It was paradise in Inglewood.

Whenever I come back to LA, I nourish this enduring feeling of “home” that I’ve come to recognize as synonymous with this city of paradoxes. While it’s a place that I love and hate, it’s also a place where I’m free to be me. Not only so, but in all its contrariness and spacious lack of community, it also is a very American place: a place where people mix and gather and walk down the street – or drive down the street – with an entirely different set of questions and issues than those people on the other side of the world. In this place, at least, we are free to say and to feel and to think whatever it is that we will, no matter how ungenerous or bigoted or arbitrary.

Freedom is something conspicuously lacking in the daily life of a Bangladeshi. Something I take for granted as an abstract American ideal is immediately obvious when I’m not free to wear the clothes I want, I’m not free to walk alone after dark, I’m not free to go to the movies, I’m not free to go to the market and get charged the same price for a piece of fruit as the person next to me with darker skin, and I’m not free to give hugs or shake hands or do so many of the things I consider natural and meaningless at home.

In some ways, leaving Bangladesh makes me feel like a quitter – the quitter I’m sure everyone else wants to be. When things are so awful and you can come back and have so much, it’s quite easy to feel guilty or lost or unworthy. A few weeks ago, I asked Kent what is the average career span for development workers who live in Bangladesh. He told me the “country director” of major NGOs changes frequently – sometimes every year, or every other year. The current country director of the NGO we did work with had been there for 4 years – a relatively long time for those in his position. In Bangladesh, 5 years of service is a really long time. For missionaries, it’s much longer. While not an entire “career,” he says 20-25 years is the longest most stay.

To me, who has been there for spans of 1 month and 3 months, it seems like a lifetime.

Everybody gets worn out. No one who comes can stay. The tragic level of poverty, disease, and suffering is terrible. There is no way around it. The quality of life, even for those at the upper reaches of society, is laughable. The sky is gray in spite of the sun and dirt settles into a chronic cough that must look like smokers’ lung on the inside. For nearly 150 million people, this is The World. This is what it’s like to be alive. For those of us who have been there, and know what it’s like, the enduring question that runs through our minds is this: “Is there anything we can do?” It’s not really “What can we do,” as if there was some sort of solution that, if everybody just pitched in, could fix “the problem.” There are way too many problems for that. And I’m not convinced that the answer to that question is not “Disperse the population of the country throughout SE Asia and flood the country out of existence.”

Truth be told, Dhaka seems to have only gotten worse in the 4 years since I was last there. And I don’t know what to do about it – what to think. I’m not sure if development can help. And I’m not sure I’m left with anything other than enduring questions.

If you are the kind of person who likes to give money to feel better for how decadently we live in the West, consider the following vetted-by-me organizations that I know are doing good and valuable things, and which are NOT run by corrupt leaders.
SIM Bangladesh’s Salam Training Centre
Bengal Creative Media (my company, BCM)
World Mission Prayer League

“Everyone is in their own lane, Aziz bhai,” I commented. “The traffic looks so… tidy.” And indeed, the sloppy mess of rickshaw-between-car-between-baby taxi-between-bicycle-between-car that normally clutters each breathable inch of space (betwixt which beggars manage to knock on car windows one at a time and ask for change) was today evenly divided into four lanes, structured by men in orange vests with handouts telling drivers to mind the red and green lights and to obey the signs. Indeed, the government has recently issued a law requiring vehicles to “stay in the middle of your lane unless indicated by your turn signal, and obey all traffic lights and appropriate street signs.”

This, my friends, is a revolutionary new requirement, unprecedented in potential reach. If Bangladeshis could manage this superhuman feat, the earth might cease its revolutions and cause the sun to bow in honour of this great achievement. However, citizens hold out little hope for such a result, as the scheme, which currently has traffic controllers at maybe 6 or 7 prominent intersections throughout the city, is masterminded and managed by some Japanese firm, anxious to bring their civilized ways to Southeast Asia. The colonial style of such a “modernizing” endeavour is not lost on the people.

