we actually live or work in these places.

And there's another element to this, an uncomfortable one.

The British strength - and the British weakness - is to 'keep calm and carry on'. We are hardy, stoic and not easily shaken. But we prize unobstructed lives as much as anything else in the world; which means we are perfectly happy to quietly tolerate a nonspecific, massive volume of wrong at home and abroad, as long as we never have to interact with it.

We know money isn't everything, that possessiveness is creepy and life lived for consumption is hollow; but that is the option presented to us by our society, and finding another way is too inconvenient. We know we're hurting ourselves by not relating to each other very much, but Assassin's Creed is calling and the sofa is terribly comfortable. We in the middle class knew that some people in some places were not enjoying the same boom we were; we got into massive debt anyway. And 3 years on, the slump isn't going away. Is it possible we mortgaged a very important part of our souls?

Certain people are to blame for this damage, and justice should be done. But I think if non-rioting Britain just cleans up and goes back to work, we are denying our part in creating a society which reinforces and spreads the message that all you need is stuff, and people don't matter in the slightest.

Blame is not to be equally shared, but unless we leave Britain forever, each of us is responsible for how it looks.

But this morning, I promise you, the commentary doesn't matter. What does matter is that people are going out to clean things up together. The 'Big Society' in action, you might say. But they're not doing it to prove David Cameron right, and they're not doing it to prove him wrong, and they're certainly not doing it because of his leadership. They're doing it because they care about the place they live, and they're doing it together, and that is a beautiful thing.

I can only pray that they will continue to care about it together when the glass is out of the street. Sadly, that would be a very unBritish thing indeed.

If you are in any of these places, please check www.riotcleanup.com and see where you can help. Then tomorrow, let us, please, continue to give a shit about each other.

Governments, footballers and philosophers (oh my)

2011-08-09T07:03:00.001+01:00

A couple of links for today, one from either side of my haphazardly strewn spectrum of interests...

One, on Bangladesh and the government and anniversary thereof, by the Economist:

'Bangladeshis might make more of their countrys birthday if their government wasn't so busy manipulating it'.

(Also a rather upset-sounding reply from the Government of Bangladesh here. For the record, and contrary to this letter and some of the comments, I didn't see anyone celebrating any harder last Independence Day because it was 40 years. But perhaps that's a very Western expectation.)

The other, from some genius of composition at the Independent, taking liberties with the reputations of many dead philosophers to preview the new football season, and being pretty damn funny about it, here.

On returning to Dhaka

2011-08-07T06:15:00.010+01:00

Upsides:

Friends, old and new
Sleeping in the same bed for more than 4 nights (re: the last two, no juxtaposition intended, you scamps)
Enveloping warmth (for a few days there's always the novelty of a tropical climate)
Bhaji
A lazy afternoon at a club swimming pool
Genuine happiness at seeing colleagues again, asking after families and other simple wonders of cross-cultural relationships.

Downsides:

Nonsensical traffic diversions, leading to:
Epic traffic jams, which contribute to:
Heroically polluted air, meaning:
Irritated eyes,
Endless sneezing,
Shortness of breath, and
Interrupted sleep, the latter of which is not entirely helped by
The enthusiastic re-blossoming of stress-related injuries.

And the promise of greater political instability to come, with all the horrendous structural and physical violence that will do to the good people of this nation.

Still and all the same, it is nice to be back.

Detritus

2011-08-04T07:23:00.003+01:00

Back in Bangladesh, to a new cocktail of emotions and a familiar mixture of odours. It is, and I've thought carefully about this in the last 48 hours, good to be back. Praise God.

In the last 5 weeks I have slept in the same bed for a maximum of 4 nights, and usually only for one. I have seen a lot of awesome people, and I regret nothing; and yet, I have left behind me, across continents and timezones, a haphazard nuisance of personal effects:

Item: 1 crystal anti-perspirant (probably in Southfields)
Item: 1 waterproof jacket (probably in Canada)
Item: 1 camera case (probably in an Enterprise hire car)
Item: 1 computer charger (probably in Southfields)
Item: Countless socks.

And that’s not to mention all the stuff I forgot to buy. Logistics may have got away from me a bit at the end there.

The socks are particularly frustrating. Only the computer charger will be easy to replace in Bangladesh at a price that's on speaking terms with reasonable; tax and other, um, miscellaneous import charges *coughBRIBEScough* make e-commerce a bit of a fairytale.

But a moments reflection will probably reveal that, if all I'm worrying about now are socks, then I am probably doing pretty well. Thus, from 3:50;

Thank you

2011-08-02T14:27:00.001+01:00

I am phenomenally grateful to everyone who reads this blog. Thank you for being here, even if it's briefly. Until recently, though, I haven't really known a lot about who is reading.

However, I have recently discovered the 'Stats' tab on the Blogger dashboard, and it has quickly come to be my primary source of recreation. That's not quite true.

I learn that I have significant readership in the UK (expected but gratifying) and in the US (less expected and very pleasing) - but also in far more out of the way locations. None of the numbers are impressive at all - I'm certain I could probably fit my whole regular readership into my front room - but their locations would make it a fascinating meeting if I did.

Germany and The Netherlands have given given me a couple of page-hits each this week, which is lovely, and guten tag and goedemorgen to you both. I'd like to wish a hearty salaam aleikum to the three people from the UAE who dropped by, and to ask the 20% of you who are still using Internet Explorer to switch, for the love of your sanity, to something better.

Over the life of this blog, things are even better. Apparently I have been visited by several intrepid netizens from behind the great firewall of China, though I'm certain that mentioning this will mean it will never happen again. South Korea and, predictably, Pakistan have made appearances, and that's very pleasing.

