Three days in a row with internet!? WHAT THE WHAT?!
I should be doing my grammar homework and translating a Bangla text but instead I am taking this opportunity with internet to share a fun story that Travis said was good enough to share.
I know I said that this was a funny story, and it is funny in a totally absurd way but it also alludes to a reality that's a bit difficult to swallow: there may be a need for some education in Bangladesh about the harmful effects of littering. Here's what I mean:
So we went on a field trip last week to Sonargaon, a city just outside of Dhaka. We saw an ancient mosque, a colonial palace and visited a market where you can buy some really beautiful handmade crafts including jamdani saris, which are woven by hand, stitch by stitch (the saris in the post above are jamdani saris that were being sold during our visit). This area of Bangladesh is incredibly beautiful and so different from Dhaka city. There are acres of rice fields (paddy), dozens of little ponds (pookurs) and miles and miles of lush, green trees (gach) and flowers (phool). People live off the land here in every way, fetching water from their ponds and eating and selling the rice they grow and the fish they catch.
It was a long trip so we all ate lunch in the bus. We collected all of our trash in a paper bag and handed it to our bus driver to keep at the front of the bus until we arrived back home.
Before I proceed further it will help to mention the academic demographic of our CLS group. There are at least 4 of us studying water pollution/arsenic poisoning and two others studying water-born diseases. The rest of us are in the humanities working on social issues in Bangladesh, ranging from NGO structures and agricultural rebellions to my work on the socially subversive dimensions of Baul theory and ritual. In brief, our work stems from an awareness and concern for the social, environmental and health problems that Bangladeshis face as well as an interest in Bangladeshis solutions or forms of resistance against these problems; we are also all too well aware of the problems of pollution and tainted water...our bodies remind us of this problem all too often.
As we are pulling out of the area we had stopped to eat lunch at, our bus driver hurls the bag of trash onto the side of the road, which, in this case, was directly into someone's pond. We could see someone on the other side of the pond gathering water, perhaps to drink. Needless to say, we bideshis produced an overwhelming gasp of alarm. Tara, an environmentalist who works on arsenic poisioning screamed "OH NO, OH NO, OH NO!" and literally fell to her knees. It was like watching a car accident; our faces were pasted with looks of horrified disbelief. But our bus driver just laughed and said, "It is Bangladesh! It is good! We do this here!".
Watching the embarassed look on our driver's face in his realization that he had for some reason offended a bus full of rich white people who were now righteously yelling at him about the "right thing to do", the anthropologists and transnational femininsts on the bus were conflicted about this particular situation; do you yell at the driver with some air of moral superiority? Of course not. We had a Mohanty voice in the back of our heads telling us "You have to find a different collaborative means of discussing the problems of pollution and attempt to create new lines of communication wherein you incorporate the driver and his cultural perspective to creatively ferment new strategies of anti-pollution activism"...(yadda yadda yadd). However, our thoughts were somewhat pointless because a few other CLS'ers were already in full on offended bideshi mode, yelling at the driver not to litter. In the end the driver, a super nice dude who I know didn't mean to offend, apologized, but I'm not sure if he knew why he all of the sudden felt like he had to.
It was one of those moments of cultural contact, or perhaps collision, wherein you realize not only a socially ingrained mode of thinking that is stridently different from your own, or at least different from the one you know you should take up, but also the conflict of approaching such difference when we are, unfortunately, so disproportionately privilaged. We also hilariously encountered each others' different modes of approaching cultural difference. We faced academic clashes in how to theoretically approach the situation: some of us were frozen in feminist theoretical anguish, others of us pretty much just flipped out. Which one is better? I guess that's not really the question; the question is....why didn't someone have a camera to film this hilarious scene of cultural and academic conflict? (The more obvious and educated question is how do you reshape understandings of pollution and its interconnectedness with social and environmental health but I am still dwelling on the cluster of clashes that occurred on the bus).
So that is my slightly funny, slightly disturbing, slightly thought provoking story. I have so so so many to tell; a sheltered well-to-do white gal finds herself in many funny situations in a foreign country. I promise to tell you more, but this will have to do for tonight. Homework calls.
I love you all. Thank you for the prayers, love and support.
With all my love from the city of mosques,
ashlee
p.s. above you will find some pictures of my home, bedroom,school, and the area around my school. Enjoy!
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