So as I sat with Aziz bhai waiting in our proper queue, I asked him what he did over the weekend. “I look for a wife for my youngest son,” he said. I asked him how he went about finding a suitable mate for his son, and where he was looking. “Outside Dhaka I go, into the villages. My son not marry someone from Dhaka City. These girls not so good. So far, I find some girl with pretty face, but very thin, and not healthy. Then they have little dowry.” I asked if he knew the families of these girls ahead of time, but he insisted they were strangers. I asked if his son had any voice in choosing his mate. “My son 28, but as he not very good looking, and I not very rich, is hard to find for him good wife. He accept whoever I find, so my choice is his choice.” The more questions I asked, the stranger it all became: the curious sense of cultural familiarity that allowed this man to knock on the doors of village strangers and ask if they had a daughter of marrying age; the trust a son placed in his father’s choice for him; the superficial qualities of a woman required to merit his blessing; and finally, the despicable exchange of money required, called a dowry, that bought and sold a woman’s life away.

In the afternoon, I left the office with Aziz bhai and Sumi, the only other female at work, to make a shopping trip to New Market, a crowded shopping plaza in central Dhaka. As we braved the incredible traffic in what turned out to be an hour of driving, I asked Sumi, eight months pregnant, about her husband. I knew they had been married for over a year, and although I have been here for almost a month, it finally occurred to me to ask what he does for a living. “He is a singer,” Sumi told me, “and a creative teacher.” “Where does he teach?” I asked. She gave me the name of someplace I had never heard of, which I learned, upon further inquiry, was several hours from Dhaka. “He lives there,” said Sumi, “and he comes to Dhaka once a month, for two or three days, to see me. But when we were married, then he stayed for two weeks.”

She explained that her parents had tried to find him work in Dhaka, but nothing was opening up, so he couldn’t leave his job. As for her part, Sumi said, “I can never leave Dhaka City.” But I imagine it also has something to do with the couple needing both of their incomes.

“What will you do once the baby comes?” I asked. “I stay with my parents,” Sumi told me, “and they will take care. And maybe in another year, my husband can find work here.” Sumi’s resolute strength and indefatigable sense of humour immediately deepened my sense of respect for her: this woman, modest and unassuming as she is, was suddenly a hero in my eyes.

After what seemed like ages of walking through endless stalls of colourful saris and salwar kameezes with bright patterns of thin cotton, endlessly flowing fabrics and young salesboys shouting out “Madam! Madam!” while customers jockeyed for position and bargained over prices (which Sumi, by the way, turned out to be very good at), we emerged with dishtowels, ornas, trinkets and china. We found Aziz bhai in the car and took off… only to sit at the same traffic light for 8 continuous revolutions, watching it turn from red to green to red again, without moving an inch. Besides for the ever-present honking of horns, it was actually the most patient I had ever seen an entire road of traffic behave. As the cross-traffic refused to stop, our unruly cluster waited, an waited, and waited some more.

It was torture.

When we finally made it through that intersection 20 minutes later, things didn’t get much better. Traffic continued to ebb much more than it flowed. After crawling ever so slightly for what seemed like ages, we would roll once again to a dead and indefinite stop. “This is traffic situation in Bangladesh,” said Aziz bhai. After an hour, we had made it about halfway – back to Sumi’s home – and after another 10 minutes of stop-and-nearly-stop rickshaw backups, we made it onto some sort of a major road, from which rickshaws were blessedly banned. Suddenly the sporadic lane-markers returned, and with them the traffic directors instructing drivers to “stay in your lane and follow traffic lights,” and with it some temporary sense of order.

It all seemed so maddeningly clear. To avoid appearing racist, bigoted, or imperial, we westerners refuse to pass judgment on the cultures we don’t understand. We feel ashamed, somehow, to admit anything that we feel might be absolute. “An imposition,” our politically correct minds tell us, “of western values on a non-western society.” But sometimes it’s impossible not to do, not just when you think of a marriage arranged without love, but when you think of a society with little value for women beyond what they look like and how much money comes with them. It’s also quite hard not to pass judgment on a society whose people can’t figure out that cramming into the small space next to you at a perpendicular angle to the rest of the traffic is not going to cause you to reach your destination any faster.