Lest I get too carried away with all of this, these figures don't distinguish between real eyes and spambots on the search for foolishly-posted email addresses - there are a few source URLs which have 'Russian spam service' written all over them - and there is a caution when I go to see which posts have been most popular. First of all, my hits go up massively whenever I'm tweeted by one or two friends, which means their readership and social clout far outstrips my own appeal.

Secondly, after a year and a half in Bangladesh, trying my damnedest to write down this extraordinary, broad-spectrum assault on my senses, by far my most-read post is one from years before I came here at all.

I posted it when I lived in Coventry with some friends, and was trying to articulate our shared vision for Christian community and artistic creation, and I titled it with a quotation from the ancient Christian mystic St. Ireneus. It's an absolute cracker - 'the glory of God is man fully alive' - and a few people a day Google it and get pointed in this direction.

I have no objection to this. I'm flattered and blessed that anyone reads this blog at all, and writing it would be valuable to me even if I had no audience.

But I do. If you read this blog, you have made me a gift of your time, and for that I am very grateful. Whether this is your first time here or your fiftieth, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy it.

(Incidentally: I apologise for any intrusion you may feel at the collection of these statistics; it's Google's doing, not mine. If you're worried about your privacy online, I recommend Tor, which is a fantastic and trustworthy tool for anonymising your browsing. It's been invaluable to me as I've got round Bangladesh's occasional country-wide internet censorship. But of course, viewing anything harmful online will, y'know, harm you even if no-one sees you do it.)

Picnic

2011-07-31T08:50:00.000+01:00

BBQ, Bangla style. Tasty, but (yes) still fish curry.

Looking Really Good

2011-07-29T06:38:00.001+01:00

Further funny t-shirts seen on my walk to work:

A man whose chest demanded, in big white capital letters on a bright green background, to know WHO ATE ALL THE PIES

A suspiciously high number of Dimmu Borgir fans

A man whom I could have hugged on a homesick day for bearing the legend: 'CUSHTY: Trotters International Traders' around a picture of a yellow Robin Reliant van.

Beautiful.

This Post Does Not Contain A Jay-Z Pun

2011-07-27T03:59:00.002+01:00

My language skills are still very very limited indeed. However, there are certain words which are so commonly necessary in Bangladesh that you acquire them with great speed. Turn left, turn right, go, come, look, yes, no, I don't like fishbones, the real minimal essentials for day-to-day life.

Bangladesh being Bangladesh, another of these indispensable words is the word for 'problem'. Shomosha, to be used in conjunction with a growing list of nouns - car, stomach, computer, water, feet, electricity, crocodile, and so on.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you've heard, Bangla accents make little distinction between the voiceless palato-alveolar fricative and the voiceless alveolar grooved fricative.

Sorry. I mean there isn't much of a difference between 'sh' and 's' when you speak in a Bangla accent, unless you are speaking in an exceedingly posh manner.

The Bangla word for 'samosa' is properly pronounced 'chomocha', but again, without Bangla RP those 'ch' sounds are very very sssssssssibilant.

[Those last paragraphs brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia: Making Me Look Smarter Than I Am Since 2005].

You begin to see the problem. Unless I approach a street vendor and address him like a Bangla Mr Cholmondely-Warner, I run the very real risk of having a conversation that goes like this:

'Hello, peacebewithyou.'
'Andalsowithyou. What can I get you?'
'I'll have four problems, please.'
'Uh....what?'
'Four problems, thanks very much. Oh no wait, hang on, I have friends coming over, so that should be ten problems.'
'Uh....'
'No need to warm them up for me.'
The vendor is silent. So, in a genuine attempt to make a connection, I plough on:
'Yes, my word, I do enjoy a good problem. Tasty tasty problems. I like to share them with my friends at parties.'

At which point he, not unreasonably, looks at me as though I've lost my marbles.

Monsoon

2011-07-24T08:22:00.002+01:00

It's monsoon season.

I guarantee that hundreds of thousands of people living on riverbanks and seashores in Bangladesh will lose their houses from underneath them this summer.

They don't live there because they're stupid; they live there because they have nowhere else to go - no money or power to move to a less vulnerable place.

If you pray, pray for them.

Anarchy in the BD?

2011-07-22T11:00:00.005+01:00

A final thought on social contracts.

It's a bit bleak of me to assume that, because Bangladesh doesn't have a UK-style social contract, in which all people are equal before the law and there are norms of behaviour which exist for the good of everyone, that it doesn't have one at all.

That's nonsense. With no social contract at all, the place would be lost in anarchy. And it's not.

There are some remarkable social contracts about - the millimetrically fine-tuned conventions about whether a car accelerates to close a gap, or allows pedestrians to walk through, for example.

This is terrifying, both as a driver and a pedestrian - crossing-signs are not respected, so cars nudge their way through the crowds of people who run across intersections whenever they get a chance. The way you show your intent to move isn't by using an indicator, it's by moving - usually into a space coveted by someone else. When you're in a car, this risk panel dents. When you're not, you risk being flung up into the air by an over-assertive driver with an itchy accelerator. So when do cars stop and when do they continue? There are rules that govern movements like that.

That's a social contract. But it's a pretty rubbish one. Much of the time, it doesn't work. Why put up with people being injured every day? The horrifyingly common car-crashes on major roads (which I have mentioned before) speak of norms that aren't doing very much good. But they exist, even if they're ineffective and undesirable.

Bangladesh isn't in a state of anarchy. But it's in a pretty poor state; and I repeat that one of the major parts of the problem is a culture amongst ruling elites to seek self-enrichment more than the common good.

Social Contract

2011-07-20T07:07:00.003+01:00

Many of the problems I write about in Bangladesh revolve around a single problem.

There isn't much of a social contract here.

