Benjamin in Bangladesh!

When I first started this blog, my only intention was to keep a journal to help me process events as they happened to me and keep a place where friends and family could check on how I was doing this summer, and I was pretty sure that the only person that would be checking this blog on a regular basis was going to be my mother. As this page has been sitting in the bowels of the web, I’ve found a surprising number of other people that seem to be interested in what I am doing. I’ve gotten comments from a guy who hosts cooperate cross-cultural seminars, a Marxian who pasted a dense 5 page critique of Yunus’ “trade in poverty” (I didn’t approve her comment, not out of intellectual censorship so much as bad formatting), a polite and informed guy named Jeremy in the UK who wonders with me about how to implement microcredit in developed nations, and apparently a friend of one of the fellow Grameen interns to name a few. However, my new favorite is this guy, Mr. Dillman. I approved his comment on ‘Grameen Danone” today (I’ve taken the liberty of slight grammatical editing, you can see the original under ‘Grameen Danone’);

How is this not a good story? He starts by sounding overly dramatic. By the way, who is this guy? He has some good ideas but seems to have little if any experience other than travel, observation and neo-classical economics. Lots of this stuff is good (meaning the projects) Quit tearing them down to make yourself seem smart!

Well, Mr. Dillman, my name is Benjamin. I’m a fourth year Math and Economics Double Major at Grinnell College in the middle of Iowa. I’ve been to Hong Kong (thrice), Japan (twice, for close to a year and a half), Guatemala, Belize, and most recently here in Bangladesh. I’ve come to Bangladesh because as a Christian I feel very strongly that Jesus calls all Christians to both personally interact and help those in poverty. I first used this realization to condemn the western Church as a whole, but quickly found that this judgment quickly circled back to point the finger at myself; my college life is one of hardly even leaving the two city blocks of ivory tower we so lovingly call the “Grinnell Bubble,” hardly ever seeing – let alone helping – anyone in poverty. To this end, realizing that with my level of standing in the world – speaking in terms of the world, likely in the richest 5% – that I had the priviledge of great flexibility in choosing my occupation in life, and as such I should choose an occupation that not only provides for myself, but that through the simple act of doing my job also helps people in poverty. I’m flexible in the specifics; it could be direct help through a charity or an NGO, or indirectly, such as running a business specifically planted in a poverty stricken area. My reasons for coming to Bangladesh were twofold; one, to see in more detail the work of microcredit with my own eyes, and two, to see if I could find some aspect of the Grameen model that I would be passionate about to do as a career. I’ve been successful at the first, but unsuccessful (as of yet) for the second.

Let us be perfectly clear, Mr. Dillman, I think that you have hit the nail right on the head when it comes to my qualifications. All I have is as you mentioned; travel, observation, and neo-classical economics. But I don’t think that makes me unqualified. In fact, I think that makes me more qualified to speak than most. There are millions who speak about the wonders of microcredit. It is the newest and latest fad in fighting poverty. Of those, how many travel? How many have gone to see with their own eyes the work that is being done before shouting their own particular praise or criticism from the rooftops? How many sit in the belly of a metal bird and sterile airports for 26 hours? How many of them learn to haggle with a CNG driver to get back home in the middle of the night? How many of them learn how to wipe their butt without toilet paper? I seek knowledge, and I seek it firsthand.

Of those that travel, how many of them observe? How many venture outside of their air conditioned hotel to walk the streets of the slums? How many wrestle with wording questions and translators to be able to ask questions in a way that will get answers? How many try to learn the culture? The language? (I must admit, though, I’m not so hot on my Bangla I’ve got most of the script learned, but the vocab and grammar is lacking. I do have lessons three times a week.) How many look actively, think critically, and ask questions?

And as for neo-classical economics, I’ve already spoken already on this blog of some of the flaws that I see with that ideology, but for better or worse it is the both the language and the ideology of the economic institutions of our day. Despite the massive power these economic institutions have over people’s lives, most people don’t understand neo-classical economics. Sadly, even among my academic peers, many people neither know nor care what it means when the dollar is weak, the Fed changes interest rates or what the full implications of loans from the IMF or World Bank are. Worse still is the lack of understanding of how the four dollars for a gallon of gas or biofuels impact not only their wallets or environment, but the stomachs of poor in Bangladesh. Neo-classical economics connects the dots and elaborates the global implications of our actions.

