Air Conditioning, Bowls of Water, and a Long Hose

All of the above objects were combined in unexpected ways last night.  I had got back at around 10:30pm from a Bangladeshi play (which told the heroic/tragic story of the murdered Bangladeshi Christian-Indigenous leader Alfred Soren).

My room was predictably sticking hot and I turned on the ancient air con unit, which grumbled to a start.  I had left the room and was just about to pop into the shower when I saw a flash of light and flames erupt from the geriatric unit.  Clad only in a towel, I ran around the house looking for a water receptacle - the best I could find was getting a setup involving plastic tub to transport the water to the room and a small ceramic bowl,  to dowse the fire in discrete upward throwing motions.  The flames were resilient though, and kept growing despite my heroic actions.  In between bailings I called the building manager Kamrul who eventually came with a more advanced piece of fire-fighting equipment - a thin black hose which he proceeded to attach the bathroom faucet.  By this time by some stroke of divine luck my repeated bailings seemed to have extinguished the visible fire, and Kamrul used the hose to soak the whole thing down thoroughly for good measure.  The sweet smell of incinerated plastic and melted electrical components lingered in the air in some kind of fragrant mocking way. 

Together with a supportive housemate Carla (who brought me some iced ribena after the ordeal), I requested over email that other Australian volunteers should be advised of the fire risks and adequate mitigation measures taken etc etc.  This is being currently taken care of, and hopefully the net outcome of the incident may be positive in reducing future fires, and risk to other volunteers.

However standing out on my balcony in the balmy July Dhaka night, I looked down on the shacks clustered around the building site next door.  It's estimated that between 25-30% of the Dhaka population live in slums, which are at continual risk of being set alight by faulty or unattended cooking stoves.  Standing on that balcony, feeling lucky to be unscathed,  I had the backing of the Australian Government to mitigate my risks, as well as my own relative affluence in this country.  But who was looking after the risks of the people who were down below?  It reminded me again how culturally, economically, and geographically relative the perception of 'risk' is.

Returning to Nerd-dom...

I found some old essays and writings of mine when I was going through the dark recesses of my computer.  Remembering the various times that friends had been curious about my writing, I thought I would dust them off and load them up onto the web.  It's actually a fairly bizarre set of essays, encompassing topics such as zen, art, social change and fish hearing.  So feel free to have a browse if you're in the mood. (it may cure you of any curiosity fairly quickly!)

http://www.scribd.com/michaelchew

The Bat and the Stealth Bomber

Beauty.  Air.  Death.

I got back from work, with a heavy heart. A small boy had called 'bondhu...' (friend) after me as I walked back - often this is accompanied by an ask of money, so I just walked on.  But no ask came.  Either way, his small, skinny, frame and large brown eyes disappeared from my view, leaving the lingering traces of my privilege resonating inside me. The chance encounter of two with such vastly different opportunities in the world.

I cooked a quick dinner of noodles with tomato and gourd, and headed with it up a flight of stairs to the roof, a favourite place of mine.  Curiously no other foreigner comes up here (despite myself continually extolling the wonders of the place).  I settled down to eat, under a cloudy sky which faintly trembled with the beginning of a cool change, the cautious wind picking up gently around me.  Having finished, I stood up and walked over to the ledge to look down.  Almost immediately a dark flapping figure drifted through my line of vision.  A bat!  It's a flying webbed thing, I caught a good glimpse of the membranous black wings flapping through the air, just as a spider walks across the earth.  That is, it was having a conversation with the air, (or the ground), instead of a monologue which birds are want to do.  My mouth remained in a firmly embarrassing 'O' shape as my head swiveled to follow the disappearing creature. 

It was awe-ful, in the proper sense of the word.  I had a flashback to a moment when as a young teenage boy, I begged my parents to go the Avalon airshow, where myself and thousands of others formed similar 'O's as they craned their heads to see fighter jets roaring through the sky.  This kind of awe seems elemental, perhaps.  However the more I thought about it, the more I realised that mostly our awe of a flying creature is directed to military technology, machines carefully and painstakingly designed to kill and destroy.  Our collective fascination with the advanced cruise missile, the stealth bomber, the unmanned drone, each the distillation of billions of years of evolved creativity, directed not to life, but to death. 