Of course the danger here is making criticism absolute, and condemning everything in a society based on both the things you can’t understand and the things that drive you crazy because of their inherent “wrong-ness.” But then there is always a Sumi. Amidst the madness, somehow there is room for someone like Sumi: an independent woman, living in a man’s world, and refusing to seek the protection she has rightfully earned from her husband in the village. For this woman, something greater is her strength. She, somehow, makes it seem possible for all of these other things to change, and for the true beauty of such an upside-down society to shine through and all of its horrors to melt away.

“Do you think people will ever learn to follow these traffic rules?” I asked Aziz. “No,” he replied resolutely. “I think this is Bangladesh. This never change.”

I have started watching a lot of HBO-Asia in the past week, which is a way to quell the evening boredom and remind me of home. Only, the more I watch “Hollywood movies” here in Bangladesh, the cheesier they seem to me. I start to wonder if the very things I find lame and cheesy about Bengali movies aren’t inherently lame and cheesy in their western counterparts as well. Perhaps it’s also because things look worse on a smaller screen, but I have started to question my very own notions of “quality” by seeing the cliches of Hollywood in an outside context. Of course, many of these movies I would have always thought cheesy, because they are made from inside the “machine” that I feel is so unadventurous and lacking in risk or reward. So many of these same movies look just as cheesy and unrealistic to me in America. I just can’t tell if these are cheesy to my western mind or just my Asian one.

Lately, it seems cultures are mixing, and my own prejudices about this culture are slowly melting into misapprehensions I have about my own culture. Corruption, for example, which is rampant and widely accepted here (in the form of our clients paying off interviewees for a favorable interview, just to name one example) is not such a stranger at home, where my friend works for a boss who employs a constant stream of unpaid interns instead of ever hiring a salaried employee for his faux-successful company.

Life is complicated, and does not become more simplified when you demonize certain people and uphold others. While this part of the world has a long way to go, I wonder, to whom can they look as a shining example of ethical norms and moral absolutes? Because not one of our supposedly “modern” and “developed” nations in righteous. No, not one. And how dare we tell those who live a much harder life that they shouldn’t do something that makes it just a little bit easier for them to get by?

But maybe I should back up and explain some of this mother-tongue stuff. A little history lesson: before India gained its independence from its colonial captors in Britain, the nation included the ethnically separate region which is now Pakistan, and its great Muslim ally in the east, Bangladesh. But India’s struggle for independence created an uprising, and an alliance, between these extreme eastern and western reaches of the country, and in 1947, they declared their independence under the name Pakistan, which later became an Islamic state. All was well and good for about 20 years while this new nation of Muslims found peace. However, trouble was brewing between the larger, stronger region of West Pakistan, and its little brother, East Pakistan. With little government representation and even less in terms of aid for the never-ending flood of natural disasters (cyclones, floods, mudslides), Bengali Pakistanis were disgruntled, to say the least. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was West Pakistan’s insistence that East Pakistan adopt Urdu as the official language. And that was the end: there was rioting in the streets. Major uprisings. Bengali, spoken since the 8th century among not just 150 million East Pakistanis, but almost an equal number of Indians in West Bengal, was under attack. And, in 1971, after a bloody war that lasted for 9 months and borrowed the support of Indian forces (take that, Pakistan!), the nation of Bangladesh was created.

So, today we celebrate the mother tongue: the language of the people. The language fought for by the people. The language that will never die.

This is me with laughably big hair

So when I arrived in Bangladesh, it occurred to me that henna must be the answer! I had seen its affects on our wise old grandfather-like driver, Aziz: shots of bright color streaked through his dark brown hair. Surely, I reasoned, henna must be the magic bullet for overzealously coloured hair!