A social contract can mean many things, but one thing it doesn't mean is a piece of paper with everyone's signature on it. Rather, it's the often-unspoken list of norms which shape the accommodations that people make for each other all the time.

A good example is traffic. Let's say you're in the UK, driving in a hurry to get somewhere. You pull up at a set of traffic lights on red at a crossing to a big road. They are barring your way. They are, right now, slowing you down.

But in 30 seconds you know they'll change, and then they'll be slowing someone else down for a bit. And you know that, in so doing, they'll allow you to cross the road without being hit in the side by a lorry. So you respect the rule.

You give up your immediate self-interest not only because you don't want to get hit, but because in the long run, the fewer car crashes there are, the quicker you are able to move about.

In a society the size of a country, these laws don't get respected on their own. Governments make rules or laws which make people more likely to choose the greater good. The government makes traffic law, so one of the reasons you don't cross the road is because you don't want a ticket. But that is only one of the reasons. There is a sense that, in observing certain rules, everyone's life gets easier.

Life in the UK is littered with examples like this; where people accept short-term inconvenience for to avoid longer-term idiocies. There is a reason we are world-champion queuers; an orderly queue gets everyone through the Post Office much quicker than an indisciplined ruck at Cashier Number Four.

However, our willingness to surrender our self-interest depends upon our trust that everyone else will do the same. Otherwise, why not just push your way to the front of the queue?

Which brings me to Bangladesh, where I frequently have to manhandle people to maintain my rightful place in a queue, and crossing the road is like playing Frogger with your eyes closed.

For reasons which are not clear to me, there often seems to be no social contract at all in Bangladesh. Traffic waits till it sees a gap, then accelerates, regardless of the presence of people or traffic lights; because there is no guarantee that the system in place will reward you if you wait your turn.

The internet debacle I wrote about a while ago is another good example. Plans which would make sense, if everyone had the aim of improving things overall, fall completely to pieces when people have no reason to seek anything other than their own wellbeing.

This is not theoretical, in Bangladesh. From healthcare to education to employment to justice, time and again examples appear which demonstrate that without looking after number one, you will end up, not only behind everyone else, but actively disempowered, and in danger of falling into some of the worst poverty on earth.

Your own wellbeing, in Bangladesh, isn't just about selfish laziness. It may be the only thing ensuring you stay alive. Money is might, and might is right.

This is why good governance is crucial. The only thing which can convince people that they shouldn't lie, cheat, steal and kill to get ahead - at everyone else's expense - is the idea that they can ensure their safety without doing those things. And only a government can guarantee that.

Or, to be more precise, only a government which follows its own rules. This is why corruption is horrendous, and the biggest threat to development which exists today; the thing which, one way or another, keeps millions in a poverty they should not have to experience.

To be rich in Bangladesh is to be able to flout the law. And to be foreign is to be treated as rich - so, to my shame, I don't actually have to manhandle people in queues as often as you might think. People in shops often refuse to serve others before they have served me.

And so people's lives get a little more inconvenient, people's business dealings become a little more slow, and Bangladeshi public life becomes a little more unjust.

Money talks, even when I don't want it to. And if I was in any way inclined to profit from my status here, I could. People do. If people can buy their way out of the consequences of their actions, they will. And so corruption, even in the smallest part, changes society - until law means nothing and money means everything.

That's not how it is in Bangladesh. But it often seems like it's pretty close.

Afghanis-ban

2011-07-17T07:55:00.005+01:00

Halfway up a hill in the far south-east of Bangladesh, someone has something they would like to say.

The problem with cross-cultural puns is that you have no idea what it is.

I hesitate to suggest that they were advocating the banning of Afghanistan in toto; but who can know. 'Abolish Thatcher' graffiti was popular once, and was about as likely.

Perhaps it is a pun on the presence of the Taliban in Afghanistan? But if so, what on earth is it doing on a crumbling concrete wall on the broken path up to a tourist lookout spot in southern Bangladesh? It's not a Muslim area, and even in majority-Muslim Dhaka I've never heard Afghanistan mentioned.

It could be that in Bangladesh, the word 'ban' means 'forest', and this was taken in the Bandarban, or 'monkey forest'. Implying a correlation between 'Afghan' and 'monkey'.

So. Linguistically absurd protest, esoteric geopolitical commentary, or subtle racism?

And why on a hill near Burma, on a path no-one uses?

To repeat a theme of this blog - human beings are really weird, and that is very pleasing indeed.

Internot

2011-07-15T06:37:00.003+01:00

This is probably one for the development geeks amongst you. Public provision of infrastructure for privately-provided utilities, to be otherwise entitled Why My Internet Connection Fails All The Time.

The internet connection in my house depends upon a wire. In my part of town, there are hundreds of such wires, nested and bundled and twisted around each other like so much fibre-optic spaghetti, thus:

These wires are owned by private companies, one of which provides me with the internet connection to my house.

As you can probably imagine, they are not safe. They frequently fall down, hanging low across the road in dolorous, deadly loops, blocking roads and tangling around wheels (or necks). Noting this, the government decided to do something about it.

They dug up roads and disrupted traffic, and put in place pipelines under the Dhaka streets, to take the wires underground. The relocation of the wires themselves, they left to the companies which own them.

And in some quarters, there are people who will tell you that this is precisely as it should have been. Government builds infrastructure; companies use it to provide and improve services. Margaret Thatcher and the IMF will both tell you that private companies provide better utility prices and services to consumers than governments do, and I admire them for their simple faith in the invisible hand.

Unfortunately, this is a wonderful example of why they are often wrong. Particularly when they're talking about developing countries, which is, um, the IMF's job.

The internet companies saw no reason to spend big money moving their network ten feet downwards. Public wellbeing, as far as they are concerned, is the government's problem, not theirs. So they didn't.

