Saturday, February 16, 2008

Adventures in Dhaka (What's love got to do, got to do with it?)

Today was amazing. I have been sick all day, achy and feverish, but it has turned out to be an amazing day nonetheless.

At work, I spoke with Afsana-apa about going to the field an extra time to see the workings of the newest MNCH programmes. That pretty much means I will be gone from Dhaka every weekday/workday until I leave. I am so glad for that...it means I will be taking advantage of every minute I have here. Also, today was my interview with Afsana-apa to clarify all the information I am putting in my reports. I have been talking to everyone at lower levels on the organogram ladder, but today was my day to hear her superior evaluations of MNCH. God that woman is amazing. She didn't bullshit me like everyone else. In all my interviews, no one wants to tell me any criticisms of BRAC. Everyone always wants me to be impressed and to realize how great BRAC is. Well; I do. I get it. BRAC is the most amazing organization I have ever studied. The problem is that there is no way it is perfect. I think these people are afraid I will lose sight of the positives if I am thinking too much about the negatives.

Anyway, Afsana-apa's criticism fundamentally contradicted my reasons for BRAC's greatness. I have always found the organizational responsiveness from the head office to the field workers to be a key factor in the ability of the institution to make big plans that implement well. Afsana-apa actually identified this trait as an inefficiency. The lower level workers have become dependednt. They are all well-educated, but, as she said "they have lost the ability to use their own intelligence". This is funny, because while I couldn't understand all those meetings I attended in Bangla, it was pretty obvious to me that Afsana-apa and Habib-bhai were doing some pretty simple problem solving with the workers. The problems needed little but to be talked out. Why didn't these intelligent people just troubleshoot on their own? They have grown to get okays and not to trust their own midlevel decision-making.

She gave me a few examples of implementation issues with the primary health care service provision in the field. The Shasthya Shebika and Shasthya Kormis, health volunteer and health worker, were very difficult to recruit and train because of the poor standardization of education certification. Health workers are required to have education to the tenth grade, but some candidates were certified under false pretenses. Once training came around, it was apparent that the women were not capable of fulfilling their duties with competence. Shasthya Shebikas needn't much more than reading skills, but they often misunderstood the workload they were volunteering for and quit soon into training or implementation. In order to bypass these difficulties, the BRAC workers made a second attempt at employing the field by speaking to villagers and getting better peer-analyses of character.
At work today, Debrah had said she was thinking about watching movies and sitting in her violently purple room. I looked forward to crashing her plans with a sitting-and-doing-nothing partner but it turned out AZIM my fave fun friend from Mymensingh training and research center was coming to Banani! I felt like shit, really wanted a nap, had been given about 16 hours to finish the MNCH section of the BHP annual report, but I was SO pumped to see him. I came home, threw some Western clothes on, and powerwalked to CoffeeWorld/ Pizza Corner to meet him.

Azim brought his bearded friend Jahid (not to be confused with jihad) who is an English Literature major in some university in Dhaka. We were trying to go to dinner somewhere or eat pizza at pizza corner, but they didn't want to have anything. There isn't much to do in Dhaka, so we all sat and drank tea and coffee at Coffee World, some of us had a bit of pizza, and we caught up with everyone. [Note: Azim had a cold and didn't want to take anything chilled because it would make his sickness worse. In America, I take as many cold fluids as I can to flush out sickness...weird cultural difference I guess] Azim told me everyone misses me at the TARC and it made me really want to go back to Mymensingh before I leave. Shaharia, Salma, Mooshet, Atik, and Azim were the first people I became friends with in Bangladesh. It also helps that I associate them with the best week I have had here...the week I first got to see the workings of BRAC with the people.

After tea and coffee, we walked for a long way to go to the park across the street from the American Club, basically a pathway around a small lake. The night was so dark and the faint reflection of a sliver of the moon and the faraway streetlights made the ripples on the lake shimmer a little. This gave just enough light for us to see the uneven path we were walking on. The conversation was structured to be so traditional and pure... I don't really know how else to describe it. It all began when Azim's friend told us about his "heartwrenching debacle." He is in love with a girl, but he cannot tell her he loves her because she is so conservative that doing so will ruin his chances . But how can he ever be with her if he never tells her? While we walked away the crisp summery evening, he spoke of things like "love is pain" and sang some Hindi songs while we walked. (People sing all the time here. They always ask me to, and always they're certain I have a beautiful voice... but I really don't... and they really do.)

Then he got sentimental again and said he knew a beautiful American song. "Do you know of George Michael?" he asked. Yes. I am certainly familiar with the better half of Wham!... and then he began... "oceaaans apaaart.. day after day..." and sang all of "wherever you go" by georgey. It was surreal. Here I am, the other side of the world, walking in some random park with Bengali foliage and an arched bridge with a random bearded Bangladeshi man and my study abroad friends...while one sings retro pop love ballads. I was conscious of the foreign atmosphere, enjoying myself very much. I don't think I will ever forget that hour in the park.
I have read novels that take place in traditional settings, and in those stories people go for walks in parks and speak beautiful words like these, but never have I conversed realistically, especially with grown men, about the philosophy of love. I would only talk about such things while giggling in my pajamas at my girlfriends houses, and generally those talks were superficial and gossipy. Last night I talked about rationality versus romance and the personal pursuit of emotion versus the ability for fate to find you. I am sure my cultural traditions of dating before marriage contradicted their fundamentals of arrangement. Because of this, the love-talk was really a culturally based philosophical comparison. They talked as if working for a relationship is like fighting fate. If it works, then fate has wanted it to; if it doesn't, then it wasn't meant to be. This is so different from the "fight for it" kind of romance I have been socialized to desire.

After the park, Evan and Nick had to leave to eat dinner with their host family, the Costas (love them). I wanted to walk Debrah home and go get ice cream or something so we could gossip about how weird the night was, but in my offer to Debrah, Azim and Jahid agreed they'd like to join. So the three of us went to Gelato for a nightcap. Azim and Jahid wanted coffee, and since they both pay for everything all the time I offered to buy. It was a weird refusal that turned into my picking out drinks for the guys if I was to pay. All the shop had were lattes and macchiatos, so I bought two lattes for the guys and two gelatos for Debrah and me. Well, Azim and Jahid turned out to be a little less than hardcore about their lattes, each adding like a cup of sugar. I kept telling Azim to dip his cookie in his latte and he kept refusing, same with Jahid. Randomly like 20 minutes later, Azim said "I will do it! I will dip my biscuit!" and dramatically threw this mini cookie into his coffee, laughing HYSTERICALLY. Azim, dip, don't drop. Anyway, I suppose I see why he refused and saw the proposition to be some radical custom. Debrah and I laughed hysterically. In this conversation, everyone was a little slap-happy from exhaustion... but it turned weird. A lot of talk about Debrah and my beauty and some awkward silences made it pretty strange. Also, when we all randomly were talking about linguistics, Azim made a pretty un-PC impression of the Chinese language, saying that most East Asian languages sounded like "chingchong...". I mean, he talked about the Dutch language too, and hadn't been socialized the way we have to respect those kinds of differences, but I must say I respect Debrah's tolerance of that kind of behavior. She must have had to dig deep not to say anything.

All in all, the night was great. Completely surreal. More to come I am sure... Azim invited us to a wedding on FRIDAY! Gotta get a sari (Bangladeshi dress) now and learn how to wear it by Friday!
<3

No comments: