Money and laundering

Here are the ways to get clean clothes in Dhaka:

• Send clothes to the laundry with the dudes-who-clean. Comes back after 5-6 days, boiled, beaten and finally, mangled. You can use the shirts for roof tiles. Highly impressive, albeit a bit harsh on the clothes. You then have to remember to cut the little note tags off the clothes before wearing them in public. Not cheap - costs about £10-15 a week.


• Handwashing. For underwear and sensitive garments. A couple of lumps of 'jet' handwashing powder (the box features a picturesque 50s housewife), water and a mass of underwear - and scrub. The water turns grey - is this just my sweat and secretions, or are the clothes caked with dust as well, or is this just the colour of Dhanmondi tap water? Price: effort...and exacerbated heat rash from the lazy rinsing.


• Washing machine!!! One was installed in the flat yesterday. It seems to work although it walked nearly a meter during the spin cycle. Heaving it back in place is as much effort as handwashing underwear, but it takes a shorter time. Now let's watch the electricity bill skyrocket.

Take heed for after the apocalypse

Spending last week on a field trip involved a lot of sitting in the car and watching the rice harvest in Chapai Nawabgonj. As we sped through villages and towns, scattering anything smaller than the landcruiser onto the road verges and terrifying righteous pedal-power travellers, it gave a good overview of the different harvest phases.
It was sort of fun to look into the lush green fields beyond the 'tempo' buses careering into potholes and ditches and past the cyclists carrying bunches of firewood and 50 kg of rice and balancing on the last 5 cm strip of asphalt, and piecing together the sequence of rice events. It seems to be:

• men advance around the field with sickles, cutting the bunches of rice and leaving them on the ground;
• people of all types gather up the bunches and tie them into sheaves;
• these are carried (on the head) to the house or yard;
• the farmers have hired a threshing machine: a cylindrical drum covered in short metal hoops that make the rice fly off the straw when you turn each sheaf over the hoops and foot-pump the mechanism.
• The rice is spread out on a convenient surface - school yeard, basketball court, roadside - to dry and people walk through every now and then, shuffling through to turn the grains evenly.
• The rice is transported in sacks (on home-made tractors, bikes or trucks)to market where it's weighed and sold at rock-bottom prices because the market is saturated.

So if we face a situation where we have to reconstruct civilisation after the total meltdown of modernity, you'll be pleased that you've read this blog and so know how to harvest rice. You just have to hope that your companions in survival have read another blog about germinating, sowing, transplanting and irrigating rice. Enjoy!

goat and pumpkin

At work today we talked about rural poverty. In certain districts of Bangladesh, absentee landlords own all the land. Although it's fertile as Eden, the people who work there (growing food) don't own any of it, and earn a living from their labour on other peoples' (probably my neighbours') fields. (They may well have had land before, but had to mortgage it to the landlords or moneylenders during crises like flood, drought or too many daughters). This means that after the September rice harvest, when there is no agricultural work to be done, these folks have nothing to live off and nothing to eat. The 'lean season' is called monga and is a high-profile development problem that DfID wants to solve.
So far so depressing. My colleagues were talking about livelihoods diversification strategies. Some of these involve growing alternative crops: if they ripen during September-November when everyone's starving, even if you can't eat them yourself (because they belong to the landlord), you can earn some money from hearvesting them. (And buy food from the market; life is twisted). Sweet potato, strawberries, root gardening involving pumpkins, cassava and neem tree were suggested. Or you can rear goats, ducks or chickens (given to you by an NGO). These don't need much land (which you don't have) but you can eat the milk or eggs or whatever, and lend the chicks or kids to your neighbours and get eggs back as interest, or similar. (Until the goat is washed away in the next flood, or it survives the flood and you have to sell it to the moneylenders so that you can get rice for your family to eat).
Goats around here are cute; they have long floppy ears that do something to counterbalance the satanic horizontal pupils. And ducks are cute. Low centre of gravity. I must admit that I was distracted from empathising with the full horror of being a trapped, desperate, howlingly angry monga-region cash cropper by the thought of these farm animals; and even more so, by the thought of them combined together with alternative food crops in a fragrant, succulent goat and pumpkin tagine.

alone

Now I realise why the Lonely Planet guidebooks are called that. Because with a Lonely planet, you never have any need to talk to another person.