In response to this, rather than (say) establishing a charging system for aboveground lines, or engaging with companies to encourage them to move the wires, what do you suppose the government did?

Top marks to any Bangladesh-watchers who answered using the word 'scissors'.

The government started slicing through the wires, reasoning (no doubt) that companies would see the error of their ways and spend the repair money, since they now had no choice, on burying the cables.

Of course, it is not so. The companies merely put the wires back up again. So the government cut them again.

All of which leads to the forehead-spankingly insane situation I currently see on my way to work, where some men are cutting cables, and a few yards down the road some other men are putting them back up again. It's as if Kafka decided to get into public administration for real; and of course, it increases the number of hanging wires which might whip me in the face of a morning.

What does this have to do with development theory? Well, if there is no sense of shared interest between business and government, there is no reason for them to trust one another. And if they don't trust one another, they can't adequately fulfil the role they need to in the IMF's dream of market efficiency.

So if the internet company sees no reason to trust the government to keep the pipe maintained (which they don't), and the government sees no reason to incentivise the companies to bury their cables, then they aren't working together, they're working against each other.

And out come the secateurs, and bang goes my internet connection.

To sum up. The IMF gave its privatisaton advice so I'd get a better service. And the government acted to improve my safety. But because there is no social contract in Bangladesh, I have ended up more endangered, and without a sodding internet connection.

This is bananas.

A Confession of Road Rage

2011-07-12T05:43:00.003+01:00

Driving to meet some friends the other day, my progress was arrested by a man walking happily in the middle of the road. It was a rare lull in rush hour, and there were several cars speeding up behind me, so he was in a lot of danger. I beeped my horn, but gently, as one who has suffered.

He didn't respond. I beeped again.

He looked round with irritation, as though I had done something completely incomprehensible and unwarrantably rude, and walked slowly to the side of the road.

I drove on, negotiating the pitted and flooded road surface as quickly as I thought was safe.

Not quickly enough. A few hundred yards down the road, another car pulled out from behind me as though to overtake.

I moved over, but as the driver passed me, he slowed so we were driving down this backstreet parallel with each other. He leaned over, looked at me and addressed me in Bangla through the passenger window.

'What's the problem?'
'What?!'
'What's the problem?!'

I took a breath.

'Are you quite sane? You want to talk about problems? You are DRIVING on the WRONG SIDE of the ROAD and if you hit any of the many pedestrians ambling around here, you will kill them, swerve, kill yourself and then in dying kill me as well? Is this the optimum moment for a tête-a-tête? Have you LOST your damn MIND?'

Of course I didn't. I don't speak Bangla nearly well enough to be acidly sarcastic in it, which is just as well.

What I actually said was, 'What? Go away! GO AWAY!'

But, let me tell you, I said it crossly.

Written on the Walls

2011-07-10T07:27:00.000+01:00

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Painted on a wall in a community in the South-East of Bangladesh, which we walked through while we were on holiday. It was poor.

Either God is a myth, a fairytale of wishful thinking, in which case the presence of words like this in places like that is a sick joke; or we worship a God who really does deserve each of these names, and one day poverty will have no meaning.

I'm nailing my flag to that mast, I tell you. Hope is not lost.

Putting on a Voice

2011-07-08T09:38:00.003+01:00

When I was 20, I went to America. I was visiting a friend who had been working in Massachusetts for a year; I felt (I said, nauseatingly, at the time) a responsibility to teach her how to be British again.

Anyway. I landed at Boston airport, and was to catch a bus down Cape Cod, to the town of Chatham, where she was to meet me.

I arrived, delirious with jetlag, and asked a man near the buses where the bus to Chatham left from. He looked at me in bewilderment.

'Where?'
'Chatham.'
'What?'
I squinted with tiredness. Had I landed in some other Boston? Had the unimaginative Pilgrims, centuries before, founded Boston then fallen out again and emigrated west to found yet another settlement with a stolen name?
'Chatham?'
He looked at me as if I was irretrievably stupid for a second, then understanding dawned.
'Oh! CHADDAM. You want Chaddam, right?'

Of course. Silly of me.

If, that morning, you had asked me and this guy (who was trying his best with my tired and very foreign accent) if we both spoke English, we'd have said yes. Yet a simple conversation was derailed by differences in how we thought English words are correctly pronounced.

Bringing me to Bangladesh. I have several conversations each day in which I adopt what must, to an observer, seem a condescending and pidgin version of my mother tongue. And the accent I employ must make me sound like I'm doing a Bernard Manning routine.

But it really does make a difference to how I'm understood, and that is the only thing on the table. I communicate. Unless the manner of my communication compromises my message, I'll talk in whatever way gets the meaning across with the minimum fuss, including patois, silly (and condescending) though it may make me feel.

And of course, no-one here gives a damn that I'm speaking in a way which causes my liberal conscience to twitch. They're probably giving silent thanks that I'm finally pronouncing things properly.

It's fascinating to me how letter-sounds, when transplanted in one language into a context where the mother tongue works differently, flourish into sounds which are completely other than they started out. Though of course, with the English language, you'll have a hard time claiming one accent as more authentic than another (the London of Chaucer? The Warwickshire of Shakespeare? The Scotch of Rabbie Burns?!).

It is my salvation that English is spoken in most places in the world, including Bangladesh (and indeed America), and I actually quite enjoy how elastic it is. Until I'm fluent in Bangla, I'll speak whichever English is best understood.