But most of all, Mr. Dillman, let me clear that I agree that many of these programs are good. I “tear the down” them because nothing is perfect. When I hear talk of microcredit in the States it is a silver bullet for poverty that will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and almost raise the dead. My economic development textbook is a graveyard of the fads of development that have come and gone; some of which have done nothing, some of which have left developing countries much worse off. All of them at the time were spoken of as silver bullets to save the world.

There is no silver bullet. There never will be. Anything that is spoken as such will ultimately fail. I want to make sure that we understand the full implications of what we are doing. To me, if we do not point out the bad with the good, the good will eventually be overshadowed by what we ignored. Microcredit is a good thing. It does help some people out of poverty. However, we, as a community of people committed to eliminating poverty, must continue to prune our ideas and our tools; keeping what is good and leaving what is not. While I understand that such a critical look may seem to be the almighty academic on high pointing out the flaws to bill as myself above the fray, that is not my intention. My intention is to give an accurate account of what I have seen and heard so that those of us interested in the elimination of poverty are living and thinking in a word based on truth – both pleasant and unpleasant – and not in a world based of of hype and fads.

By the way, if there happens to be anyone out there looking to fill a job position that involves helping the poor, international travel, cross-cutural interaction and/or drinking good, well-brewed tea and starts sometime in the summer or fall of 2009, shoot me an e-mail; heringbe (at) grinnell [dot] edu. I’d love to talk.

After about a month here in Bangladesh, I’ve become much more aware of what microcredit is microcredit is not. While it is the latest fad in economic development, it is not a cure-all for poverty. I think that it is on the whole a good thing, but there are shortcomings:

1 Microcredit has difficulty helping the “ultra-poor”; Microcredit seems to work better for people the closer they are to the poverty line. I’ve heard many terms for the poorest of the poor. My personal favorite was in an academic paper on Bangladesh’s numerous microfinance institutions calling them the “hardcore” poor. It made them seem like only the truly dedicated poor people could join the “hardcore” club. Regardless, while Grameen has started a beggar program to try and reach this poorest of poor, the numbers remain small in comparison to normal members and requires the utmost flexibility for the repayment of loans. Most of the initial basic loans that members have taken here have been agricultural; taking cows, chickens, or renting rice paddies. Most of these require some sort of space to keep an animal or the ability of put in large amount of hard work. The guy I saw yesterday sleeping on the side of the street swarming with flies has no place to keep an animal, and too low of a caloric intake to do the strong labor. His access to the wealth generating potential of the market is more than just a lack of capital.

2 Microcredit requires a vibrant informal sector with low capital: There has been a number of attempts to start up microcredit programs inside of the United States; the Good Faith fund started in Arkansas by then Governor Clinton, a more recent program called Grameen America out of Queens, and more in a small handful of Native American reservations. I don’t have strong hopes for any of them. The idea of microcredit is that if one only had a small amount of capital (tools, animals, land, whatever) that one can employ themselves and get the entirety of the profit. In Bangladesh where large part of the economy is run by the informal sector – that is, not formally registered companies, but small independent businesses outside of government taxation or regulation like street-corner stalls, rickshaws, or prostitution – it only takes a small amount of capital to enter the informal market as a small, but competitive player.

For example, while there are grocery stores in Bangladesh, most of what I have seen have been neat, air-conditioned, luxury stores that by their marketing, cleanliness and high prices I must assume cater to the rich of Bangladesh. Most of the food that I have seen for sale have been from stalls on the street that sell every type of fruit, vegetable, meat or fish imaginable. The air conditioned grocery stores are part of the formal sector, while all of these street corner stalls are part of the informal sector.

