8 things I would have never understood without living in Bangladesh

I lived 3 years in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Throughout that time, in my good moments as well as in my bad moments, I was always learning. Much of what I learnt has only grown sharper since I left.

Here’s a list of the 8 most interesting things I would have never discovered without living in Bangladesh!

  1. The Bengal Famine
  2. Not all refugee camps look like hell
  3. Why Lenin said “Learn, learn, and learn!”
  4. Expat clubs are more than colonialist fossils
  5. Your heart should go out to celebrities
  6. Europe can feel a bit musty   
  7. A dysfunctional system can kill you
  8. In Europe we don’t have problems
  1. The Bengal Famine 

It is a classic that one’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, but it was in Bangladesh that I really understood historical relativism. Could Winston Churchill be a war criminal? Not many would agree, not even in Bengal. But how much do we know about his role in the Bengal Famine? In any case, has anyone even heard of the Bengal Famine?

Not me, for one, not even after reading Willem Van Schendel’s “A History of Bangladesh”, which hardly spends two pages on the famine. Then on a trip to Kolkata I saw a few striking, impossible to forget photos in the India Museum. As often in the history of photojournalism, some of the images, published by editor Ian Stephen despite considerable political pressure, made a huge impact on the public sentiment of the period [link].

Orphans who survived the Bengal Famine (Wikimedia Commons)

Still, the Bengal Famine has largely been forgotten since. The Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, though it had happened a decade earlier, is better remembered – partly because Europe was not yet busy with WW2 in the 1930s, but partly (I believe) because it was easily attributable to the worst days of Stalinism, and Stalin himself. Stalin being responsible for the completely avoidable starvation and annihilation of 4 million people sounds nothing surprising. Just one more entry on his long list of crimes.

But who’s the villain in case of the Bengal Famine? In a time-span hardly over a year in 1943-44, as many as 3.5 million people died of hunger mostly in rural Bengal, in this golden basket of rice and lentils and sweet fruits. Many historians agree that just as the Holodomor, the Bengal famine was also a man-made disaster, the result of subordinating people’s needs to other priorities – such as Soviet industrialization and unification politics in the case of Holodomor, and British military interests in case of the Bengal Famine. The British disagree, and an official committee (composed of British officials) cleared the British government from any responsibility shortly after the famine ended. I’m not a historian, and I’m not able to settle the debate (I doubt anyone could, not without a major project). But I know this much – while the British were going through “their finest hour”, millions of British subjects were starving to death in Bengal. After living in Bangladesh, I could never think of Winston Churchill or enjoy WW2 stories set in Britain in quite the same manner. 

2. Not all refugee camps look like hell

Bangladesh has been hosting almost a million Rohingya refugees since 2017. Practically all these people live in refugee camps close to the Myanmar border in the south of the country. Kutupalong is the largest camp, with almost half a million people, and there are many smaller camps in the area, with tens of thousands of refugees each.

During my 3 years in the country, I visited the refugee camps several times, typically as a handy tagger-along during VIP missions. The strongest impression I had, every time I went, was a kind of embarrassed acknowledgement that, in fact, I did not find them dreadful.

Much of this is explained by location and human geography: the camps are located in Cox’s Bazar, close to Bangladesh’s seaside. A visitor from Dhaka would be impressed by the clean air, so different from the often unbreathable smog of the capital. In the camps themselves, refugees are cramped together in small spaces in makeshift shelters. But for the outsider, the camps, especially the smaller ones, are almost indistinguishable from the locals’ houses and huts: crowdedness, even in rural Bangladesh, seems the way of life. I remember the last camp we visited, a camp where locals and refugees lived practically next door to each other. The locals’ beautiful black fishing boats, resting on the riverside, gave an almost romantic background to the bamboo shelters, green vegetation and relative calm. Already a world away from Kutupalong’s endless plastic roofs over mudhills.

While the makeshift shelters were built as temporary housing, the international aid organizations that designed and constructed most of it did a very good job: there is planning and attention to sanitary needs. Walking in the camps, it was impossible not to draw a comparison to Dhaka’s urban slums, with the makeshift shanties, heaps of garbage, hazardous air pollution and constant, deafening noise. Extreme poverty, cramped quarters, natural and man-made disasters killing a lot of people every year – many facets of misery are comparable. Rohingya refugees would spend their years in futile waiting to return, unable to start building any kind of future. Slum dwellers in Dhaka at least have citizenship and a theoretical possibility of working their way to better living conditions – but in many cases, this hope remains very theoretical. This is not to say that Rohingya refugees don’t need and deserve all the help they can get. It’s just the bizarre reaction to seeing people in a refugee camp, and finding it less than horrifying in view of the extent of misery and squalor elsewhere in the country. It’s to highlight the latter, not to diminish the former.