Kuakata (Cyclone Sidr)

2011-07-05T07:18:00.001+01:00

Don’t shake
Dear child, cold and scared
Of what the night will bring
Of what the next horizon sneaks in while you sleep
Don’t shake. I make no promise
But that I will stay awake, so you can dream
And be alive before the sun
Before the sun

The light died; the sea sits
Hiding evil violence behind the secret line
I know; you know. I wish it had not come
Eight years is too short a time to live
Before betrayal by the sky.
Don’t shake below the ceiling’s rattle
There is so much cause for fear – it is a fire
You will never need to feed. So starve it well, and sleep
And wake. I’ll die so you do not while you are gone.

If you don’t leave
Your cries stuck in your throat, if you
Breathe to break them loose
So they will die out loud
If you don’t fear, and
While fearing walk past nightmares
This village has no tales for what you’ll be.
Don’t shake. Even if these filthy waves
And hammer-air destroy you,
Accidents will not become you. You are more than they are; son
Don’t shake. I’ll see the night out if
You wake to greet the day.

Never Written Down Before

2011-07-03T06:58:00.006+01:00

This guy blows me away.

He's a pre-school teacher in a project in western Bangladesh, a partnership between my peeps, FH, and SIL.

SIL do phenomenal work developing alphabets for ethno-linguistic groups and tribes who have never had their own language written down before. We went with them into villages of two people-groups who had generally been ignored and forgotten by the ethnic-majority mainstream. FH ran our savings and learning group model, which you can read about here or here; on top of that, we started pre-schools.

If children start learning in their mother tongue, their success in future education - whether in their mother tongue, or the majority language - is transformed. I mean, transformed. And education is as close as we get to a magic solution to relieving the poverty of the poorest.

If parents grow up illiterate, they grow up knowing that they lack a skill which many others have. They feel their presence at the bottom of a social pyramid, assume that they are there because they are stupid or incapable, and stay there. This hopelessness, tragically, is passed on to their children; because you cannot teach a child about potential and wide horizons when you have never known them yourself.

When you grow up thinking in a language that no-one else cares about, the effect of this is compounded. For generations, these people have been left on the outside of Bangladeshi society.

SIL helped them develop an alphabet. Together we ran a pre-school. And this guy is the teacher of that pre-school.

The village is dusty and closely-cramped, so that the most can be made out of the surrounding fields. When I visited, I was welcomed into the dusty space between the houses where the lessons take place, and children ran around me with excitement. Their teacher smiled.

‘We had no documents. People used to say, “if your language is real, where are your books?”’ He held up one of the story books that have been developed with the new written Koda language. ‘Now we have them.’

The children sat around as he told them the story of a bird and a fox. The story is called ‘Koda Songs’, and the community wrote it themselves. The bird and the fox debate their differences, and decide that one can sing, the other can howl, without harming the other.

Before I left, my friend offered to have the children sing a song that the community had written. As their children sang, some parents translated the words for me.

Come on, boys and girls, men and women
Sleep no more! Wake up! And read.
When are you going to read?
Are you happy in life? If you read
You are happy. You have a name.

Some days, Bangladesh is difficult or inconveniencing or annoying. But some days you get to see something utterly astonishing, and it is worth it.

Some days, this job just takes my breath away and I am so thankful to God to be doing it. I'd praise him with instruments if I could play them; I can't, so I'll praise him here.

The Smart-Arse Guide To Not Paying Bribes

2011-07-01T15:46:00.000+01:00

This post at The Economist is very pleasing to me indeed.

In it, the correspondent details how to get around policeman who stop you in developing countries and demand your driving licence or kindly offer you the option of paying an on-the-spot 'fine' (coughBRIBEcough) to drive on with licence un-sequestered.

Click through to read how, but I have to say that this infuriation with petty officialdom rings fondly true with me, and I love the judo-throw intelligence of the response.

Of course, there are two sides to every coin, and the man in the uniform who has been sent to sit in a hot metal box beside a nothing highway is probably there because he isn't powerful enough to be posted somewhere influential - and thus needs the money.

I'm still not paying, though. I might get one of those licences, just for the lulz.

I Paid No Bribes

2011-06-29T05:56:00.000+01:00

There's a website in India that's been getting a bit of exposure in the UK recently, called 'ipaidabribe.com'. On it, you do just that - say that you paid a bribe. You can read about it here or here.

It's based in India, and aimed at shaming Indian authorities into cracking down on corrupt public officials. People report the bribes they have paid (still an offence in India). In the long-term, perhaps it will flush this horrible practice out from the realm of 'everyone knows but nobody cares'. In the short-term, they can at least find out what sort of money they should be paying for certain services which the government claims to provide for free.

I sympathise with the plight of the Indians who suffer this way; the situation is similar in Bangladesh, though (never having been to India) I can't really draw any deep comparisons.

However, when I try to imagine such a site taking off in Bangladesh, I just can't picture it. Perhaps in India there is more of a tradition of non-aligned political dissent; in Bangladesh, any national-level political action seems to happen firmly and only under the aegis of political elites (as with the recent general strikes).

But I have a sad feeling in my gut that, in Bangladesh, a site called 'ipaidabribe.com' would be about as noteworthy as a site called 'hottoday.com' or 'powercutagain.com'. You paid a bribe? So what? You might as well say 'I saw a beggar today'. It's part of life.

I can step round a lot of this stuff because I'm foreign (and all my government paperwork is done with dedication and great patience by a man who refuses to pay bribes, and instead sits in the relevant government office until they give him what he should get for free, for free).

I do wish something like that could take off here, though. The Bangladeshi people, generally, are ace; but the common practices that exist here make everything so much slower, and make poverty so much more widespread than it needs to be.

Product-Labelling in Bangladesh: Continued

2011-06-26T06:49:00.002+01:00

Life without an advertising standards agency:

Lest you should be worried that there were bad things lurking in the little soily chocolatesque pellets. It is not so. Be at peace. There are good things in the cereal. The sticker says so.