As most of the players in the informal sector are small and without much capital, a microloan can catapult a person into the informal market quickly. A single cow, a handful of chickens, or a few kilograms of rice is enough to be a participant in the informal sector. In developed economies, the informal sector is small and usually limited to illegal activities like drugs or prostitution. In order to be a participant in the formal sector market usually takes a large amount of capital to be competitive. In Bangladesh you can start a hammer making business with a few tools and raw materials and be competitive making them by hand and selling by the street side. In America, hammer are made cheaper with the help of mass production, huge factories and massive machines (that is, huge amounts of capital) dedicated to the production of nothing but hammers. Without a capital-deprived informal sector with easy entry, microcredit cannot start competitive businesses, and thus cannot generate income for people.

This raises questions for me not only about using microcredit to fight poverty in the developed economies, but in some of the vastly underdeveloped economies of Sub-Saharan Africa. In Zimbabwe, for example, both formal and informal sectors have been decimated by the insane economic policies and brutal political repression of President Mugabe. With catastrophic inflation (nine million percent according to the BBC) and massive unemployment, even if microcredit could be used to start businesses there wouldn’t be much of a market for anything as hardly anyone has any purchasing power, leaving some of the countries with the greatest poverty unlikely to be helped by microcredit.

3 Poverty has many sources, not all of which can be cured by income: Even if microcredit does start up an income generating activity for a family, it does not guarantee an eventual end of poverty. For example, families with a chronically sick members often spend all of the extra income on treatment, possibly improving the health of the family member but doing nothing to bring the family out of poverty. There exist a small core of members who continue to take and payback loans successfully, while never making progress out of poverty. Grameen doesn’t research or take exact numbers – of if they do, I’ve not yet been able to find them – leaving the exact reasons and numbers of people unknown.

4 Shit Happens: I’ve touched on this before, but all microcredit enterprises are a single action in a single sector. It is the epitome of “putting all of your eggs in one basket.” People take a 15,000 taka loan for a cow, but if the cow dies or the price of the milk or meat falls they are left with nothing. Actually less than nothing, as they now have a 15,000 taka debt that they can’t repay. Especially in Bangladesh with their frequent flooding and other natural disasters, having no way to spread out risk across different things can quickly turn something intended to help into yet another thing trapping them in deeper poverty.

Grameen deals with this through their flexi-loans, where if through natural disaster or market changes their member isn’t able to pay back the loan they reschedule the old loan to a much longer window and issue a new loan in order to jump start another income generating activity. In my mind, this would be better dealt with through microinsurance. Insurance in the purest forms is simply spreading out risk across a larger number of people. They already have a form of life insurance where the borrowers deposit a certain percentage of their loan in the bank, and the bank pays off the remainder of loans of members who die or whose husbands die from the interest that accumulates on that principle. By expanding this to include certain natural disasters and the like the risks of having the member’s entire economic future in a single undertaking can be largely mitigated. It is my understanding that Grameen has done some small forays into the field of insurance, but their experience has been one riddled with unverifiable insurance fraud. My guess is that their life insurance is the easiest to verify and most difficult to fake is the only reason that they have been able to keep it in place.

I write only these criticisms of microcredit, as I feel that the benefits have already been largely trumpeted already. It disappoints me when I see a people joining onto the fad of microcredit, saying that it is a cure all, or a magic bullet. Such attitudes will only lead to bad things.

I was able to sit down with the headquarters of the Danone Yogurt program. I greatly appreciated the honesty of the manager that I spoke with. He started out the interview by mentioning that we as interns must be getting tired of all of the success stories of Grameen. This was not going to be one of those success stories.

The partnership between Danone (spelled Danon in the United States) started when Professor Yunus went to France and challenged Danone, a multinational company based in France, to do something for Bangladesh. Danone’s main product around the world is yogurt, and thus the partnership company for delivering nutritional yogurt to rural areas was born. As I’ve explained in previous posts on Danone, the idea is that by using the poor as distribution network the poor will be able to increase their income, and rural diets will be supplemented with additional nutrition.