3. Why Lenin said “Learn, learn, and learn!”

    There was a poster with Lenin’s famous quote in virtually all schools of the Soviet sphere. While hardly planning to extol the virtues of communism (also see Holodomor, above), I’ve come to understand better the significance of the quote after living in Bangladesh. Educating a nation, if it needs to start from scratch, is an extreme challenge. Many ex-Soviet countries had started from similar low levels of general education as recent-day Bangladesh, and reached high levels of literacy and school attendance in a generation. What an achievement this was, I could appreciate many a time in Dhaka when people around me lacked even basic skills – like calculating the price of three shirts in a shop, reading basic instructions, or finding an address on the map.  Parents in Bangladesh attach a prominent value to their kids’ education, and are ready to make almost any sacrifice. But with overcrowded classes, insufficiently trained teachers and environmental pollution affecting children’s development, many kids don’t stand a chance to get educated beyond very inadequate levels. Bangladesh is on the very bottom in ranking of % spending on education. I don’t have comparative data for the communist era, but ex-Soviet sphere countries, even those that are still relatively poor, tend to spend more than twice the % value – and they had already done much of the heavy lifting in former decades.

    4. Expat clubs are more than colonialist fossils

      Colonial clubs had always sounded like a fitting target for mockery (just check out the English Club in Gerald Durrell’s “The Mockery Bird”!). What’s the good of shutting yourself off from the country you live in, with Western-imitation food and swathes of expats around? After my arrival to Dhaka, I soon understood the attraction – bikini and beer, yes, but above all, time spent in the imitation of your comfort zone.

      Imitation I say, as even in an expat club, you would not get away from the strict security control at the entrance, the relentless noise tearing at the walls, the haze of winter smog and dengue-carrying mosquitos. Still, it was as close to your comfort zone as it gets in Bangladesh – with (some) space, the option of dropping the long pants and long sleeves and wearing a short, and playing sports or having a coffee or lounging in the pool without anyone gaping at you. It was virtually impossible to swim outside the expat clubs in Bangladesh, in spite of the tropical climate and a long sandy beach in the south of the country: Muslim modesty rules, combined with the tumult an expat woman (even fully dressed) would cause virtually in any location, made it a venture too hard to pull off. 

      As a result, colonial-style clubs, these much-envied oases of (relative) calm and comfort in turbulent Dhaka, were still flourishing during my stay. They were already on the edge when I lived there, their real estate highly desirable in one of the most expensive cities of South Asia. In a way, the clubs did not ooze luxury. I remember the many eyesores of my club – knee-deep puddles during monsoon, the concrete slowly crumbling away in the heavy climate, the rust spots and the occasional cockroach in the changing room.  The kids’ playroom boasted two mattresses and an old plastic kitchen, the gym had two exercise bikes and a treadmill, and the main tennis court had no shade. The menu sported Italian spaghetti, Dutch meatballs and fried paneer, which almost tasted the same, and they would sometimes run out of beer, or serve wine that had been cooked after the long storage in heated containers. But my memories are still fond, and occasionally I miss lounging in the pool, under the fading poster of black fishing boats, watching the countless planes and the occasional bird or monkey passing above.

      5. Your heart should go out to celebrities

        Celebrities complaining about the lack of privacy is nothing new. Commiserating with them, however, was a new experience to me, and as I’m a total nobody, I would have never understood it without living in Bangladesh. In Dhaka, the expression “in the public eye” gains an entirely new significance. Overcrowded as the city is, anywhere outside your most private zone you would constantly be surrounded by at least a hundred people – and each and every one of the hundred would be staring at you. To my non-statistical experience, it makes little difference if you’re a man or a woman, dressed modestly or not, a dazzling beauty or an ogre: as long as you are clearly non-Asian, they will stare.

        The staring is disconcerting because it’s so direct. We’re not talking peeks or glimpses: it’s unabashed, plain staring. People would fix their gaze on me in the shopping mall, the supermarket, the cafeteria. They would shout at me “where you from?” on the street, they would ask for selfies in the park, they would covertly snap pictures of me instead of photographing monuments. They would stare at me while cycling their rickshaw, carrying bricks to the construction, handling cash at the till. They did not shift their gaze if I looked at them, they did not smile – they just continued staring.

        On none of the occasions was I in physical danger, or threatened by any kind of abuse. And yet, it was beyond irritating: I felt exposed, unprotected. It often triggered a flight or fight reaction that was hard to suppress. Over the weeks and months, it would pile up, and I would be reluctant to step out on the street, visit a museum or the cinema, go to a market. Then a trip out of the country would turn me blissfully invisible, and I could build up some resilience again. What would it be to live in the public eye constantly, without relief, and not being able to afford to slip up and occasionally lose your temper with the onlookers? Thankfully, I will never be famous to find it out.

        6. When Europe feels a bit musty   

        Bangladesh is an extraordinary sensory experience: the humid heat, all the frequencies of noise from high-pitch prayer calls to low-toned drilling to deep bass wrecking ball thumps, the towering concrete high rises and the unceasing ebb and flow of little people bustling among them. Returning to Europe, tranquility enveloped me like a protective coat.

        But after a while, something was missing. Europe felt musty. I enjoyed the pretty streets, pretty shops, pretty parks, clean air and neatly collected garbage and muted noise – but it still looked like living in Lego city. I was having flashbacks of driving in the Dhaka traffic, one of those post-monsoon mornings when the sunlight could get through to shed a golden hue, watching the cycle rickshaws swerving among the auto rickshaws swerving among the rusty, speeding buses, all in deafening noise and always so much on the edge. It was grueling and ugly. But it was infused with such a promise of opportunity and good things to come that can only be felt in a very young city.

        Statistics will tell you that that about 60% of Bangladeshi population is under 30 years old. At the same time, the old continent is exactly that, old: half of the population in Europe is over 45. These are paper figures, but once you’ve spent some time in one of those hellish, dynamic young cities of Asia or Africa, you’ll feel it with all your senses. Nothing in Europe can compare to the sheer energy of developing cities. There must be at least 10 million young people in Dhaka, enough young people for a mid-sized country: toddlers in laps, schoolchildren in uniforms, teenagers in groups, newlyweds in love, students who think they own the world, young workers dreaming of big future. And their idealism, their readiness to jump and embrace life translates into a vibe of vitality and energy that can lift you up even in the midst of the world’s worst cities.

        7. A dysfunctional system can kill you

        It’s not like I hadn’t heard of corruption before living in Bangladesh, but in my mind, it was just an irritating small offence, something that happens to politicians and border guards, with no influence on my life. This cushy delusion soon eroded in Bangladesh.

        One of the great pleasures of the country is the fresh mango, considered among the best in the world. Came mango season, I was ecstatic. My pleasure was much curtailed when I learnt about the widespread use of a carcinogen chemical to force early and uniform ripening in the mangoes. Lychee was another delight and family favorite, but then I heard about recurring massive tragedies in the region where children died in high numbers after eating lychee, with a probable link to pesticide contamination. Our fresh food consumption started plummeting. The final straw was, however, the milk scandal: after finding above-limit levels of lead and other dangerous substances in milk samples, the Supreme Court banned practically all locally produced milk varieties. The decision was overturned in a day, with authorities claiming that other lab examinations produced better results, and the milk is safe to drink. In the absence of having my own lab at home, I resorted to buying imported dairy products – milk from Australia, yogurt from Switzerland. An incredibly wasteful and high carbon footprint practice, but my faith in local milk was badly shaken.

        These food scares opened my eyes to the lethal effect of corruption in other sectors. A recurring type of news in Bangladesh is the tragedies resulting from fires in shopping malls, office premises and residential buildings. Every time, it turns out that fire safety rules had been breached and overlooked. Another frequent tragedy is bus drivers running over pedestrians. When two high-school students were killed by a speeding bus, emotions spilled over and weeks of student demonstrations followed. It turned out that the bus driver didn’t have a driving license. Later a survey among bus companies revealed that more than half of Dhaka’s bus drivers did not have a valid drivers’ license.  Those who held license were often coerced to pay bribes to obtain them, instead of being checked for driving skills. Eventually, the student protests died down, and nothing much changed. Not long ago, another student and a disabled child were killed by another reckless bus driver who did not possess a driving license.

        Every time I skipped buying mangoes, chose Australian milk over the fresh local offer, avoided using public transport or even crossing the road, worried about fire safety in a shopping mall’s soft play area – every time I was reminded that in a non-corrupt system, all these worries would vanish. Returning from Bangladesh, the lesson remained. We can be grateful for better enforced standards, but even in Europe we need watchdogs, media and whistleblowers. We cannot afford thinking that corruption is a small issue.