The bat flew back and forth a few times, indecisively trying to find a suitable tree to settle into. Each time the feeling of awe was in my belly as I saw this seeing this great creature fly by.   This time I was relieved that I cast my lot with life.

Raindancing

It’s raining here.  

The brooding clouds have finally shelved their bashfulness and wept.  For joy or sadness, I cannot tell.  A sudden desire comes upon me, I strip back to a pair of shorts, race from my room up to the roof and stand in the driving rain.  Fuelled by a secret naughty knowledge, the decades late defiance of the whispering of parents past - stay dry, you’ll catch a cold – I feel the droplets striking my skin, their rolling caresses, a brief affair with the sky.  Once I overcame the default urge to cower, to hide, to flinch from those miniature heaven-sent spheres, I am filled with a primordial relish-ment that seems to seep from a cellular place.  Water within, water without.   

Walking over to the rooftops edge, I stare down.  By some chance I stare into exactly the direction of the rain sheet’s trajectory; instead of seeing them race by me, across my vision, I am looking down the barrel at them shooting past me on all sides, a receding tunnel of thousand upon thousand of droplets whispering past me to disappear in their communion with the earth surface below.  I’m sitting on the rear deck of a lonely spacecraft, watching the stars recede away from me.  But instead of moving, I am at rest, an amazed witness to the sheer brilliance of water, air, and movement.   

A thought appears from nowhere – what if these countless droplets were each a soul, a person, a living being, and I was watching from some god’s perspective their brief wobbling journey through life on the way down.  A flicker of individuality, precipitated from the continual collective condensation way up above, each totally unique, and each hauntingly similar, we make our way through life, jostling and mingling with the other droplets on the way down.  The way down.  We stream past the gods’ eye, in our brief existence we experience all of reality, no more no less, before reaching the ground where we once more rejoin the flow, handing on our little gift to the stream.

PS: the girls in the photo above were also dancing in the rain, and having the time of their life.

Barisal Field Trip

My team at Concern Universal had a second field trip over July 2-5th, this time to a southern district called Barisal.  The trip formed part of our 'Community Managed Disaster Risk Reduction' project, which involves working with 67 partner NGOs to build up their capacity to deliver their own community programs better.  Half of the trip involved this capacity building training, while the other half involved visiting a few villages and schools in which two partner organisations ran various education and training programs.   I was lucky enough to go this latter trip, and we were joined with representatives from the five partner NGOs that were from Nepal and they had traveled down to Bangladesh to join in this visit.

It was fascinating and harrowing to visit some of these villages, one of which was barely 500m from the Bay of Bengal.  During the massive Sidr cyclone in 2007, waves over 6m had pummeled the coast, including this village, which was devastated.  However through participating in some of disaster preparedness activities that the NGO was running, they were able to slowly build their resilience.  This included raising houses on mud platforms, building portable cooking stoves that families could take after disasters, using coconuts as floatation devices, and developing early warning systems.  Two years later the village was hit by cyclone Aila, but because of these interventions, damage was reduced.

During meeting the villages, seeing their preparations, and hearing their stories, I was moved by what these people had gone through, and the sheer tenacity and hope which they approached their situation.  They weren't going anywhere, and it was impressive to sense some of the pride that they had in their community.

It seems in start contrast to the clamouring and complaining that I am reading about in Australia regarding the carbon tax.  Over here, no one is debating climate change - their are no Lord Moncktons deniers spreading the seeds of doubt.  Millions have been facing a changing climate, and increasingly severe natural disasters, for decades, and thousands of NGOs, research institutes, and community initiatives have been quietly working away at methods of adapting to the onslaught.   At these times I cant help but to feel ashamed of my own country and our bubble of illusion that we are desperate to prop up, despite the fact that our denial is actually costing the lives and livelihoods of people here in Bangladesh. 

Further trip details are here.