Maruf Hassan Balg, the assistant manager of Grameen Danone Foods Limited that I spoke to had many wonderful things to say about Danone. Their expertise has been invaluable to the success in setting up the company. Also, merely the presence of Danone’s name has been invaluable asset for selling in the market. One of the Senior Executives of Grameen Fund, a social business venture capital fund, explained that the mindset of most Bangladeshis is such that even with products of equal quality, Bangladeshis often prefer imported products to domestic ones. This is entirely understandable, as most of the high technology products have to be imported, and most of the capital intensive products have to be manufactured outside of the country, leaving an impression that foreign countries product better products than domestic companies. Thus, simply having the name of Danone on their products increases the demand for them.

He also spoke, however, how simply having the name of Danone attached has brought about liabilities. As Danone has their name attached to the product they are holding the standards of quality for the inputs to developed economies standards of quality and not Bangladesh standards of quality. At first blush, this is a good thing; we ought to hold ourselves to a high level of quality. No one in Bangladesh is able to create food grade plastics to the standard, so all of the packaging has to be imported. The pharmaceutical companies in Bangladesh that might otherwise be able to supply the nutritional supplements that are added to the yogurt are disqualified as their packaging doesn’t hold to the standards of developed economies, further increasing the amount required to be imported and further raising the price. The end result is a product that conforms to the standards of a developed economy in ways that most Bangladeshis neither understand nor care about, and forces them to sell the yogurt at a higher price to cover their costs. I don’t blame Danone. In the event that something might happen as a result of creating yogurt to normal Bangladeshi standards, Danone would be having a public relations nightmare.

I also cannot blame them because while Danone might be partly responsible for the losses the company is incurring, as 50% owners of the company they are also paying half of the approximately 1.5 million taka per month ($21,500) in losses the company is currently having. Balg said that the current estimation is that it will take around 7-8 years before they become self sustaining based off similar social food businesses in the area. In the meantime, they are still selling around 5,000-6,000 cups of yogurt per day.

I’m surprised at the number of innovative ideas that he was pursuing to reconcile the problems of holding to the nutritional and quality standards while being competitive in the already tight Bangladeshi food market. Their immediate thought is to reduce the amount of yogurt in the containers so the market price drops to about 5 taka, hoping that the smaller price would be more affordable to people. They are also considering changing the packaging from the hard plastic cups to more of a plastic sack, reducing the complexity of the packaging would reduce price and possibly make it possible for more of the production to be shifted to inside Bangladesh.

They are thinking of expanding their market to Dhaka and other more wealthy urban areas. They realize that if they introduce the exact same product at a higher price that all of the yogurt they sell in the rural areas will simply be transported to the urban areas to be sold. Thus they are planning to expand their line of products to be able to sell higher priced “luxury” yogurt in the urban areas. Something as simple as adding fruit, flavoring or larger sizes could be enough to differentiate the products. Then the higher profit margins from the urban areas would be enough to subsidize the yogurt sold in the rural areas.

In the end, Grameen Danone Foods is a fairly recent start up, attempting to enter the food market of Bangladesh when the price of staple foods have doubled over the past year. Combined with a history of recent floods and other natural disasters, people do not have a large amount of expendable income to spend on anything new. Nevertheless, so long as Danone and Grameen are willing to suffer the losses of however long it will take to set up, this could result in both a profitable and helpful structure in Bangladesh if food prices stabilize to lower prices and their economy continues to grow.

I’ve been satisfied intellectually with my uneasy reconciling of the short term needs of beggars against enabling a mindset that reinforces begging as a better alternative than work. I’ve decided to give to those who are disabled as there is no social safety net in Bangladesh for those who are unable physically to work. For the rest, I’ve decided to follow the example of Dr. Yunus and the workers of Grameen bank in not giving to beggars, especially children. Children must not grow up in a mindset of begging.

The children have been the hardest part of my intellectual compromise to swallow. The only way that I knew to have a beggar move on without giving to them is to never even recognize them. Any recognization of their existance was taken as a sign that they had my attention and was a call to redouble their efforts. While giving them false hope was not what I wanted to do, I felt that I was committing injustice by refusing to recognize them as fellow human beings.

