The Wisdom of Zen Dog
on From Banglatown to Bangladesh (Bangladesh), 30/Nov/2008 14:56, 34 days ago
Today I want to introduce you to a greeting card that sits on top of a set of drawers in my new home. It may seem strange to choose a greeting card as my muse, particularly considering the abundance of sources of inspiration provided by the rich sensory environment enveloping me here in the Desh. Yet, without wanting to turn this into a Hallmark moment, the card aptly captures my recent feelings, so please indulge me. Featuring a cartoon dog– ‘Zen Dog’ – floating on the sea, relaxing and soaking up the sunshine, it is the caption on the card that I want to draw your attention to:‘He knows not where he’s going’, it says,‘for the ocean will decide – it’s not the destination……it’s the glory of the ride’.Before you start to wonder what exactly it is VSO volunteers do, I can assure you that my last few weeks have not been spent on the beach or sunbathing. Far from it. The last month has been a whirlwind of activity, taking me from Bangla language classes, induction activities, and English, Filipino and African parties in Dhaka; to spending hours on buses, ferries, and a variety of other very slow, but very entertaining, modes of transport during an intense and eye-opening foray into rural Bangladesh, during a visit to a town called Patuakhali, in the south of the country; to moving into my new‘home’ for the year - the town of Khagrachari, in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region - and meeting my new neighbours, colleagues and friends.Each of these experiences have contributed a piece to the Bangladesh puzzle that I am devoting so much time to trying to understand. My head is full of images, which flicker sporadically as I try to make sense of where I have been and what I have done. There was sitting and facing one hundred sari and salwar kameez-clad women on the dirt floor of a small village, listening to the endless list of social problems affecting them, feeling two hundred eyes fixed on us. And then there was walking away from the women, and feeling the anger at their circumstance slip away as I returned to my own life. There’s the elaborately painted cycle rickshaws, and the skinny legs of the underpaid, overworked and malnourished men who drive them. And then there was riding through Dhaka’s richest area following a party in which the food was good and the wine was flowing, when my friend decided to take a try abeing a ‘rickshaw-wallah’ himself. There’s the posh ex-pat hang-out, the BAGHA club, which offers gin and tonics, proper British grub, and a break from the Dhaka noise. And there’s ‘System’, a little bamboo restaurant in Khagrachari, offering service with a smile, rice wine in plasticbottles and Mickey-Mouse patterned bowls of rice, vegetables and fish, which are scooped up eagerly by the hands of its clientele.Each of these images deserves much fuller descriptions than I can provide here. But they are some of the components that make up the the Bangladesh puzzle that I have seen far. I have learned that the jigsaw is multi-layered. There’s the puzzle of Bangladesh, including its multiple languages, cultures, histories and politics; and the puzzle of its environment: the rice paddies that flood, the land that is being lost, and the hills that separate the Chittagong Hill Tracts from the plainlands. There’s the puzzle of development in Bangladesh: the vast number of NGOs operating here, the even larger number of problems they are trying to alleviate, and the processes of social change that have failed to tackle the staggering inequalities in existence. And then there’s the puzzle of my time here, which can take me fromdancing in a five-star hotel one day to witnessing desperate poverty another and which has introduced me not just to ‘Bangladeshi’ culture, but also to those of the Chakma, Marma, Tripura and other indigenous groups, and to people from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.After only seven weeks in Bangladesh, this puzzle is far from complete. I’ve learned that it can’t be after one year, and it couldn’t be after ten years, twenty years, or a century. Its contrasting and contradictory pieces are often irreconcilable; the pieces of the Bangladesh puzzle don’t fit neatly but rather move and change and grind against each other. As for myself, I still have little idea of where I’m going on my Bangladesh adventure or what I’ll find on the way. But it’s the ride that counts: it’s at once interesting, fun, difficult, intense, frustrating, eye-opening, scary, strange, wonderful and ridiculous. It makes me smile, laugh outloud, and – very occasionally – want to hide away under my blanket. And learning from the wisdom of ‘Zen Dog’, I know that it’s this combination that makes the ride glorious.