Eleven Time Zones and Eleven Years Later

“I went to Bangladesh once,” I told my nephew recently after Cordell told me about hearing a man in church speaking about the south Asian country.

“You were? I didn’t know that.” I told Cordell that his uncle Ken and I had gone in 2008 with a rebuilding team to a cyclone-damaged village in southern Bangladesh.

Looking back eleven years later, I realized that the most interesting part of the trip was the actual traveling to Mirzganj, Bangladesh and back. During the two weeks at the volunteer base, I mostly cooked and did laundry, which was a lot like doing laundry and cooking at home with slower appliances and more bugs. My brother and the others guys got the brutal work— building tin-roofed houses in tropical heat and mud, and me shaking a few bugs out of muddy jeans wasn’t so bad.

Flying with Emirates Air

Halfway around the world is a great introduction to international traveling.

When I went to Bangladesh, I was twenty-one and had never left the country or taken a commercial flight before. We went with a group of other young adults as short-term volunteers with an international NGO.

“You’ll be tired like you’ve never been tired before, ” warned Ken.

Ken is four years older, and to me he was a worldly-wise travel companion. He had been outside of the United States once before— to Pakistan on a similar volunteer trip. Years later, Ken would learn he had been in the same town as Osama bin Laden, during the time the jihadist was holed up in the compound where he would later die.

We left the JFK airport in New York City at night. One of the other guys gave me his window seat next to Ken, since he know it was my first airplane trip. Soon after takeoff, Ken told me, “Open your window shade, Susan!”

Falling below us was the northeast coast of America, lit up like a thousand flickering candles. The trip was off to a magical start.

Most of the flight was spent trying to sleep or reading. At one point, I opened my window shade and thought, “Those clouds look odd.” Then I realized I was seeing sand. We were flying over a desert.

After a 16-hour flight, we landed in the Dubai Airport, in United Arab Emirates (UAE). I was very pleased that my first steps on foreign soil was in a tiny little Middle Eastern county no one at home knew anything about. We even got to go outside when going from one airport building to the next, and I was thrilled to see sand instead of soil on the ground.

Here’s some pictures of the airport in Dubai. Our layover lasted for several hours.

Despite the opulence of the airport, after being there for hours, we were anxious to start our four-hour flight to Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh.

We were the only white people at the gate and we got many stares as we gathered with the other passengers. An older man asked me in accented English, “Have you ever been to Bangladesh before?”

When I shook my head, he went on, “When they open the gate, there will be a rush! But you just wait. Then you can get safely on the plane.”

I didn’t find his words comforting, but the anticipated stampede didn’t happen, and we made it safely on the plane and flew to Bangladesh.

The Ferry Ride

Our traveling wasn’t over when we landed in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. We had to take an overnight ferry to Mirzaganj where the volunteer base was.

Two workers from the NGO met us at the airport and took us to the docks. We boarded the ferry by crossing a swaying, narrow plank, hauling our suitcases with us. After putting our luggage into the small cabins, we gathered on the deck to wait until the ferry left the capital.

The next few moments became what is now my most vivid memory of Bangladesh: standing the deck of the docked ferry on the Meghna River in Dhaka and staring at the strange new world around me.

Boats of all sizes crowded the river, which was hazy with pollution. The city skyline was filled with smokestacks. Cement buildings many stories high were stacked on the banks of the river. In contrast to the gray cement, flags, tarps, boats, and flowing Bengali script burst with color everywhere I looked.

Several towering ferries, like the one we were on, were docked nearby. I waved to some girls staring at me from another ferry, and they waved back.

Loudspeakers blared over Eastern music. Voices yelled and chanted. The air was hot and moist. The city reeked of sewage.

Everywhere were people, masses of people— women in bright saris or burkas, men in shirts and trousers or lungis. The people were on boats and ferries, and crowded on the river banks, hawking, working, walking, talking, and shouting.

My eyes were glazed with culture shock and jet lag. I had always read about other places in books, but now I had landed on the pages. I wasn’t in an alien world, I was the alien.