I struck upon an ingenious solution; singing. I got the idea from the beggars repeating the same Bangla words over and over, almost like Buddist monk chanting. Anything that I would say to them was always overpowered by the chanting. I decided to sing back to them; I would be able to look at them and recognize them as people, while at the same time not expressing that I would give them any money.

So yesterday I was walking from my church to the Pizza Hut (I was going to celebrate the birthday of one of the interns), I crossed paths with a young girl in a dirty red dress that barely came up to my hip. She extended her hand to me, palm up, unquestionionably asking for money. As I kept walking she came beside me and kept pressing on my arm to get my attention.

I started my concert with “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Bat;” a song to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” sung by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. She recognized the tune, and soon we were singing together a slightly choppy version of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” as I was weaving in and out of traffic to cross the street. We then moved to the “ABC’s” as I navigated around some construction over the sidewalk. She asked again for money, and I countered with “This is the Song that Never Ends” from a kid’s show called Lamb Chop that I watched as a child. When I got tired of the round and the song ended (as somehow it always seems to betray its name) I moved on to the “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” complete with the hand motions which she tried to imitate. She started singing a childs song that I had never heard before that I think was to the tune of “Are You Sleeping, Brother John?” that started off with “I am happy. I am happy. You are sad. You are sad” and then switched into incomprehensible Bangla complete with her own set of hand motions as we walked together towards Pizza Hut

A couple of songs later she grabbed my arm again. I thought she was asking for money again. However, this time her palm was to the side and all she wanted was a handshake. She said simply “Thank you” and then ran off back the way we had came.

My generous host has somehow managed to corrupt his hard drive into something entirely unreadable, and thus turning his computer into the equivalent of a very large paperweight. I was able to make it functional by booting into ubuntu off my usb key. After an entire night of giving us wonderful, wonderful internet access, we awoke the next morning to the entire internet connection deciding to drop off the face of the planet. I had been kicked out of the only other place that I knew had an internet connection, the Grand Prince Hotel, for the apparently incredibly egregious sin of sitting on the couches in the lobby with fellow interns when I was no longer a paying guest. This left me at a bit at wits end for getting my daily internet fix. Fortunately, it seems there is a large number of “Cybercafes” that charge only 25 taka an hour for connecting me back with the rest of the world at large. Though, according to the browsing history which the previous occupant didn’t seem necessary to erase, this particular computer has been used mostly to search for Adult stories in Bangla.

There was a new intern from China today. I think she studies at a University in Wisconsin. I met her as she was walking back to the hotel. he was wearing something like a half tank top that exposed most of her left shoulder. Three of us guys decided to walk her back. She was stopping traffic.

Rickshaw guys were leaning off their bicycles to get a better look. People were turning around to see her back side after they were done staring holes at her chest. It really began to anger me, and I was just walking behind her. The vengeful side of me really just wants to hire a girl to walk down Mirpur road in even just a one piece swimsuit and laugh at the traffic accidents that would ensure. I understand more why in this culture they feel the need to keep women at home or wear an additional length of cloth draped across their chest to protect their purity. I would rather the females that I’m close to wear a full length burka wear a burka than be exposed to that level of objectification every day.

I’ve come to the unwelcome realization that Bangladesh has turned me into a vegetarian. The absolute deliciousness of the vegetable concoctions my host makes for me combined with the frequently encountered stench of unrefrigerated rotting meat has been enough to slowly push me towards swearing off meat for the summer. There is a section in the local air-conditioned supermarket that my nose refuses to let me go to as it is right next to the unrefrigerated meat section. Other interns from more culturally similar places such as India and Pakistan assure me there is no problems with such meat so long as you cook it thoroughly, but that simply isn’t an assumption that I’m willing to make in most Bangladeshi restaurants.

On a side note, I will eat the meat in the Gulshon restaurants. Gulshon is the most foreign area of Bangladesh. It is home to most of the western foreign embassies and foreigner-exclusive clubs. It has the five star hotels like the Westin which is one of the very few places you can get a beer in this country – for around US $7 a can – or pork products. It has an A & W, a KFC, a Pizza Hut, but surprisingly, no McDonald’s. It’s also home to a nice Korean restaurant that we had to explain the concept of a Korean barbecue to, a Japanese restaurant that had the worst sushi I’ve had in my life and still enjoyed, and a “Mexican” restaurant which serves good food that can hardly be called Mexican, as there wasn’t any hot sauce and even normal Bangladeshi fare is much spicier.

