Odds and Ends

Even now after four-and-a-half months of living here, nearly every time we leave the house we see something that makes us raise an eyebrow in amazement, amusement, puzzlement, or dismay. Some examples:

If you read the “Daily Star and Other Funny English” you might have gathered from the orange juice container quote that product labeling standards here are somewhat relaxed compared to what we’re used to. On our most recent outing to New Market we ran across these cherries? tomatoes? cranberries? – clearly food of some sort, yet the label claims they are men’s briefs. Well they won’t trick me!














A couple weeks ago Jen and I were walking through Farmgate to catch a bus. Farmgate is one of the busiest transportation hubs in Dhaka as well as a big market area. On a typical day the side-walk is so jammed with people that you are literally bumping shoulders with someone on every-other step. Imagine leaving a large stadium after a major-league sporting event as everyone tries to press through the row of double doors to reach the outside – only in Farmgate you are already outside. There are just that many people... So there we were walking through the crowed, when I noticed that the sea of heads (I’m taller than most people here, so that’s my view) was parting up ahead, much like water flows around a rock in the river. When we got closer we could see that the cause of the disturbance was a man – probably the father - with a child - his son? - stopped in the sidewalk. The man was holding the kid’s pants around his knees, and the kid was taking a wiz! Right there in the middle of the sidewalk! (Alas, my camera was at home.) What was most shocking to me was not that a kid was taking a wiz on the street – after all there are practically no public restrooms in Dhaka, and if you’ve gotta go you’ve gotta go – but here was a clearly upper middle class adult teaching a child that it was okay to just piss wherever you please. There was no attempt to aim for the gutter or a trash pile – to my eyes it constituted a total disregard for public space. And people just walked on by…

To be fair I should point out that this is the only time I’ve seen such a blatant display of public urination in Dhaka. On any walk around the city you will see men crouching by walls or ditches or in the corners of shady alleys and you know that they are peeing and that that is one of the reasons this city smells so bad, but somehow it’s not quite the same as the kid parting traffic with his stream.

There is not much grass in Dhaka, but the other day as I was sitting on a wooden box squished between a smelly man and a couple sets of women’s knees at the front of a bus to Gulshan, I looked out the window and saw a lone woman crouched on the ground using shears to trim the swath of grass between the air force base fence and the sidewalk. Behind her the grass was uniformly short, with piles of raked clippings forming a grid on evenly spaced six foot centers. Ahead the grass was still tall. I always know that Bangladesh is a poor country, but scenes like this really drive it home. Apparently, it is cheaper to hire a woman to spend all day, day after day, cutting the grass painstakingly snip by snip than to buy a mower and run it for the half-hour a day it would take to do the same job. At around 50 Taka a day, you can hire that woman for a long time for the cost of a lawn mower. With her there are no maintenance costs. If she breaks down, just get another. And there’s no startup cost for that either.

This next observation doesn’t raise my eyebrows anymore, but I haven’t mentioned it in the Chronicles yet, so I will now. Nearly all the multi-story buildings in Dhaka have concrete pillars on the roof with scraggly stalks of re-bar sticking out. The fact that the rest of the building is finished, makes the roof look like a demolition site. Like rubble. Communicates a sense of run-downess or decay. For a while I was puzzled by this. After all, how hard would it be to cut off the re-bar once the building is finished. In fact, buildings are left this way for a good reason. It makes it easy to add another story in the future. Given that Dhaka is tied for the fastest growing city in the world that is probably smart planning.











You know you’re in the third world when this message appears on your TV. It reads “This cable network has payment due and is requested to clear same immediately.” It interrupted our viewing of American Idol.Ohhh, the hardships we face…

Clever Deshi Inventions

For a while now I’ve been keeping my eyes out looking for cool Bangladeshi inventions/better ways of doing things that we could learn from or implement at home. Alas, after four months of observation the list is pretty short. So far it contains two items:

1. The wood block doorstop




















2. The dishwashing liquid refill pouch


(Lest I be accused of wandering around with my eyes shut, I should point out that I have noticed an immense collection of different tools/practices/ways-of-doing-things here that I had never seen before and to my eyes constitute Deshi inventions - the bodi knife, cooking on the floor, tandori ovens, rickshaws, ruti rolling sets, etc. However, none of these seems to me an improvement over the old stand-byes that we use at home. So I've left them off the list.)

Surely there exist many more useful innovations from this part of the world (local readers please offer your own observations in comments on this post), but perhaps many of them have already circled the globe, and so go unnoticed by me by virtue of already being familiar. (Actually, I have no idea were the two items on this list were actually invented. I first saw them here. So, as far as I’m concerned, here’s where they were invented.)

That said, I am impressed by the two that made the list. The wood block doorstop caught my eye when we first moved into our apartment here. Nearly every room has a door to a little balcony outside. During the day we usually leave a few of these doors open for better airflow. The doors themselves are solid wood and fairly heavy. When the wind gusts and blows them shut they make a bang that shakes the house. That’s where the wood block doorstop comes in. On each doorjamb there is a little wedge of wood attached to a hinge. When you open the door, you can swing the wedge between the door and the jamb and it will hold the door open and keep it from slamming shut. The real genius of the tool is its simplicity. At home we have those fancy hydraulic-arm things on our screen doors, but they’re almost always broken or at best semi-functional. But the little wood block is sturdy, simple to use, and does the job. The catch is, you need a sturdy door. When the wind blows there’s a lot of leverage on the little block and it can generate quite a bit of force on the door. I imagine if we tried the block method with our flimsy aluminum screen doors they’d buckle where the block meets the door in a moderate wind.

The other item on the list, the dishwashing liquid refill pouch, is also straightforward and perhaps already exists in the states though I’ve yet to see it. It’s just a good way to reduce packaging. Instead of buying a whole new sturdy plastic bottle with the spout at the top, you just buy a little plastic pouch of dishwashing liquid and reuse your perfectly serviceable old plastic bottle. You are still creating some waste in the form of the plastic pouch, but it’s less than the amount of plastic in the dispensing bottle.