No, Henry Kissinger.

2011-06-24T12:57:00.000+01:00

A meeting was held the other day with some other organisations. The man leading the day did it with passion, energy and effectiveness. He was a Christian Bengali called Stephen.

In Bangladesh, it is common and polite to honour those you are working with by addressing them as 'brother' or 'sister'. For Muslims, this means calling men 'bhai'; for Christians, it means calling them 'da' or 'dada'.

Stephen da. Which my hindbrain treacherously rewrote 'Skipinder', which is (warning to those concerned by bad language, ripoffs of Australian TV shows or British-Asian humour) something left in my subconscious by 'Goodness Gracious Me', thus:

The thing about being a grownup is, you can't just giggle in the middle of serious meetings. It is not done.

Peace

2011-06-21T04:35:00.000+01:00

As anyone who has lived near or in a Muslim community knows, there is a greeting used by Muslims everywhere. Salaam aleikum; to which the response is the pleasingly symmetrical waleikum asalaam.

It means 'peace be with you', and the response comes, 'and also with you'. I like it; even if, as with all other greetings, overuse drains it of its original meaning. When was the last time any of us asked 'how's it going' and expected a truthful response?

I like it anyway. I particularly like it because it is the quintessential Muslim greeting. It is also, if we have read our Bibles, the quintessentially Christian greeting:

Jesus said to them, 'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.'

The peace being offered here is the old Hebrew word 'shalom', the deep sense of abiding peace even in the midst of great strife; a sense of assurance that God is good, and he loves us through and in all circumstances.

'Shalom' and 'salaam'. They have the same linguistic root, thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away. And even though hatred rages between those whose heritage gives them these words, give them it does.

There are, globally, too many stories which put Muslims and people like me on opposing sides of a global culture war. Yet the peace we offer each other is a profound shared heritage.

It is shalom and salaam which I need as I deal with life in Bangladesh, a life without all the things which previously made me feel secure. Every day, if I am paying attention, I am offered this peace as a greeting - cursory, muttered, yet given.

I suspect that if I take a second to consider the root of the greeting, I will be a lot more peaceful here. Peace. I think you have to choose to hear it in this town.

Beauty in the Dust

2011-06-19T09:10:00.000+01:00

The metaphor is cloying but accurate.

The difficult bit is recognising that, even in a place of horrifying poverty, you are the dust, and beauty is a gift of God.

On Product-Naming in Bangladesh

2011-06-16T15:17:00.000+01:00

Me: Why does your hairbrush have ‘Con Air’ written on it?
GF: What?
Me: Your hairbrush is named after a Nicholas Cage movie.
GF: (with deep thought)...I think...the movie was named...after the brush.

She's a keeper.

Tourist Advice

2011-06-14T13:27:00.001+01:00

This post is very funny, particularly for those who are living in tourist cities this summer. Lies to tell to tourists, including such suggestions (for Londoners) as:

The finest Victuals in all London are serv'd at Mister ABERDEEN'S House of STEAK

If you enter the British Museum, shout "I claim these Marbles for Greece" & exit with them, the police are powerless.

Yuk yuk yuk. You can search for the rest on twitter with the hashtag #londonliesfortourists, and I very much recommend that you do.

What about other cities? I'd suggest the following, from my years in the tourist-attraction (with associated suburbs) that is York:

When entering a pub, remember that landlords will always overstate the price of beer. As in Asian countries, a firm negotiating line should be taken - he will respect you for it.

Hadrian's Wall surrounds the city; any guide book which suggests otherwise is a hoax.

It is considered polite to refer to historic churches using the traditional term 'poky little God box', particularly when addressing members of the clergy.

The rest of the post suggests some advice for tourists to other world cities, to general mirth.

But it misses out Dhaka! So. People reading from Bangladesh: what advice would you give tourists in this fair(ish) city? It can be serious or, as with the advice above, designed to make them look silly.

Likewise, Yorkies: what have I missed? Your suggestions please.

Personal Space And Other Myths

2011-06-12T05:06:00.005+01:00

Personal space in Bangladesh isn't what you're used to.

Let me put that a different way.

Personal space in Bangladesh isn't.

In a country the size of England and Wales, with 160 million people living in it, this is not surprising. It is quite extraordinary to sleep alone, even on a business trip, for all but the Westernised. Houses are tiny, and crammed with people. There just isn't enough space for everyone. One of the reasons this genius built his building in such an inappropriate place is that there was none other available at a price he could afford.

Coupled with the twin facts that it is way outside the spending power of most individuals to ever leave Bangladesh, and that very few foreigners ever come here, this means it is very difficult to walk down the street and stay alone.

Generally speaking, you will have this conversation quite a few times, and you can start to feel like a minor celebrity. Which is to say, no-one's really bothered about you, but they all want a photo with you.

People will come to you asking for phone numbers (and are dismayed to discover that you are simply not playing the game, and persist in being a white person with no contacts in big industry). One person may come and ask you for a photo, and if he's in a group of people, that's the end of your afternoon. There will be endless permutations of requests - the guy who asked you first, then his best mate, then him and his brother, then him and his brother holding a picture of their mother, and once it appears that you are open for business, you have become the front of a queue of photo-seekers without trying at all.

Unfortunately, my culture prizes personal privacy - often to ludicrous lengths, wherein you may spend 2 hours a day with your nose in someone's armpit on the tube, but it would be a terrible faux pas to ask them their name. So it is hard not to get frustrated, even if you are aware that your culture is as foolishly reserved as this one is embarrassingly invasive.

There are two approaches to this. One is seen at the top of the page, where you enter into the thing and accept that a ludicrous portion of your time will be given to looking like a fool in photographs on mantelpieces up and down the country.

