Touching down between neat little rows of short and well-manicured buildings, amidst sprawling freeways with cars spaced orderly about and billboards shouting “Welcome to Los Angeles,” I was glad, once again, to be home. I stepped out of the airport and onto the sidewalk of the LAX horseshoe of drop-offs and pick-ups and took in a deep breath of fresh air. Ahhhh. Clean air smelling of nothing but sunshine and blue sky. No unidentifiable stench of rotting garbage. No barely-visible clouds of dust and soot and pollution. No chaos of honking horns and rickshaw bells or piles of broken bricks and rubble. No crowds of anxiously staring men hanging around. And – maybe most shockingly – no one asking me for money.
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
Well, today was our bonus shoot of the short film I concepted and wrote last week: way to think on our feet! I can hardly believe it all came together. Unfortunately, my friend, cohort and DP, Dan, ate some bad curry yesterday and spent most of the day with a rotten stomach, sleeping it off and puking. However, he did manage to stay with us during the morning, just long enough to instruct our light guys to hang c-stands sideways from the ceiling with twine (and yes, they had lights on the ends of them) and blow a mountain of créme brulée-smelling canned fog into our small shooting room, causing me a sore throat I kept with me through the rest of the day. But notwithstanding our newly acquired stomach and respiratory illnesses, the shoot went great.
In a bit of a wild week of idea-swapping, I decided to do the first in a series of short “parable” films I’ve been thinking about here at BCM. It’s a project I planned on starting back in the US, but the idea came up to give the stories a bit of an international voice, and perhaps do them in different places in the world. Bangladesh is, of course, a great place to start! Since my boss has always wanted to do this type of film for a national audience, he was on board right away. I wrote a 4-minute script, and before I knew it, we were planning to shoot it within the week. Since we’re already shooting a documentary project on the days before and after the new mini-shoot date (the new shoot is on our “day off”), our equipment is already set, so the next step was casting. Which brings me to my title.
I am now one week into my second visit to one of the most unglamorous and remote parts of the world: Bangladesh. While it may seem that, surrounded by the up-and-comers on the world’s financial scene, like India and China one one side, and southeast Asian tourist hubs like Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam on the other side, Bangladesh must be one of the “small, but steaming ahead” sites of world development that you just don’t hear much about. Perhaps factories are thriving and Bollywood culture is beating out the heart of this soon-to-be prosperous people. Or perhaps it’s one of those hidden gems: the final frontier for “off the beaten track” tourism.
