There were a good number of things I liked in Bangladesh [The 10 things I liked best in Bangladesh], but still, it is considered a hardship posting for a reason, and during my three years, I did find a number of things stressful, irritating or just alien. Here’s the ten things I liked least in Bangladesh.
- Hazrat Shahjalal Airport
- Tropics without sun or swimming
- Riotous construction
- Selfies and staring
- Dengue fever
- Public transport and traffic
- Noise 24/7
- Eating with hands
- Pollution and litter
- Turning into an ogre
- Hazrat Shahjalal Airport
The first impression of Bangladesh starts with an immediate low. Hazrat Shahjalal is the ugliest airport in the world. If there is one uglier, I hope never to see it. It is claustrophobic, the low ceiling and the bad lightning creating a permanent twilight zone. It is dirty, in spite of the large number of cleaning women sitting and walking around without proper equipment, occasionally making a half-hearted attempt to wipe the floor with a dirty mop. And the smell is terrible, even worse than the general air pollution fumes of Dhaka, partly because it hits you for the first time, partly because the extra added flavours of kerosene, concrete walls not cleaned since 1980, and sweaty long-haul passengers.
After gathering your luggage from the carousel, having withstood the long, curious stares of your fellow passengers, you need to get past the controller who meticulously checks the luggage code on your ticket. After this, brisk walking is recommended – with head held high and passport waved, you may be able cut through the gridlock of trillion trolleys which queue for the scanner at customs. Finally, you’re in the country. You’ve probably arranged with your driver/tour operator/hotel to pick you up, so you would exit to the canopied pick-up area in front of the terminal. Wait can be long, as the cars often try to outmanoeuvre each other in the narrow lane, and end up blocking other cars. In any case, the system was designed for one tenth of the current traffic. This is one of the most polluted spots of the city, with the canopy successfully blocking the car exhaust from escaping. While fighting the nausea and keeping an eye on your driver to arrive, you need to fend off a constant stream of taxi offers, and endure the usual close-up inspection by everyone in your vicinity. You can also watch the poor families crowded behind the fence, some of them waiting for half a day for the arrival of their breadwinner from the Gulf countries or Singapore. At the end, your driver arrives. You’ve survived your first two hours in the country.
- Tropics without sun or swimming
Bangladesh has a nice tropical climate. I arrived in September, and watched in fascination as the months passed by, but winter did not come. Winter in Bangladesh means temperatures ranging from 10-20 Celsius, but most of the year it’s uniform 30-35 Celsius, high humidity, and not too rainy outside the peak monsoon period. A lovely weather for tropic-lovers – except it’s surprisingly difficult to enjoy the sunlight and warmth. Dhaka’s vertical architecture and many high-rise buildings, coupled with the severe air pollution most of the year, block out much of the sunlight. The sky is often a random shade of grey, with a large concentration of solid and liquid pollutants hanging around in the haze, and while it feels hot, it’s not sunny. Chances of getting a good suntan in Dhaka are low – I got more suntan during my European holidays than in Bangladesh. And when you get to the sunny beach, things get even more frustrating.
During your stay in the country, you will often hear that Bangladesh has the longest unbroken stretch of beach in the world – 120 kilometres – around Cox’s Bazar. The fresh sea air keeps it clean of pollution, meaning it is actually sunny, and the water is not dirtier than elsewhere in the Bay of Bengal. It’s a honeymoon paradise, and you will see scores of young couples taking selfies on the sandy beach. Doing little else, however – no sunbathing, no swimming. The only water sports I observed was floating out to the bay on large, brightly painted car tyres, practiced by young boys.
Women were only seen walking, fully dressed in saris or even burkhas. Even men rarely venture into the water, and when they do, they do it in shorts and T-shirts – no swimwear. As a foreigner, even modestly dressed, you’ll be the immediate focus of attention, with a hundred requests for selfies – I heard of some brave souls braving the stares to jog in jogging gear, but it was much frowned upon.
The only chance for relaxed swimming in Bangladesh is the swimming pools in the expat clubs of Dhaka – they’re the only spot in the country where you may wear a bikini. I hear that recently, with the soaring real estate prices, even expats clubs are getting scarce. Opportunities, therefore, are scant – rooftop swimming pools for the very rich, splashing in dirty little lakes for the poor, and nothing for those in between.
- Riotous construction
Bangladesh can easily feel like living in a giant construction site. Not being an economist, I don’t know if this is the cause, the side effect or the desired result of fast economic growth, but it is one of the most distinctive features of the cityscape. The verdant two-storey villas were turned into five story blocks already in the 90s and early 2000s; now they pull down the five storey blocks, and erect ten- and twenty-storey blocks in their place. Driving in the outskirts of Dhaka would show you a lot of dirty grass with plots measured out, waiting for the building trucks, and a horizon of a million half-finished concrete structures, with spaghetti-like iron rods sticking out and waiting for the next floor. Even in the new plots, constructions seem evolve haphazardly, with no planning. Houses are built so close to each other that neighbours could kiss by hardly leaning out of the window, and the bottom floors will never see any sun. Footpaths crisscross among the building debris wherever a little space was left unclaimed – there are roads for cars and trucks, but no pavements.