The other can be seen on my face below, taken with opportunistic glee by Matthew Bone at 6am after a poor night's sleep on a boat. I can't remember what our brother there wanted to talk about, but I do remember I was not in the mood.

Let me tell you, putting on a smile like that when all you want to do is walk away is something they should teach you before you become a missionary.

The flow of reason and the feast of soul

2011-06-10T05:39:00.002+01:00

Most people in Bangladesh are fascinated by the presence of foreigners. A day running errands will see you having the following conversation, almost verbatim, about 10 or 12 times.

'Excuse me, my friend, where are you from? America?'
'No, I'm from the UK.'
'Uhh...sorry?'
'*sigh* I'm from England.'
'Oh, good. Where do you live?'
'I live in Banani'
'Are you married?'
'My name is Dave, by the way.'
'Yes, my name is Abdul. Are you married?'
'No...'
'Why not?'
'I'm not going to answer that.'
'Uhh...sorry?'
'Never mind.'
'Oh, good. Who do you work for?'
'I work for an NGO.'
'What is the name of your NGO?'
'FH.'
'Oh, good. Are there any jobs at your NGO?'
'I am very junior, I'm afraid I don't hire people.'
(with a skeptical look, for is it not a truth universally acknowledged that white people are all very rich and very powerful?) 'Oh, okay. Can I have your phone number?'
'Sorry, no.'
'Okay. Can I have your number?'
'No.'

If you are in a popular tourist spot, your new friend will probably add the following.

'Can I have a photo with you?'
'Yes, of course'.

It's not exactly meaningful - in fact it feels like being addressed by one of those language-lab tapes they used to use for teaching basic French vocabulary - but it is pleasingly predictable, at least. I'm not kidding when I say this is practically verbatim every time. It's as if everyone's been given a script.

Foreigner

2011-06-07T04:36:00.002+01:00

This very interesting report in the Guardian has illuminated my day. It's about madrassas - Islamic religious schools - in Bangladesh, and particularly tells the interesting tale of one which teaches girls.

There are elements of the story which are shocking; the girls never leave the small compound of the school, and their playground is the corridor outside their classroom (in Dhaka, if premises have land to use for playgrounds then they are posh without question, and most madrassas aren't).

The description of Dhaka is unflinching but unjudgemental, and it's accuracy and power is something I very much admire. If you want a good image of of Dhaka, and the unbelievably dense streets of the Old City, then I recommend it to you. The description of standard-issue Bangladeshi public buildings - crumbling, smelly and damp and made of splintering concrete - is particularly evocative.

I have nothing to say about religious education in Bangladesh, because I have never witnessed it; and this itself is an interesting thing.

As a woman of South Asian heritage, then, the author, Tahmima Anam, is able to access and describe a world I will probably never see. As one with white skin and limited Bangla vocabulary, I am very dependent upon people's goodwill when I want to glimpse parts of Bangladeshi culture which I've never seen, and in which I have no natural place.

Goodwill, for understandable reasons, tends to be in short supply when dealing with Islamic institutions when you look like a westerner. The legacy of a decade in which the west clumsily allowed itself to be identified as an enemy of Islam still holds firm. Not nearly enough of an effort was made, in the early noughties, to make friends with Muslims who were not extremists; and now many religious authorities are stand-offish, if not suspicious, of foreigners asking questions about their mosques and madrassas. All they know is what they've heard; and what they've heard is that the white people won't stop bombing Muslims.

So Ms. Anam has gained access to a world I don't get to inhabit, or glimpse; a world I would find it hard to understand if I did, even though I'm trying to get my head round as much of Bangladesh as possible.

It's a strange truth of my presence in Bangladesh that so many parts of it remain inaccessible to me, and that a journalist with roots here but residence in London can come for a few weeks and see parts which I'll never access in three years.

There is a simple truth which governs much intercultural interaction, even in a globalised age, and it is this: people trust people like them, and sadly one of the indicators of that is what you look like. Everyone, as the song insists, is a little bit racist sometimes.

I am not hard-done by; living in Bangladesh, I do not face the horrendous crushing weight of structural racism, or legal racism, and for that I am very thankful. But the way you look defines to a massive degree the way you are treated by individuals, and there is no amount of mealy-mouthed talk about mutual tolerance which will change that.

What will change it is the accretion of actions which make up relationships with the people I see every day. It is through our interactions with people as individuals that our experience of a culture is made. Though I use collective descriptions for convenience, I'm not getting to know Bangladesh as a sort of gestalt, lumbering entity with a single face, I'm experiencing interactions with hundreds of Bangladeshis, and that's different.

The more time I spend in Bangladesh, the more convinced I become that this kind of separation between peoples - based on rumours and misunderstandings and skin colour - occurs, and can only be overcome, in personal relationship. How people respond to you in the first instance depends upon what they have heard about people who look like you. How they respond to you in the second instance depends upon how you respond to the first instance. Angrily? Indignantly? With the insistence that they should be the ones to step across the culture gap and address you in terms with which you are familiar?

I have tried all of these, and they don't work.

No matter how much global storytelling is affecting what people think of people who look like you, individual racism is overcome by individual relationship-building, and the hallmark of relationship-building is grace; a willingness to try to speak someone's cultural language. They might still be convinced that people like you hate people like them, but at least the evidence of their eyes will have to acknowledge one such person who was civil.

So there are many areas of Bangladeshi life I may never see. I will always be a bideshi - one who is not of the desh, the country. But it is in the day-to-day business of connecting with individuals, even in such simple acts as buying a singara or paying for a rickshaw ride, that I have the slightest chance of understanding and being at home here.

