Special stories: “I’m on a boat” and others

At 5:34 PM on Thursday, I embarked on a 20 hour boat ride down to the coastal areas of Bangladesh. We left the GP at approximately 3:30 pm in a CNG with a driver who was actually insane.  At one point, two buses were simultaneously merging toward the center of the highway and our crazy driver zipped in between them. He then stopped to buy some bettle leaf (to chew tobacco on) while we were in traffic. But, he did get us to the boat terminal in Old Dhaka in plenty of time to get on our boat, The Launch. The other half of our group was less fortunate. Darshan and Abi were in a second CNG, which broke down in the middle of the journey to the boat terminal. They waited on the side of the road for a while (holding Tiffany’s HUGE backpacking bag and a garbage bag full of chips, among other things) until another CNG arrived to transport them to the boat dock. At 5:15 pm, a mere 15 minutes before our boat was departing, we received a call from Darshan telling us that they were stuck and traffic and would be late. I then started walking through the masses of Bangladeshis on the boat screaming “DOES ANYONE SPEAK ENGLISH?” No. no one on the boat speaks English.  So, I found one of the workers on the boat and started pointing at 5:45 on my watch and (screaming) asking him to leave at 5:45. He obviously has no idea what I’m talking about. He takes a pen and writes 5:30 on his palm and shows me, because he thinks that I don’t know what time the boat is supposed to leave. False.

 

It’s now 5:20. We have gone downstairs to the entrance to the boat. All three of us are doing intense charades gestures to indicate that there are 2 more people coming and we need to wait for them. It’s 5:25. They start removing the board that connects the boat to the dock. We all scream NOOOO and Tiffany jumps on top of the plank so they can’t move it. The attendant holds up 4 fingers to indicate to us that we have 4 more minutes and then the boat is leaving.  Literally everything in this entire country is 30 minutes late- why is this boat the one exception?? Despite our best acting attempts, no one ever figures out that we are waiting for 2 people. We are all peering out of the boat to try and spot Darshan and Abi running towards the boat, but they’re both Indian, so they blend in with the Bangladeshis. Tiffany is on the phone with Darshan, screaming, “THE BOAT IS LEAVING RIGHT NOW!!!!” Finally, we see the top of Tiffany’s huge backpack bobbing above the hoards of Bangladeshi’s and realize that they’ve made it. They sprint on to the boat just as the attendant is pulling the plank away from the dock.

 

And now we’re just hanging out on a boat for the next 20 hours. Peaceful… right? No. The same 6 people keep pacing around the top deck of the boat (where we’re staying) and stopping each time to stare at us. We saw the same people approximately every 8 minutes… like clockwork. And here’s the kicker: At 1:30 AM Lisa woke me up. I sat up and realized that someone had opened our window from outside, pushed the curtain aside, and reached his arm all the way in to our room and was shining the light from his cell phone into our room to watch us sleep.

 

That night, I had a dream that the Launch turned into the Titanic. So every time we stopped at a board and bumped into the shore, I dreamed that it was an iceberg. I then dreamt (very elaborately) that we were running through the boat, scrambling to find lifeboats. Ironically, there were only 2 lifeboats on the boat, and there were probably about 500 people on the boat. I knew that if there was an emergency, one of the lifeboats would have been for the crew and I would have been on the other one. If anything were to have happened, there’s no doubt in my mind that the white people would have been saved first. It is sad how much they revere foreigners.

 

After disembarking from the boat, we had the pleasure of riding in a tum-tum for about an hour. We were driving through some pretty remote villages, so I was pretty confident that the “hotel” that had been booked for us would be very special. It turns out we were staying at an orphanage, which was very nice (except for the large quantities of animal droppings that lisa found on her bed). Anyway, we spent the rest of the afternoon playing games with some amazing kids- we helped them practice counting in English and they (sort of) taught me how to count in Bangla. That night when the power went out, we taught the kids the Macarena, the stanky leg, and attempted to teach them the electric slide, but none of us really knew how to do it. 

We spent the next day distributing saline and water purification tablets to people on the coast who don’t have access to clean drinking water. Some of them were feeling the effects of cyclones Aila and Sidr, but many of them never have access to pure drinking water.

 

That day was really challenging. All we could give each family was 3 packets of saline and 10 water purification tablets. One of the women came up to one of our group members and asked if we were rebuilding her house. Another person came up to us and angrily told us that he didn’t care about having saline solution when he didn’t have a house. We saw a lot of destruction, but I’ve seen a lot of destruction from hurricanes, so that wasn’t what got me. I struggled a lot with seeing how these people are marginalized from society- both literally and figuratively. The government can’t buy good land in Bangladesh because the country is so overpopulated, so the only lands that the government can provide to poor people are basically islands. Government housing is often located on strips of land that are bordered by the bay of Bengal on one side and a river on the other side.  However, I never cease to be amazed by the survival skills that these people have. We saw many men (ranging in age from about 6 to 65) walking back to their dwellings, soaking wet, holding fish that they just caught with their hands or with a shoddy fishing net. We heard over and over again how the cyclones are constant, and so the people never have a chance to rebuild before the next storm hits… they literally cannot get a break.

 

To be continued…