So I walked into the salon today, comforted by the unusual dominance of ladies: three surrounded the cash register, while their mothers and older sisters casually painted fingernails, trimmed toes, and plucked eyebrows with concentration and precision while idle copies of Cosmopolitan and Vogue lay discarded on the tables. I picked one up. The atmosphere of a women’s beauty salon, always familiar the world over, gave me a certain comfort in the rough world a Bangla-land. Not to mention, supporting a business in which women did all of the taking and making of money felt summarily pleasant.

After my hair was uncomfortably worked over with the thick henna paste, and set in a hovering, 1960s-style perma-blowdryer, I spent the next hour reading what I was soon to discover was both a boring and pretentious fashion magazine full of glossy, over-Photoshopped images of bizarrely alien-like creatures who I assume were supposed to resemble women. The tongue-in-cheek copy, celebrating various chic and expensive “green” and “ethical” efforts in New York and London, wasn’t much better.

Now, a few hours after sweating it out from my heated head down for an hour while I “read” the sparsely-placed articles in the magazine, I cannot remember one interesting thing I came across.

When the time came to wash the henna out, I was grateful. Finally, I sat before the mirror in a salon chair while the stylist prepared to dry my hair. She took off the towel so I could see my bright new exotic colour. Only, there was nothing exotic about it at all. In fact, the “red” was merely a little lighter than my original dark brown, with tones of highlight visible only under directly light. As the stylist began to dry my hair, I got so used to the colour I couldn’t see the difference between it and my original one. As she worked the brush in rolls around my hair, I realised it was drying practically miles from my head. And in fact now I feel a bit like the 1980s wife of a southern politician. My hair has never been this big in my life.

As I strive to make sense of this rather unfocused and irrelevant blog, I am struck by the enigma of my day: a western beauty salon; an eastern dye method; an unrealistic magazine; an unexpected outcome. When some things seem unquestionably out of reach, both in this society and around the world – gender equality, supermodel beauty, and naturally bright-orange hair, to name just a few – what makes us still, in the isolation of our own safe salons, still reach for them?

And it’s called the American Club. Now, don’t get me wrong – the British have one too. And so do the Germans, and the “Nordics” (okay, so there weren’t enough members at the Finnish Club and they had to expand their reach). And I think the Canadians have one too. But that’s beyond the scope of this exploration: I’ll just stick with the American Club.

When I first arrived here, I thought it was a bit pretentious and oh-so-racist, even, to have a private gathering place for rich white people in which the Bengalis served as the “lower class.” I had never belonged to a private club before in my life, and could just imagine the lavish golf courses with dark brown caddies toting around golf clubs for the affluent white folk. I despised it immediately. And my impression didn’t immediately change when I stepped inside as a guest of the boss and saw the rows upon rows of blooming flowers and mostly-green grass in the otherwise brown and dry climate, stretching over a city of dust and rubble. My boss’s wife casually slipped off her orna, the gold-standard for female modesty, mandatorily worn like a shawl-and-headscarf over any other piece of clothing a woman wears: if she doesn’t have her orna, she’s fresh meat on the street – even in the raging-hot summer temperatures.

So this intrigued me, and started to win me over. The American Club: a place where an American can be an American. At first glance, yes, it did have tennis courts, a gym, and a pool. But the pool wasn’t heated. And, more importantly, their menu included hamburgers and fries, macaroni and cheese, a weekly barbecue, and seasonal pumpkin pie. Not to mention brands of ketchup only found at the commissary and generally only available to government employees. This was the casual stuff of American life, not the fine, snobbish pickings of an elite upper class. And the drink – oh, the alcohol! In a country where alcohol was not permitted, they served two-for-one margaritas during Happy Hour, for the grand old price of $2.20! And that’s right – all prices were in dollars, so you knew just how little money you were spending.

For my friends, the American Club was a sort of refuge in times of deepest, darkest depression – and rightly so. It was the only place to feel normal – sort of (because the mosquitoes and bad air, sadly, did not park themselves outside the Club’s door). And, over this past week, it has been the only place to serve the kind of bland foods one is desirous of when one has been puking and feeling weak: tonic water and popcorn. You might not imagine they would be so hard to come by on the mean streets of Dhaka, but of course you would be wrong.