Also, Happy Father’s Day, Papa! … I think. It’s not a celebration here, but my fellow interns tell me that its already happened. My apologies.

Hey all,

I’ve been trying to keep a pretty regular schedule here for updates, and I hope to keep it up for as long as I have new things to talk about. I just changed locations, however, out of the hotel and into a home of one the Grameen translators (Not the one that I had for my village visit). For about half the price of the hotel I get twice the number of meals, much better meals, good Bangladeshi company, and I get away from the hotel that was starting to really frustrate me. The only downside is now my internet connection is at the whim of the loadsharing power companies that decide to shut off the power for an hour or more at a time for on what seems to me to be an entirely arbirary schedule. This might make the posts a bit more haphazard, but we’ll just have to live with it.

Welcome to a developing country!

Grameen Shakti is the sister company of Grameen which has a long term
goal of being a sustainable social business in the area of renewable
energy. Their main project is to bring solar panels to rural villages
that are not part of the normal electric grid. These solar panels are
expensive as while there are local markets for the rest of the
equipment, the solar panels themselves have to be imported from Japan.
This is only exacerbated by the rising cost of all alternative energy
sources from the increase pressure of skyrocketing oil prices. The
cheapest of these systems runs close to 20,000 taka (US $290), including
installation and lights specialized to run off of DC current. They have
a three year installment plan for customers to try and ease the pain of
the price, but no matter how it is cut 20,000 taka is a lot of money for
the average Bangladeshi. Currently around half of Bangladeshis live
below the international poverty line of two dollars a day. Nevertheless
Grameen Shakti stands as the largest supplier of solar panels to
Bangladesh, responsible for two thirds of the solar panels in
Bangladesh. They have installed over 300,000 systems, and installing
close to 7000 additional solar panels in a month.

Nevertheless, the unavoidable but exorbitant price of the solar panels
has kept them from being a truly sustainable business. They are making a
slim profit, but only due to a 20% subsidy from the government (Which is
due to a World Bank loan to stimulate renewable energy in Bangladesh).
As such, they are currently more styled as a non-profit/NGO style of
organization, but they have the goal of becoming a true self-sufficient
social business that requires no subsidy from the government. They are
soon going to be helped by an additional subsidy from the World Bank
that will give them $9 for every ton of carbon emissions they help
reduce. The exact mechanism for this carbon reduction subsidy is still
unclear to me, considering that for the majority of their customers this
is the first and only opportunity for electricity and not a substitute
for a carbon releasing production.

On a later day, a group of us visited one of the branch offices of
Grameen Shakti. They took us to see some of their customers. One of the
members was using his light to be able to keep his corner drugstore open
after things got dark. Another used his to power a television and small
speakers to attract more customers to his roadside cafe. While Grameen
Shakti explained to us that some of their customers use their systems to
increase their business, or pay off their system by selling the
additional electricity to close-by stores, I found out later that a
majority of their solar panel customers are actually use them in their
homes and not at a place of commerce. There they give the increased
benefits to children’s studies, as well as providing electricity for one
of the main motivators for all civilized life: namely, television.

In addition to the solar panels, Grameen Shakti provides biogas systems.
Again, the prices are unavoidably high, and they have a three year
installment plan to try and compensate. I find the biogas to be a more
exciting and applicable technology. The alchemists of old spend years
trying to make lead turn into gold. Obviously their knowledge of
monetary policy was quite limited. Turning all of the lead into gold
would simply make gold worthless and lead valuable. Still there is
something alluring in turning something that is common and useless into
something that is valuable. These biogas plants do exactly that. Simply
mix equal parts water and cow manure, drop it in through the inlet pipe
and out comes methane to run cook stoves and rich fertilizer for the
fields. I saw the smallest sized plant in the field which produced
enough methane for a single family to use for cooking and ran off the
excrement of their three cows. Larger sized plants offer the possibility
to pay for themselves by selling the extra gas to surrounding neighbors.

