A Walker in the Suburbs

The title sounds flippant, but my feelings are not. It’s just that “bye-bye” is an English phrase that translates. So if the country could hear me now, it would know that I’m leaving.

What it might not know — so I’m going to tell it — is how deeply it’s touched me.

Of course, “it” is really “them” — the drivers and the chiefs of party, the farmers and the fishers, the boatmen and the shopkeepers. I’ve been fortunate to travel to a place preceded by decades of good will, since Winrock International has been doing important work here since the 19980s.

Bangladesh is an old culture but a young country. Half its people are under 25, and it has the energy and drive to prove it. Things may seem a bit slower at home when I return. And that will be fine — for a while. But it won’t take long to miss the honking horns and the colorful rickshaws — the chaos and the color of this place,  and — most of all — the heart.

It’s my last night in Bangladesh, so I celebrated with room service, a bad movie, and before that … a sunset swim.

The rooftop pool tempted me from the start, but there hasn’t been time for it between trips to the field. Now my work is almost done, so I spent a few minutes side-stroking through the gloaming.

It was good to be suspended in the warm water, thinking about all that I’ve seen, the people I’ve met, how we all live under the same sky and clouds, how we all look up at the same unfathomable blue.

Not a lot in common, true, but more than it might seem.

Usually, I get to know a place by walking through it. This trip has challenged that way of knowing. There have been exceptions: a soggy slog to a pond where vegetables grow from the bank; the stroll to a trafficking survivor’s home, which led past a lake fringed by palm trees. But mostly I’ve seen Bangladesh from the backseat of a vehicle.

Until today. At Hazarikhil I hiked to a tribal village, an ecotourism ropes walk and a camping site. On the way I heard stories of pythons captured, and of leeches that stick to your skin and must be pulled off with great force. At one point I looked down and saw one on my sandal. Luckily, someone pulled it off before it could suck my blood.

Let’s just say this is not your typical walk in the suburbs of northern Virginia. But how good today to stretch my legs, trudge up hills and down. It gave me a feel for the place that I haven’t gotten before, a weariness of limb and a wariness of step and an appreciation for … the air-conditioned back seat.

I’m writing today from Chittagong, the second largest city in Bangladesh — with the traffic noise to prove it. Car horns here are a way of life, a feeble attempt to manage the constant flow of cars, buses, baby taxis and pedicabs that clog the streets.

Today’s adventure led us through a cattle market. Young goats and old cows, bulls with horns, skinny animals and fattened ones, all in a crazy, crowded, mooing jumble.

Traveling the roads and lanes of southwestern Bangladesh, I see narrow brick lanes disappearing into shady groves of banana and palm trees, and narrow strips of land slicing through the rice paddies.

Every village has one pond or several, and I can’t always tell where the ponds end and the flooding begins. Many Bangladeshis are homeless this season because of the rising water and swollen rivers — and this in a nation already tested by hunger and poverty and climate change.

Flooding is just one more trial, as being wet is just one more condition. The rains fall and the clothes are wet — but they will dry out. Let us hope the country does, too.

In Bangladesh, goats seek out the warmest part of the road and stretch out there, oblivious to the traffic that flows around them. Motorized rickshaws, battered buses, bicycles carrying chickens, beds, you name it — all jockey for position on roads that are buckled and muddy from monsoon rains.

Drivers honk horns whenever they close in on another car — or whenever they feel like it — a cacophony of street noise.

It’s nighttime now in Khulna, but I can still feel the jumble of the road. And I’ll fall asleep to the din of car horns honking.

A sail across canals and oceans of time, a voyage so fantastically different from my normal life that I can hardly describe it. That is the last three days in the Khulna region of Bangladesh.

My photographs will come later, as will more descriptions. I’m writing this post now thanks to the generous loan of a colleague’s iPhone “hot spot.”

But I felt today that I had gone both back and forward in time, seeing a communal past … and a watery future.

Today I flew from Dhaka to Jessore to interview victims of human trafficking. Here are several who became friends through the ordeal and are now growing beans and eggplant together on leased land to pull themselves up from poverty.

Later, we went to a community meeting where a trafficking survivor explained how to safely migrate out of the country. It’s her way of paying forward the kindness shown to her after she was victimized.

“It is my pleasure to help others,” she said, “so they don’t have to suffer as I did.”

These people are no strangers to suffering. They live on rice, endure torrential monsoons — and generally work hard for everything they have. But they offered me their only chair and pressed cold drinks in our hands. As we left, they said one of the only English words they know: “Bye bye”!

Pushing my curtains aside this morning, at first I saw only a gray mist, moisture rising from a thousand rivers and inlets, from the sea that is steadily stealing this country away from the 169 million (about 3,279 people a mile) who live here.

But as the sun rose beyond the haze I could see tall buildings rising, lush rooftop gardens and this view from the breakfast buffet bar.

Almost nine million people live in Dhaka — which means that when it comes to photographing the place, above the fray is the right place to be.