I'm Back

Hi Everyone,
For those of you who haven't heard, I am heading to Tanzania for the summer and have opted to keep the same blog rather than start a new one. So be on the look out for new postings. My departure date is still unknown, but it is most likely going to be early next week. I have gotten all my immunizations so I am set to go, other than the lackc of visa, plane ticket, I'm not packed, and I have to move into my new apartment before them. Yikes...

Lots of Love,
Jenna

Photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/jenna.golan/IfIDieTellEveryoneIWasEatenByATiger?authkey=Fa8m0g7KKuo&feat=directlink

I feel that I have drastically misled my audience. I was going on and on about driving in Delhi and how they are the worst drivers and so on. But I have recently determined this to not be true at all. The fact of the matter is that Bangali drivers would be significantly worse, but development has not allowed them to reach their full potential. And trust me, I know this for a fact, I easily spend a third to half my day in a car. Dhaka, is the most densely populate place in the world. I don't really care what statistics say, there is no way people can live in any closer quarters than this. I often like to spend my time (any time, not just here) thinking of ways to improve things regardless of it is cities, food, or people. I have been trying to figure out a way to improve Dhaka. The major problem here is traffic. It is impossible to get any where because there is always traffic. It takes over an hour to go 10 km. I would just walk places except there are no side walks. I considered public transport for a while but subways would flood and I don't think a monorail would just collapse. I thought about buses then realized that they have them everywhere and they are always full. There are just too many people in Dhaka and a gross lack of city planning. Then I thought about moving people out to the countryside or establishing another megacity. But there is no place for them to go. Most of Bangaldesh floods. Thus, people have built up the land for roads, buildings, and villages by digging out space for the water to go and is used for farming in between time. Basically, all of Bangladesh looks like rice fields (look at the pics if you don't believe me). There is a single lane road that winds through the country and ditches on either side. For the most part, driving in Bangladesh is a continuous game of chicken. There is barely enough space for one car to drive on the road. Yet some how I see massive tour buses regularly pass each other. I think that 32 people die a day in traffic accidents and I honestly believe that must be an underestimation. After much pondering, I finally concluded that 150 million people is just too much to fit in the state of Wisconsin and that there is no real solution.


I forgot to mention that they don't know how to read maps here and that the streets are not in order and occasionally change. Thus the main form of navigation is rolling down the window and asking the nearest passerby if they know where random location is. They inevidably say yes and start directing you there. The catch is that they really don't and are making things up. So you end up in the middle of no where. We pulled out a map once and asked our driver if he knew where we lived and he said yes (he's been going there every day for a month). We asked if he knew where we lived on the map and pointing to the competely wrong location. I think cartography/ geography should be added to the primary school curriculum.

USA! USA!

Apparently the unpopularity of America and Bush's administration failed to impact Bangladesh's opinion of us. It appears that everyone loves America, everyone loves me because I am Americas, and everyone wants to move to America and work low paying jobs because they still believe in the America is the land of opportunity. It is quite distrubing. Without a doubt foreigners get special treatment in Bangladesh. Our driver was telling us that if he ever gets in trouble while driving, he just tells them that he is driving foreigners and its all ok. I found this hard to believe because there doesn't seem to be any traffic laws here so if you were to get in trouble it would have to be something pretty severe. But I was proven wrong. The other night we were reversing down a main road because we had missed our destination and a cop standing on the street starting approaching looking very mad. He then starting tapping the rear passanger window in order to get Saiful's attention. However, when he peeked in and saw me, he saluted, and then cleared the way so that we could continue on our mission of risking life and life to create traffic jams. I have never been saluted more in my life, security guards, police, and sometimes in the military personal salute me. Though this general attitude of servitude to foreigners does not just stop there. I often feel like the Bangali's that work for us will stop at nothing to accomodate us. As soon as we arrive in a village, chair magically appear for us to be more comfortable. Robbie (the cook) almost always does what we ask, I have no idea if we are putting him out and asking him to do more than necessary because he just nods his heads and smiles, even when Bala gave him his dirty underwear to wash. Saiful happily works until 16 hour days despite having a baby at home to care for. We were wandering around Matlab hospital the other day, (where everyone saluted us and let us do whatever we want) and I was beginning to get concerned that they would let us walk into a den of tigers if thats what they thought we wanted. This fear was immediately confirmed as we were walking around the pouds. There was a narrow trail around some of the ponds that we were walking along, there was a guard at the start who just saluted us and let us walk on by. About halfway around, one of our hosts calls out to us to be careful because there are giant snakes in the ponds! I would think this information would be valuable prior to starting on out little journey. But I guess they assumed we knew/ didn't want to bother us with important details that could inconvinience us or put us out in any way.