A really good day

Yesterday.
I woke up with mellow morning sunshine through the hotelroom curtains. Good breakfast coffee. Some telecommunications and work things out of the way.
Then: 1.5 hours of yoga on a rooftop! Don't imagine anything fancy, now... A bog-standard third world urban rooftop with bare concrete beams, water pipes to step over, yellow nylon washing lines, a few potted plants and improvised brick walls. In front: the outside wall of the taller building next door. Behind, the neighbours' washing. Sunny and fresh, activity on the road below, birds swooping, motorbikes zooming.
I'd paid for a session with instructor D, trained in yoga and ayurvedic massage in Kerala, serious credentials were rolled out by his colleagues in the spa reception. He turned out to be a short young dude, sympathetic and professional. We sat on dusty green mats, I was wearing my baggiest trousers and t-shirt, I expressed a preference for asanas (postures) over inner peace, and indeed we got the spiritualism out of the way with three oms.
Then: weird body contortions! Stretching! Bodily discipline! Balance! Lactic acid! Funny animal names! We started with standing up postures, me wobbling shamefully, but taking a lot of pleasure in standing on one leg, holding up my other heel on a level with my head, focusing on getting my knees straight and feeling some sun, breeze, some city noises around me. One part of the mind empty and focusing on stillness, another looking at the Italian tourists having a drink in a hotel garden below.
It was also gratifying to be able to do the fish asana, the cobra, the boa, the locust (!!! Half locust... On your stomach, one hand grabs one foot and hoists it up-up above the back, the other foot, knee bent, supports the leg in the air), even the headstand worked on the second try. And I like this 'now relax and take a few breaths' business in between asanas. I think Instructor D pushed the envelope a bit to see what kinds of postures I'd be able to do, being more flexible and gung-ho about movements (as in the capoeira attitude 'try this!' 'OK!') than your average gweilo. No pain at the time, though today my back muscles are peevish: 'You didn't warn us about that!'
So that was sunny, outdoorsy, challenging but not hard, satisfying exercise... I trooped downstairs to where Z was having a body scrub and pedicure, and signed up for the 'body scrub'.
This involved a masseuse giving me a mild massage - perfect after the unfamiliar yoga movements- with big sloppy handfuls of fragrant grit! Aaaaa it was drool-inducingly pleasant -- starting from the feet up to the neck. No painful massage-digs into muscle knots, no icky post-massage feel of 'how do i get this oil off'. The sheet I was lying on looked like modern art afterwards with a negative of my body in clean sheet, stencilled in coffee-and-rice grit.(Then: hot shower.) Zoe's toenails were also a cheery pink.
Friends, this place is not in the Lonely Planet, but go: Serenity Spa, opposite Hotel Florid, Z Street, Thamel Kathmandu.
The overwhelming good feeling lasted all day. We walked to Swayambunath temple through a bit of real Nepal after that. The endorphins got a bit of a top-up from climbing the stairs up to the temple.

Joke about work

"I will try to translate a joke for you, so that you can understand our organisation better. Here. There was a man who died and was condemned to hell. But he was a borderline case, he wasn't a very bad sinner, so he had a lighter sentence: he was allowed to choose the section of Hell where he would be punished for all eternity. So he was being guided around Hell by a demon, seeing all the burning, the skinning alive, etc. But then he was shown one section where people were just standing around, not screaming, not in agonising pain - they were just standing up to - up to just above their knees - in, well, excrement. And they were all drinking coffee! So the man thought, hey, this is not so bad! So he chose that section. OK, the demon pushed him into the lake of shh- and he got his footing.
But then suddenly a bell rang and everyone put their coffee mugs away and turned - upside down - and started standing on their hands in the shit. And you can relate, if you're standing on your hands in shit that goes to just above the knee, well...
So the man said What's all this!! And the demon answered, That was just the coffee break!
So I interpreted this: was the proposal writing we had done so far at work - was it just the coffee break?

Inflamed beyond the limits of self-control

Today Z and I were invited to a meal with ladies who work, but also lunch.
We’d been told that it’s informal – so we came wearing comfortable clothes, on the racy side for Bangladesh but relatively cool (e.g. just-below-calf length silk skirt, grey t-shirt, contemporary red perspex earrings and red wrap for me). Of course the other guests were in starched fine saris, full arsenal of gold jewellery, impeccable makeup and hair. The lunch was a very civilised ‘salon’ type affair. Our hostess had invited her relatives, colleagues from the university, and family friends and political allies. We talked to at least two women who are professors of sociology at Dhaka University (the hotbed of politics, notably the war of independence started with a university massacre); teachers of English at Brac University; a boutique owner; two knitwear factory owners and a Chief of Staff for the U.S. Navy who invited us to California to visit. And a physiotherapist from Oxford. We talked about their child/work balance, their lives in New Zealand, Norway and Nebraska; the latest designs in the sweatshop; their school’s exchange programme with Durham; the boondocks that is Sherman, Texas; my mum’s physiotherapy; women’s lack of rights under Hindu religious law; the political war between student factions…
-I’m starting to feel that as long as the elites are in charge of the development sector it can never really have a serious effect on the lives of 'marginalised populations' i.e. normal people. I think I’ll start another internship on the side of this philanthropising, ideally learning to run a café so I can revert to my family’s (Virkkunen side) roots: small business owners.
After the lunch towards sundown we took a walk around Dhanmondi ‘lake’ (a puddle) and then explored our way to Aarong, the Brac handicraft shop. The men were unusually rude, perhaps because of being drunk on Independence Day celebrations, or perhaps the sight of my ankles inflamed them beyond the limits of their self-control.