Recently, Grameen Shakti has started an improved cooking stove (ICS)
project. These stoves are aiming to replace the normal concrete indoor
wood burning cooking stoves. While commercial ones can be custom build
to larger sizes, the standard domestic ICS has room to heat two pots and
costs 700 taka (US $10). The benefits include a chimney to eliminate the
indoor air pollution of the normal cook stoves thus improving the health
of the women and children; increased fuel efficiency; and the ability to
cook two pots at the same time. It seems that the numbers of ICS is
currently small – the branch we later visited only had 27 ICS compared
to 700 or so solar panels – it has only recently been introduced and so
they are expecting an increase later.

Even though I have my doubts of Grameen Shakti being able to stand on
its own anytime in the near future, it is encouraging to me that it
exists and also has been successful in securing the additional funding
it needs to operate. The additional resources currently being spent on
alternative energies and increases in solar panel efficiency will likely
lead to a point where Grameen Shakti will eventually be able to be self
sustaining. When that time comes, Grameen Shakti will already have the
infrastructure in place to expand rapidly across Bangladesh, and can
serve as a model for other countries looking to start a renewable energy
social business. I hope that Grameen Shakti will continue to be able to
secure additional funding until such a time as the research catches up
with their vision.

As I said, all honeymoons must come to an end, and my time in Bangladesh is not exception. Here follows what has really set me off in the past couple of weeks;

10 Addresses: Addresses in Bangladesh do not refer to exact buildings, but rather to sections of the city roughly equivalent to city blocks. The most annoying of consequences is that even taxi drivers don’t know where anything is, requiring an additional thirty minutes circling around whatever section of the city you are in to try and find where you are going. Seriously, what other city in the world where the taxi drivers, the people whose job it is to get people to different places in the city, don’t even know where stuff is?

9 Car Horns: The Bangladesh population density ranks 11th highest in the world. Two of the sub-districts of Dhaka (The capital city) rank 2nd and 4th in highest population density, one of which has a population density of over 100,000 people per square kilometer. Combine this with a distinct lack of traffic signals, sharing the road with slow rickshaws and oversized buses that like taking up all the lanes of traffic (as the slow down to pick up and let off passengers) leaves a traffic situation that makes rush hour in any major US city look like a NASCAR race. Everyone seems to respond to the incredible congestion by honking all the damn time. It doesn’t change anything, they can’t go any faster, but it makes it so the only place I can’t hear car horns is on the library on the 20th floor of Grameen bank.

8 The Rich and Ignorant Foreigner Stereotype: When I’m with Bangladeshi people and they get a CNG or a Rickshaw, we pay the normal price. When I’m by myself I have to argue for fifteen minutes and stage a walk out before they get anywhere near close to normal. It was kinda fun bartering in the beginning, but having to do it every single time gets on my nerves. It seems that they think that either I don’t know what the price should be or that I’m too rick to care, neither of which is the case.

7 Beggars: I don’t want to say that beggars make me angry nor do I blame them for singling me out for increased persistence of begging (see the above Rich and Ignorant Foreigner Stereotype above). I’ve found a moral balance that I feel is justified. Dr. Yunas outlines in his work that most beggars are incredibly industrious at their work, and that giving them money reinforces their choice to beg. As such the compromise to be worked between real short term needs and long term life choices is that I will give to those that are disabled, as this country has no sort of social safety net for those that are unable to seek work, but I will not give to those who are physically able or to their children, so that the children do not grow up with a begging mindset when there are other ways to make money. Nevertheless, every encounter with them is emotionally draining at best. Once I was walking on a crosswalk over a busy intersection and this child latched onto my leg, sliding on a piece of carpet as I dragged her along. She only let go after I repeatedly told her mother that I would not give to them. I just feel between a rock and a hard place. I cannot and will not blame beggars for begging, but on one hand, if I “give to all who ask” as Jesus commanded, I feel terrible about reinforcing a mindset that will enfeeble otherwise physically able people in the long term. If I don’t, the stark realization of the obvious short term needs breaks my heart. I am torn.

6 Power Outages: In Dhaka, the power goes out at least once a day for no reason at all. Normally it comes back in a couple of minutes, but it is never certain. A fellow intern once was stuck in the elevator when the power went out; just stuck in a small, dark and no longer air conditioned box. In the villages at least, one knows when the power is going to be off as they turn off the power at predetermined times in the day for load sharing.

5 Gender Disparity:While I recognize and respect the differences in cultures, it still gets to me the stark differences in the way that Bangladeshi people treat men and women. On the street I see mostly men. All the drivers, shopkeepers, waiters, police, military or any sort of formal economic activity are all men. Only in Grameen Bank have I seen any sort of female workers, or even any single women supporting themselves. I was asked by a fellow American intern to accompany her when she went to buy a cellphone, because every time that she tries to wander by herself she feels uncomfortable from the stares she gets as an unaccompanied woman in Bangladesh. It’s both subtle and deep, and on a low but steady level disturbs me. I have been in many places where there has been discrimination against women in the public sphere, but this is the first where women are just absent.

4 Lack of Sanitation and Trash Disposal: On my walk to and from Grameen I pass a no fewer than two piles of rotting garbage on the side of the road. They usually have small number of goats eating out of the decomposing mess. In addition, there are large concrete ditches on the sides of the road full of stagnant water and garbage. Every couple of days I see a man squatting down to pee in it. Occasionally, I see half naked children playing in these ditches of stagnant water, usually catching small fish in old plastic bottles. Everyone throws their trash on the road, and the only trash can I’ve ever seen was inside the zoo. In fact, there has been a law passed prohibiting plastic bags to be used inside of Dhaka (or perhaps even the entirety of Bangladesh, I’m unsure) due to the problem of littering. Most of the bags I get from stores have been made out of mesh or a thin fabric.

3 No Pedestrian Crosswalks: I have yet to see a single crosswalk. The only traffic signal I’ve seen obeyed is one enforced by the police or military with guns. Only by the grace of the sow moving, congestion causing rickshaws is anyone able to cross the street. It’s like a real-life game of Frogger (A classic old-school video game, check out freefrogger.org for those who’ve never played)

2 Air Pollution: Whenever I travel in a car or open air CNG I usually get a slight headache from all the fumes (and previously mentioned incessant honking of horns). All of the congestion leaves hundreds of old beat up idling cars spurting various fumes into the air. When I came back from the village trip, my nose was not happy with the adjustment and started a slight revolt. The pollution isn’t just a physical detriment. In the bus I rode out to the village, I went through one of the brick fields. As far as I could see were cement chimneys surrounded by piles and piles of brick. It kinda looked like the stereotypical “evil pollution factory” that I saw in all the Earth Day films I saw back in grade school. I realize that these brick factories bring a lot of benefits to the country, not the least of which is employment and providing better housing materials (a “good” Bangladeshi house is made from corrugated tin. A brick or cement house that can survive the frequent flooding is a step up), but it still makes me sad to see the damage.

1 Foreigners on Display: Outside of the people that I have met working in Grameen or microfinance in general I have yet to see a single foreigner during my entire stay here. Even more so than my time in Japan, people stare at foreigners. Some of the interns went to the zoo. They said that they felt like they were the ones on display, they watched and took pictures of the animals, the Bangladeshis watched and took pictures of them. When I was waiting in the back of a rickshaw in the village people kept floating around me staring. As soon as one person had the guts to shake my hand I all of a sudden was surrounded by Bangladeshis staring on all sides. It’s like I’m a television show or an animal, just emotionless stares without much interaction. When a group of us went to the cricket stadium to buy tickets, as soon as we stopped moving we were surrounded by a ring of Bangladeshis five people deep. It got so close and so much that I started feeling claustrophobic and had to push my way out of the middle. I never feel like I’m in danger, or that there is any bad intent, but I do get this feeling like somehow I’m in a freakshow on display.