The two NGO workers who had met us at the airport passed around two large water bottles. “No cups,” they cheerfully explained. “You’ll have to share. Welcome to Bangladesh.” They also bought us lychee fruit from a hawker— a delicious strawberry-shaped fruit I had never seen before.

Our ferry left the docks and started chugging down the river. Darkness began to fall. Small boats scurried away from our big boat. Announcements in three languages crackled over the speakers.

Some members of our party grumbled about the restrooms having only squat toilets.

On the riverbank, a man brushed his teeth in the water.

Our group had an odd number of girls, and I got to sleep in a cabin alone. Ken wasn’t thrilled, but in reality, our cabins were all pretty close together and it wasn’t that unsafe.

Each cabin cost about ten American dollars. They were small and dark with yellowed sheets on thin mattresses, but they were luxurious compared to open decks below, where the poorer travelers slept on blankets without walls or curtains.

The key to my cabin was one of those finicky keys that takes a few tries to unlock the door. One of ferry’s young workers, perhaps twelve years old, always seemed to be lurking nearby and wherever I started fiddling with the key, he was right there, saying “I’ll help you, Miss!”, and grabbing my key. No matter how sneakily I tried to unlock my cabin, he always came to rescue me before I could get the door open.

Child labor— and child beggars— were common in Bangladesh. (On the van from the airport, a little girl, perhaps eight years old, had tried to sell us flowers while we were stopped in traffic.) I have a sad memory of a man begging us for money as he carried a child with a severely swelled head.

When we awoke on the ferry the next morning, we had left the slums of Dhaka behind us, and entered the tropical world of palm trees, rice fields, and small villages. Only the occasional fishing boat now bobbed past our ferry.

Soon we got off the ferry, and took another smaller boat, and then a van to the volunteer base, where the guys built houses and we girls did laundry and cooked and took rides in rickshaws to market.

The Way Home

Two weeks later, heading north on the ferry, I met a Bengali family from Dhaka and became their friend for an hour or so. It was a middle-aged couple and their young daughters and a baby that apparently belonged to one of the daughters. They spoke only a little English, and I hadn’t picked up much Bengali in two weeks, but we liked each other with the mutual affection of the fascinated. They showed me their cabin. I sat with them on the deck and held their baby, and we smiled at each other. They were Hindus and not Muslims. (I hadn’t picked much of the language, but I could tell the difference between Hindus and Muslims by then.) I showed them the henna tattoo I’d gotten on my hand, and they nodded approvingly.

The family bought snacks from a young hawker who chopped up vegetables and other mysterious ingredients and wrapped them in newspapers. We volunteers had been warned not to eat food that came from questionable sources, but I was going home and didn’t care very much anymore.

So I ate the delicious food wrapped in newspaper when the Hindu family offered it to me. Then the mother of the family, offered me something else: a black dot like the ones her daughters were wearing on their foreheads. They were called bindis and came in a package just like stickers.

“Um, I’m a Christian!” I said. I didn’t know much about Hinduism— what if the bindis had some kind of religious connotation?

“No, no!” the mother shook her head. “Only for beauty. Just for beauty!” (She was right, the bindi, once a symbol of marriage and devotion, is today often just a fashion accessory, especially if it’s not red.) She pressed the black dot on my forehead, it matched nicely with my new henna tattoo.

It was kind gesture, and they even gave me the rest of their bindi stickers, which I still have saved in my scrapbook today.

When evening fell, I said good-bye to my new friends. The next day, I said good-bye to Bangladesh and 8,000 miles and many hours later I got home and fell asleep on the carpet of our living room. Ken had been right, I was tired like I had never been tired before!

Someday, Cordell, I hope you can travel too.

Note about the photos: After the trip, the group all pooled their photos. So while these are from my trip, I didn’t take most of the them. If you were with me on the trip and happen to stumble upon this blog and recognize your photos, please contact me and I will be happy to give you credit.