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.