Damn you KFC

Today we ventured over to BIRDEM which is the diabetes hospital. Its kind of difficult to have sympathy for the few overweight Bengali's when we have spent so much time looking at malnourished mothers and children and old men and young men and basically everyone looks emaciated. It gets especially annoying when there is a very large man standing in front of the room telling us to look around us and look at how many people are not overweight by the western bmi standards yet have still developed diabetes. From where I am sitting in the doctor's office, all the people around me are quite fat and not in that compared to their patients way but in that compared to me and my friends way. I mostly find it annoying and this comes across when I am asking questions. I tried to demand to see some statistics and stratification of the population but they don't know these things. I guess being at hsph has left me with too high of standards. But I still maintain that I need an over view of the disease prevalence before I can fully appreciate, understand, and criticize the programs they are telling us about. My irritation subsides when they say that many malnourished people are presenting with diabetes and so it appears that in addition to obesity being underweight also causes it. But then my irritation returns when it comes out they have not attempted to establish any sort of biological reasons as to why this happens nor do they have any statistics regarding the percentage of the patients that are this way.

Now, I know that Bengali's love their fried chicken. There is KFC, BFC, and even a California Friend Chicken which I did not try and understand or explain to people why this was horribly inaccurate. There is a McDonald's in Old Dhaka and people keep saying how good pizza hut is. But regardless what data comes out about globalization and America ruining culture, I will maintain that Bata is really the epitome of that. It is absolutely everywhere. I have never been in a country and not seen a Bata, except in the US. For those of you not familiar, it is a shoe store that came out of Czechoslovakia. They claim to have a presence 5,000 stores in 50 countries. But unless a thousand of them are in Bangladesh, I would think that is an underestimation. It is truly ridiculous how ubiquitious this place is. Even in the most rural areas, there will be at least one Bata in town.

Ok, maybe it wasn't a tiger

Back on my feet some what. And back to ICDDR,B. And looking at nutrition supplemention to treat diarrhea. Once again very happy.

And I got to meet a harvard grad that I am going to force into mentoring me. Life is good.

Hungry Children Everywhere!

One of the things that struck me most about India was how many people are begging for money. There are fewer in Bangladesh and they are less aggressive (well other than that little Scrimangal girl) but they are still present. Now, I have a pity/ hate relationship with these kids. First of all, we don't give them money because they always stop you at traffic lights and then if you give them money others flock and you will never be able to leave until they have taken all you have on you. This is has been my experience. It starts out as heart breaking, you really feel sorry for the kids and want to help but usually don't. I can't feed millions of people even in Bangladesh. Then slowly you start getting annoyed because they are everywhere and always bothering me for money. Then you feel guilty for getting annoyed. Then you get annoyed for feeling guilty about just wanting to go about my day. But then you feel even guiltier because its not really their fault that their mothers can't feed them. And it just continues to spiral downwards between guilty and annoyance and anger until you can't take it and hip check a child into oncoming traffic because all you really want to do is get a bite to eat before you have to get to a meeting and there is a little boy running under foot getting in your way. Then you feel guilty and can't eat lunch which then you feel guilty about because there are starving kids outside that would love to eat that food. Then you begin to feel hopeless and BRAC makes you feel better with demonstration of their Ultra-poor grant program.


Addition: It two three weeks, a million begging children, and six blocks but they finally wore me down. I gave two taka each to two boys yesterday. Thats about a quarter of a penny each.