Building techniques remain simple. I had the bad luck of having a demolition and construction process to unfold right in front of my office window for over a year. The crews, composed of skinny men of all ages, were living, eating and sleeping on site without as much as a mobile toilet. They were equipped with little more than flip-flops and hand tools, and worked entirely without safety equipment. Often the work continued into the night, lit by powerful lamps. The noise was intolerable, and the sight often repulsive.
The Rana Plaza incident in 2013 (building collapsed and killed over a 1000 garment workers) put Bangladesh’s uncontrolled construction industry on the spot, but a lot of the corruption, corner cutting, rule-flouting that had led to that disaster are still around. Lethal building fires are everyday news. Every year a Rana Plaza-load of construction workers die in work accidents (and this is just the figure which is reported). And whoever lives near a construction site in Dhaka (literally everyone) can look forward a good deal of misery.
- Selfies and staring
Pope Francis visited Bangladesh, and in addition to the 400,000 Catholics in the country, a good deal of non-Catholics also turned up to greet him. I was standing in a throng of Catholic nuns for a good part of an hour, waiting for the popemobile to pass. The most memorable thing was that nobody was staring at me – they were waiting for a bigger attraction.
But it took Pope Francis to steal my limelight. Unfortunately, he wasn’t around during the month they were repaving our street. Crews of men and women, recruited directly from the rural parts, spent their days digging ditches, carrying basketfuls of bricks on their head, and crushing stones with little hammers right in front of our house. Except the times when I left the house, or arrived back. The moment I showed up, all work stopped, and the whole crew lined up to stare at me. I was not the only Westerner living on the street, and after a week or two, the novelty should have worn off – except it didn’t.
Staring started already at the connecting airport, once I arrived to the gate for the plane to Dhaka. It continued on the plane, and anywhere I went in Dhaka. For the record, I am no beauty queen, and I always dressed very modestly in Bangladesh. It didn’t matter – they also stare at men and kids. As I walked on the street, cyclists and rickshaw wallah would follow me with their gaze, to the extent that I saw more than one person falling off their vehicle because they failed to pay attention to the road. As I walked in the park, people would ask for selfies, or take sneaky selfies with me in the background. Paradoxically, they stared as much in Dhaka’s richest corners as in the smallest river island village in the remote Chittagong Hill Tracts. I had ample time to speculate on the reasons, and my theory was that staring had to do more with status than uniqueness. As a Westerner, one is automatically in the top social class in Bangladesh. It doesn’t matter if you are a student or teacher with a slim bank account, the spontaneous assumption is that your rich, and you have high status. On the flip side, this would often ensure you privileged treatment – being offered to jump queues, VIP seats, and invitations to conferences, or simply being able to talk to any guest in any room, with guaranteed welcome and interest in you. Still, it is hard to cope with, and to my shame, I did end up shouting at onlookers as a fight-or-flight reaction to all that staring. Certainly, don’t do that – it’s not their fault, and it will just make them stare harder.
- Dengue fever
With climate change, expected dystopian scenarios include spreading tropical diseases to moderate climate zones – a possibility that I’m certainly worried about since my time in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, bad luck has 3 of the top 5 diseases carried by mosquitos present – chikungunya, dengue and malaria. While malaria is a real threat, so far it is less present in the capital, more in Southern rural areas; chikungunya (chicken-gunyah, if you’d have a try at pronouncing it) is also less frequent, and normally, less severe.
But dengue is a really alarming virus: in severe forms, it can cause internal bleeding and organ damage. Dengue fatality is hard to estimate – I did my fair share of google research, but the mortality rate depends a lot on access to quality healthcare, so it varies a lot among countries. However, it is particularly dangerous for young children – in many known big outbreaks, almost half of the fatalities were from this age group. And as of today, there is no vaccine that would be unequivocally recommended by WHO.
As a mother of a small kid, it was easy to go into a panic spiral when affronted with this information. And without living there, it is hard to appreciate how hard it is to prevent mosquito bites in a chaotic tropical city like Dhaka. We shut all windows tight, but with the quality of insulation, there was always a small crack for the mosquitos to enter. We eliminated all stagnant water from the household, but could not do it even in our immediate vicinity – as normal in a wet tropical country, stagnant water is everywhere. We used mosquito traps, mosquito rackets (sizzling bugs with an electrified tennis racket is surprisingly good fun), mosquito coils, mosquito nets above the beds – everything. And we used miraculous Odomos [https://www.odomosprotect.com/], the cream that can really save the day when it comes to mosquitos. End result: none of our family had dengue during our stay in Dhaka – which, of course, also meant that we were very lucky. Nevertheless, the worry was there, constantly, all year round, never letting up. It also meant that I almost rejoiced in getting bitten by mosquitos when back in Europe – it was a reminder how lucky we are in the parts of the world where a bite only means some discomfort and itching, nothing more. If only we could stay that lucky.
- Public transport and traffic
How is public transport in Bangladesh? Perhaps I should say nothing, as I never tried it. Which is a shocking statement in itself – I lived 3 years in the country without ever getting on a train, a bus, or a ferry. I travelled and lived in many parts of the world, including in Asia and Eastern Europe, and I always considered public transport the standard way of getting around.
But not in Bangladesh. Public buses in Dhaka were considered dangerous for women in general, and getting on and off the bus – frequently in the middle of the ongoing road traffic, for the want of proper bus stops – would put your life in immediate danger. Traffic fatalities were so high that only the most chilling stories would produce any media interest. One of the most attention-grabbing during my time – which led to a few weeks of student protests, ending without any visible improvement in the system – was when two young students were crushed to death by a speeding bus while waiting in a roadside “bus stop”. The bus driver didn’t have a driver’s license – estimates said that at least one third of bus drivers in Dhaka didn’t have a driver’s license. Many of those who had it, acquired it in a system which often requires bribes instead of performing any driving skills. Road rules are hardly ever enforced.
There are few trains in the country, and the scarce occasions I saw them, they were the picturesque “people-hanging-out-of-doors-and-squatting-on-top-of-the-train” kind. As to ferries, ferry accidents were not uncommon, with the rivers as crowded as any other place in the country.
No public transport, then, but I still spent rather a lot of time sitting in cars in traffic jams. At best, it could be entertaining – I was lounging on the back seat of an aircon car, watching the world pass by on their innumerable rickshaws and motorbikes. Motorised rickshaws looked like little rolling prisons, so I preferred bicycle rickshaws with their open seating – you could enjoy very colourful sights of whole families squeezed on the tiny seats, or husband, wife, kids and a large cage with several chicken on the motorbike, and all the life going on the narrow, dirty pavements, from barber shops to greasy spoon shacks.
At worst, travelling in a private car would feel like extreme sport, a literal accident waiting to happen. I particularly recall an ill-fated excursion to a children’s amusement park just outside Dhaka. It took us nearly four hours of driving to get there, stuck among interminable queues of massive trucks which were constantly battling each other for getting ahead a metre or two, almost crushing our little car in the process. The only reason we didn’t turn back was that it was impossible to get out of the queue. To travel in Bangladesh, better to make sure you have the stronger vehicle and the smarter driver – I did enjoy trips when I was lucky to have them.
- Noise 24/7
Whenever I left Dhaka, and arrived to Doha Airport for my connecting flight, I was always stunned by the tranquillity. Compared to the city I had just left, Doha Airport felt like the calmest place on Earth. Pressure was immediately lifting from my chest, and my muscles were losing tension.
Constant noise is incredibly exhausting. Construction noise: heavy thuds of the wrecking ball, drilling, metal screeching on metal. Trucks unloading iron rods to the construction next door at 3 am in the morning. Another Bangla wedding mashup blaring up early afternoon and going on until the morning. Cars honking, honking and honking – as the sound of normal horns can be swallowed by the massive traffic noise, VIPs from government officials to the simply rich invest in sirens to be heard above the cacophony – a regular arms race. After a while, I hardly noticed the 5-daily calls for prayer from the 3 nearest mosques, perhaps except the early morning one, which could still be distinguished above the standard roaring.
I lived in a fourth floor apartment at the end of a cul-de-sac in the relatively calmer diplomatic quarter, and still suffered terribly from all the noise.
I can’t even imagine how life would be in an apartment of a busy road, as for many millions of Dhaka inhabitants. Lots of surveys show that noise pollution is Dhaka is a serious medical problem, causing health damage way beyond the typical loss of hearing. But the problem goes so deep and systemic that any solution would need to counter practically all problems of the city at once, and that in a city which is as big as or bigger than two thirds of the countries of the world.
- Eating with hands
After years of Western conferences and meetings with nothing but water offered, or at most a thermos can of so-called coffee, Bangladesh hospitality was a welcome surprise. Lunch and/or high tea are inevitable parts of any conference. Even at the shortest meeting, you would be offered a delicious tea, and a small plate of assorted sweets and biscuits. At longer meetings, you would get a lunch box with succulent fried dough, like potato or veggie samosas. During Ramadan, you would be invited to iftars (breaking of feast), or if you’re important enough, to multiple iftars every night.