Sitting, with my “exposed” legs dangled in the pool on a Friday afternoon, orna cast aside and book in my hands, I remember why it’s good to be at home for Mom’s chicken noodle soup when you’re sick.

I pondered this dramatic inconsistency during our entire shoot. I used to think that development was development, no matter who did it: faith-based NGOs, or strictly needs-based secular NGOs. People need food in their mouths and clothes on their backs, right? People need a sustainable way to live beyond a hand-to-mouth existence. And that in itself is the purpose of development. If you want to proselytize along the way, that is great, as long as the immediate need is being met; after all, people won’t listen to how much Jesus loves them if you’re not meeting their in-the-moment needs also. But our work with this secular NGO is really changing my opinion. Because if education gets better, and then the educated just flee the country, then what hope is there of making a lasting impact on government or society? The dramatically overlooked factor here is the power of faith and morality to affect a society: the overwhelming impact that the gospel of Christ has on a society whose highest value is not getting caught. This country of supposedly religious people values an honor vs. shame sort of facade, but when it comes down to it, their belief has no moral impact on their actions. And it is only education coupled with an upbringing in integrity – integrity not based on rules and discipline, but on a condition of the heart – that will cause major societal change in Bangladesh.

As I thought about cultures that have been successful through history, it occurred to me that most had a strong foundation of moral absolutes. In the ancient days, failure to adhere to those standards meant death or torture, and it was only by this long arm of the law that “morality” continued to reign. But once corruption persisted on a large scale, the society would crumble. In the high middle ages, as a renewed faith took root in the cultures of Europe, countries seemed to develop and prosper based on adherence not just to laws, regulations, and constitutions, but also laws of the heart: the goodness of men. This was the root of American culture when the Puritans procured their boats and set sail to the New World. And in fact, this “high moral culture” persisted in America for quite some time. Probably until the turn of the 20th century. And, while there are still evidences of that foundation, I think that society is beginning to crumble.

In truth, you can’t tell someone to be good. You can’t tell the government to shape up and give people basic human rights (or good roads or solid education, for that matter). You can’t tell people that the value of honesty and hard work far outweighs the value of a common bribe; but if you can tell them that a God who loves them has given them something totally undeserved, and that all they have to do is show their gratefulness and humility every day – well. You can’t make them believe it, but they’ll see for themselves it is the only thing that can transform a culture.

In spite of starting a few hours late due to tardy actors (who knew actors could be primadonnas – that came as a complete shock to me!), we actually finished an hour ahead of schedule (putting us at merely a 13-hour day!), thanks to some creative shot re-planning and a few blessed daylight exterior shots. For the most part, our actors were pretty good, although one was a bit of the classically overzealous Bengali ilk, flailing his arms and contorting his face like a clown. But it was all for the better, as our parable slowly transformed from a simple morality tale to a tongue-in-cheek rendering of a thought-provoking story, complete with a comedic, almost Spaced-like style. When you consider the carefully-conceived melodrama of Bengali movie posters, often with blood and guts, guns and babes, the simplicity and boredom of the movies is somewhat disappointing; but I think we’ll deliver on that same high bar of cheesiness, contributing the added bonus of a good story. More than anything I’ve ever done, I think it will inspire both thought and laughter.

The film industry in Dhaka is very small – a micro-bit of the Indian film industry, which it closely resembles. Most stories involve tons of Bengali singing, dancing, and romancing, with plenty of obligatory danger and action, overplayed in an almost cartoonish tone by a small revolving door of frequently-appearing players employed in the “studio system,” essentially. But don’t be taken in by this description, even if you enjoy more than your fair share of Hindi cheese, because Bengali cinema definitely has a less sophisticated style with much lower production values. Most projects, shot on video with minimal art direction and a visual sensibility somewhere between kung fu and “Miami Vice,” are aimed at Bangladeshi television rather than cinema. In spite of having little to no appeal to an international audience, the locals eat these movies up, and so the local industry continues to churn them out in a voracious, Bollywood-style fashion; only, in this case, it’s called “Dhallywood.”