Early Morning Mist

2011-06-05T09:01:00.001+01:00

Bangladesh isn't a place to come for interesting landscape. It's flat, except where the river is eating away the ground beneath your house - at which point the land can achieve some quite impressive gradients, often without any warning at all.

There are no wrinkles in the ground in which little picturesque lakes might be found. There are artificial ponds everywhere, though, square holes which catch the rain then slowly empty through the hot season, which might feed (and wash and water) a whole village. I shudder to imagine what diseases can flourish in water left stagnant for so long. They are one of the main reasons FH Savings and Learning Groups often buy tube-wells for themselves when they've saved enough.

That said, I defy anyone not to find this utterly stunning. Good work, creation.

How To Say 'Yeah'

2011-06-03T06:28:00.001+01:00

I worked for 8 months after leaving University in a call centre. It wasn't bad. The line was a bank customer helpline, giving out information on savings and shares accounts, so there was no cold-calling. You'd struggle to call it fascinating, but the people I worked with were nice.

It was late 2007 to mid-2008; a fascinating and bruising time to work in the finance sector. We had to be good at calming people down and making them feel as if the disembodied voice with all of their personal information was on their side.

I learned a new term when I was learning how to do this: 'verbal nods'. These are the little eructations we make in conversation to indicate that we are following along, without having to interrupt using actual sentences. Yes, mm, hmm, I see, right, okay.

Roughly a year after leaving that job, I came to Bangladesh, where I set about learning the Bangla language. Like most other languages, Bangla has its verbal nods - 'ji' (yes), 'accha' (okay), 'tik' (right) 'tik ache' (right, okay), and so on.

Marvellously, the standard way of saying 'yeah' (as opposed to a crisp 'yes') is to make a sort of nasal honking noise from the back of your throat, like a donkey coming to a difficult decision - 'heeghhh'.

After 8 months in Bangladesh, I came back to the UK for a much-needed rest, and went on holiday with my family. We went to France. Once upon a time, I spoke French (badly); so I was curious about whether my fresh, inexpert Bangla would have recorded itself over my old, inexpert French.

It wasn't so. Actually I found it easier to recall many French words, because I was used to daily communicating using words from my memory rather than my subconscious, and that was very gratifying.

But there were an embarrassingly high number of conversations, in the course of a single week, which I abruptly terminated by forgetting that French verbal nods are supposed to be melodious, elegant, even playful; perhaps sardonic, when called for.

Not basso-vibrato attempts to imitate a mink whale.

Me: 'Excusez-moi, monsieur le barkeep, avez-vous le wifi?'
M. Le Barkeep: 'Oui, oui. Mais vous devez un boisson achetez. Une biere?'
Me: 'Merci, heeeggggghhhhh'
(silence)
Me: 'Pardonnez-moi, monsieur...uhh...voila, l'argent...'
(silence, broken only by the sound of a half-litre-glass being placed on the bar and my feet shuffling me back to my laptop, ashamed).

Call yourself an international citizen?

Theological Charades

2011-05-31T04:36:00.000+01:00

One of my colleagues does incredible work for us as an interpreter. His English, then, is superb, but he is always seeking to improve.

A conscientious man, he is also trying to improve his understanding of theology (he comes from one of the tiny number of Christian communities in Bangladesh).

Both of these aims are laudable. I work a few yards away from him, so a few times a week he will ask me what a particularly difficult word means, or how it should be pronounced.

Some stuff is very straightforward. Other stuff is less so, especially given the limited supply of Christian theological textbooks in Bangladesh, which is 86% Muslim and 13.5% Hindu. There are just no materials explaining complicated concepts without special theological terminology. The man tries his hardest but must be drowning in jargon.

So far I have, with much gesticulation, imperfectly explained 'dispensation', 'transubstantiation', 'atonement', 'eschatology' and several other terms to him. Since my Bangla is imperfect and my understanding of these terms, even in English, generally needs a brush-up, my arm-waving attempts to explain must look like a sort of Masters-level game of charades. 'One word'....'um, eighty-four syllables'...'something to do with the power of God as it pertains to theologies of the end times'....

The other day brought a sad one, though. He came to me with a piece of paper on which he had written down one particular term which was confusing him.

'Dev bhai...what is this...' he showed me the paper, 'poppish mash?'

It took me a while to understand him. Then I read his handwriting carefully and realised that, to my deep dismay and complete lack of surprise, some genius of the Protestant wing of the global church had decided to write a theological textbook which referred to our brothers and sisters in the Catholic Church with less than total respect.

'Popish Mass'. That was what my colleague was trying to pronounce. And, mind you, his tribe is Catholic; so how to explain? And, more importantly, where the hell did he get this textbook from? I pray it was just a dusty corner in one of Dhaka's many book markets, and not a church leader.

If you have never tried to explain both archaic language and archaic sectarianism in simple terms for someone in their third language, I recommend it. I have encountered no greater challenge to my meagre skill as a communicator than trying to pirouette along the line between definition and judgement, explaining what the writer meant but also why he wasn't being magnificently, y'know, Christian in his (ab)use of the language.

If (as is very possible) this was the only theological book available to my friend, he would have learned theology which expressed itself in a language not only of explanation but also of denigration. I'm minded to say that, if you can't express your idea of God in positive terms, you should look at whether it is worth expressing at all.

I think it's a crying shame that, while Bibles are translated into every language (and that's wonderful), the books of theology available to my friend were and are not willing to lay down their divisiveness (let alone their complexity).

Does anyone happen to know of theological textbooks written in English for those whose first language is not English, and whose context is not defined by the politico-religious concerns of sixteenth-century Europe? There would seem to be a need.

Perks

2011-05-29T08:33:00.002+01:00

Visiting rural projects:

WOOT

[photo courtesy of Matt 'looks just as goofy on the back of a motorbike' Bone]