Naturally, one would eat much of this by hand – you would use knife and fork for samosa as often as for hamburger. My problem started with the realisation that most Bangladeshi would eat everything else by hand, too. And however much I tried to get used to it, even after years, the sight of people eating rice with dhal or rice with curry sauce by hand would cut my own appetite. It would involve mixing the rice and sauce with fingers, squashing it into a blob, then using the thumb as a shovel to quickly propel the dripping blob into the mouth. A lot of squelchy chomping, a lot of wide-opening the mouth, and much more pungent smell of food than what I’m used to. Somehow, in fancy hotels I found it even more difficult to get through a meal in this manner than in shabbier places – just too much of a juxtaposition.
- Pollution and litter
It is a terrible thing to destroy your environment when your country has a vast bonanza of natural riches, stretching beyond the horizon. When your country is hardly bigger than Greece but has 17 times the population, there is very little environment to destroy, and practically all loss becomes immediately irreversible.
True, Bangladesh is not to blame for climate change (on historical scale, Bangladesh contributed to greenhouse gas emissions by probably less than one year’s visitors to the Eiffel Tower), which is eating up its coastal areas, ruining sustenance rice farmers and forcing them to migrate to the capital. Also, the country has achieved remarkable results to lift itself from “least developed country” status. But the environmental cost of this was enormous, and affected people’s quality of life way beyond what is actually shown in economic assessment. There is the lack of clean air to breath, the lack of clean soil to grow food on, the lack of clean water to drink. I remember driving through the vast industrial ring around Dhaka a few times. Steel factories, cement factories, chemical plants, and the garment production, of course. There is an endless queue of brightly painted but heavily polluting large trucks delivering raw material and collecting the products. Thanks to these trucks, you will have plenty of time to gaze at the surroundings. I remember thinking that the third circle of hell could be a lot more inviting place to live in. The air is a choking haze of smoke. Along the road, you see big piles of assorted litter everywhere, some constantly smouldering. Sometimes you cross heavily polluted rivers, but everywhere you see the little stagnant puddles glistening with oil, or coloured with whatever chemicals. There is not a tree, a bush, a bird to see. And this is not just industrial wasteland where workers drive in and drive out. People actually live here, in concrete dumps raised around and in between the factories. On the road, all the black and brown and grey will be speckled with brightly clad women walking in flip-flops in the dirt, leading small kids to school, or getting to their shifts in the factory. You will see men smoking in the greasy spoons or getting their hair cut at the roadside barber. You will feel extremely privileged after seeing this just once – and extremely sad, as well.
A slightly less depressing, though similarly pollution-afflicted, is to take a cruise on Dhaka’s rivers to the outskirts. The heavy haze is all around, but the sights can be quite quaint compared to a road trip – the occasional cow, or traditional fishermen, or splashing children. You will, of course, also see lots of industrial activity, including the huge shipbreaking businesses, where the flip-flopped workers dismantle massive ships with little more than tiny hammers. You will also see lots of litter, and should you be reckless enough to dip in the water, even further away from the factories, you will find yourself itchy, covered in uncomfortable grease, and in urgent need of a shower.
I could go on a lot longer, but you get the picture. Will Bangladesh ever recover at least some of its natural environment? Or is the golden green landscape of “golden Bengal” gone forever, and only the gold counted in hard currency?
- Turning into an ogre
One of the worst things about Bangladesh? Yourself. All the environment strain – pollution, noise, lack of personal space and so on – would bring on a constant state of edginess. I developed serious admiration for the few people I knew who could keep their good temper about them. Missionaries, humanitarian workers and people who grew up in Nigeria were vastly overrepresented in this group.
The rest of us, well, coped. Irascibility would manifest in many small ways. Audible ways – shouting, grumbling, barking. At onlookers on the street, at the five sales clerks who could not calculate the price of three T-shirts in 25 minutes, at the help who carelessly opened a window at dusk and let in a big cloud of mosquitos. Quiet ways – blocking out the constant, maddening stimuli and barricade yourself with noise-cancelling headphones in a room with closed curtains.
At work, people tended to engage in nasty little email wars over nothing, or develop everlasting rancour against each other. I saw a lot of quiet quitting, quiet firing and slowly dying motivation. It was hard to focus on anything, hard to be generous with anybody, hard to remember how lucky all expats are compared to the vast majority of locals. Looking into the mirror and seeing the ogre I became made me genuinely ashamed on a number of occasions.
How to avoid this? I don’t know – but should I ever decide to live in a full-to-bursting type of country, I will try harder to find out. I would also be more prepared before moving to another hardship posting; and be more ware of the hidden dark side of expat life!
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