Whenever BCM does a narrative production, they go straight to the top and hire these well-known national celebrities, with little of the hassle and game-playing we’re used to in the West: we just call the actor up and ask him to meet us at our office. No agents, managers, lawyers, or assistants: just Tajul, our office manager, and the celeb. In fact, the ones BCM has worked with before are always keen to meet with us, even on a moment’s notice, because we generally pay them more, and give them their paycheque much faster than the national production companies with whom they’re used to working. And yesterday was no different. We pinpointed an actor called Anwar and called him to ask if he was available for our film on Friday. Sure enough, he said yes, and agreed to come to our office and chat about it – all on the same day, in between 2 shoots he was working on. When he arrived at our office, I was surprised at the universality of actor-dom: naturally, he was shorter and smaller than any of us, with the obligatory over-swelled ego, congenial personality, and swooning praise. He was dressed in a distressed jean jacket over a skin-tight navy blue tee, and expensive-looking washed jeans with several names, logos, and brands imprinted all over the legs. To make things even better, he pulled out some age-revealing reading spectacles when confronting the script, making his faux-modern stylishness look even more ridiculous. After agreeing to do our film – which he honestly did seem excited about – he replaced his sexy specs with some über-cool shades and made his way out of the office, his absence leaving a void in the excited atmosphere created by his presence.

Well, if you were tempted to think any of those things about Bangladesh, let me be the first of many to inform you that you’re wrong. Bangladesh is as close to the Somalias and Zimbabwes of the world in terms of poverty as you can get in Asia, and is trailing just behind the likes of Chad, Iraq, and Sudan on the list of world’s most corrupt countries. The highly Muslim society is a less extreme and dangerous place than some of its Middle Eastern counterparts, but the appalling lack of respect for women is still at work in the shame-and-respect tone of society. Dowrys are expected for a successful marriage in most parts of the country, and women are commonly raped by family members. And, with half the population of the United States in a country roughly the size of Ireland, there’s certainly no manifest destiny going on over here either.

In a nutshell, it’s no picnic.

With that said, it might surprise you to learn that Dhaka, the nation’s capital, is also the NGO capital of the world. And, with at least 13 million people in this capital city, including a whole host of foreigners (B’deshis, in local slang) all trying to make a difference, you might still want to think that things are getting better. And maybe they are. But it sure is hard to tell.

I first came here 4 years ago with a development organization, Bengal Creative Media, that functions as a business. The idea behind it is to create a business mostly staffed by Bengalis that offers creative services, and functions morally and ethically (as opposed to by bribery and cheating, which is common here) . BCM does graphic design work for NGOs and other groups that want to create branding for their company. They also facilitate theatre in villages that addresses local problems, like health, education, and sanitation. This “theatre for development” strategy takes a team of artists into a village and discusses with some local, artistically-minded people the strategy for telling the story. The team then produces and acts in a drama for their peers – the entire village – complete with song and dance, that presents creative solutions to some of the village’s development problems. Back in Dhaka City, BCM also produces similar productions for television, which address local and national issues. And all the while, the ethics and integrity with which the business is run stands like a light upon a hill against the corruption of some of the other industries the company works with. BCM is staffed mostly with national employees, but when I first came, they wanted to start a division to do video work for other development agencies that would have a western audience. So, when you see those videos on websites profiling Habitat for Humanity or Save the Children or CARE disaster relief and development projects in Bangladesh, they’re probably made by us. I am one of about 4 revolving B’deshis who create Western media that shows a Bangladeshi perspective.

I’ve written extensively about the obvious – and not so obvious – colors of culture shock one is likely to find here and, as a returning foreigner, I have been able to come back with a refreshed – if not slightly jaded – perspective. I call it Advanced ‘Deshing. I’m sure what will follow in my next few weeks of blogging will catalog some of my highs and lows here, which I hope you will read on to discover.

Oh – and I plan to make some of my previous writing on the Desh available on my Writing page. Stay tuned for details on that.