        8. In Europe we don’t have problems

        Bangladesh tells a remarkable story of poverty reduction and development. From being one of the poorest nations at birth in 1971, Bangladesh reached lower-middle income status in 2015. It is on track to graduate from the UN’s Least Developed Countries list in 2026. Looking up at last, right? Um, not exactly.

        While I’m no Nobel Prize winning economist, it’s easy to see that Bangladesh is far from being out of the woods. You name any problem in the world, you’ll find that Bangladesh has it. It’s extremely exposed to natural disasters and highly vulnerable to climate change. Experts predict that by 2050, rising sea levels will submerge more than 15% of the nation’s land. Bangladesh already has a mass internal displacement problem due to the soil salinity and flooding problems in the coastal areas. No exact figures, but some say up to half a million people move to the capital every year, most of whom end up in Dhaka’s slums.

        Due to the narrow focus on industrialization without introducing (or enforcing) environmental standards, the country suffers from a terrible level of pollution: air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, producing large (though partly hidden) costs in people’s health. The country is hosting about a million refugees from Myanmar who are unlikely to return and who are not welcome to any other country. In spite of acknowledged efforts by the current and past governments, child marriage, violence against women and a general lack of economic empowerment of women slow development in all areas. The level of education overall is still low, and spending on education is insufficient.

        I left three key problems to the end, because they are at the root of much of the lack of success of achieving change: these are the lack of time, lack of space, and lack of democracy.

        Lack of democracy: Bangladesh is in the group of “partly free” countries according to Freedom House [link], and in terms of ranking it’s at the bottom of the category, dangerously close to slipping into the “not free” domain. Elections are not free and fair. Starting a new political party and running at the elections would be unthinkable in the current environment. Political opposition is persecuted and criminalized, as an actual Nobel Peace Prize winning Bangladeshi economist has experienced recently. With no freedom of speech and no accountability, the level of public trust and people’s feeling of empowerment to initiate and achieve positive change remain damagingly low.

        Lack of space: a root cause of all Bangladesh’s problems is simply math: there are too many people in too small an area. You’ve heard that Japan has a high population density, but Bangladesh’s current figure is three times higher than Japan’s, and while Japan’s population is decreasing, Bangladesh is projected to grow from today’s 170 million to 193 million by 2050. Simple math also shows that Bangladesh is projected to lose land area faster than its population is growing. The claustrophobic image is that of a shrinking room, with a large group of people crammed in and extra victims added every day.

        Lack of time: Bangladesh’s core problem is racing against time, with a high probability of losing the race. The country has more or less found a solution to its “bottomless basket” poverty problem, and indicators allow it to progress beyond “least developed country”. But while the narrow focus on economic development helped increasing these indicators, it came with a large amount of hidden cost in pollution, overuse of scarce natural resources, people’s health and well-being. These factors are getting more obvious, and together with the unresolved problems of education and good governance, are becoming very strong barriers to further development.

        Bangladesh is racing against its own people in terms of population growth: it can be credited for policies that slowed population growth, but it may be too late, with the upward trend still ongoing in the next crucial two decades. Finally, just by about the time Bangladesh would have sorted out poverty and population growth, it will be exposed to growing effects of climate change from rising seas and floods to intensifying cyclones, which can consume all and more resources that Bangladesh would need to spend on development. Any additional factor – regional instability, further political repression, a big earthquake etc. – could push the country over the edge even before time runs out.

        Experiencing this litany of problems and counting these odds, returning to Europe I was struck by the realization how much smaller and more resolvable our problems are. In most part, we have functioning democracies, and with a minimal amount of citizen awareness, we could keep them functioning. We have the privilege of almost universal literacy and many highly educated people – again, we should just not allow this to deteriorate. Our environmental record is not perfect, but our air/soil/rivers are overall in tolerable shape. Our food is nutritious and high quality.  We face dire climate change impacts in many parts of Europe, but we have the resources to prepare and take measures. Our declining population raises economic questions, but these are softer barriers than the cold equation of sharing shrinking resources among a growing number of people. Problems? In Europe, we have no problems we should not be able to resolve.

        See these links for my best of times and worst of times in Bangladesh, and advice for expats moving there! On expat life in general, check out the hidden dark side of glamorous expat life!

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