Brick Hauling, Deshi Style

I’ve been taking language classes at the HEED Language Center in Banani, another local neighborhood. This morning as I was waiting for my teacher to arrive, I was looking out the window watching some workers hauling bricks in the building next door. The workers were boys who looked to be in their late teens or early twenties, and they were carrying the bricks up to the 6^th or 7^th floor of the building. They do this by stacking a load of bricks onto a tray on their heads. Starting with an empty tray on a cloth pad on his head, a worker will grab a brick in each hand, reach up, and put them on the tray. He repeats this until he has 15-20 bricks on the tray. Then he stands up and carries the bricks up one flight of stairs. On the landing he’s met by another worker with an empty tray. The second worker sets down the empty tray and the two workers lean toward each other in order to pass the loaded tray from one head to the other. Then the two workers bump chests in a wave-like-motion pushing off each other to help the newly laden worker get his body under the tray. The second worker carries the loaded tray slowly up the next flight of stairs while the first goes down with the empty tray for another load. The process repeats until the bricks reach their destination. I don’t know how long their shifts last, but in the 10 minutes I was watching they must have carried 15 loads. There’s no need for them to hit the gym on the way home from work, that’s for sure.