My second trip to Dhaka was fun but also arduous and painful. Our journey there was long and uncomfortable, but there were moments of beauty—the girls all started singing and dancing to Hindi songs blasting from speakers on the bus, and I could feel the wind rushing in my hair and the sights and smells wash over me. It took over eleven hours for us to get there, drop the girls off at the guesthouse, and get to our hotel. Fatema, Matt, Brian, and the two Princeton interns and I all went out to dinner, which was quite good but ended up making us all sick. Then we came back and watched the world cup and talked late into the night. On Sunday, there was a nation-wide work stoppage, a strike against the results of the election. It wasn’t safe to leave the hotel, so unfortunately, we were confined there for the entire day. We all talked and laughed together though, and had a good time. Early Monday morning, we were picked up and brought to a five-star hotel where the conference was being held. It was extremely fancy, and security guards made us walk through metal detectors as we entered. Then, we were all given special passes to be there, and were led to an opulent assembly room, with a long stage and podium set up for the eminent speakers. In the entry hall, there were booths set up for all kinds of social businesses, subprojects of Grameen Bank. I can explain in more detail what social business is, if any of you don’t know or are interested. The conference had some of the most eminent businessmen in the world, not only those involved in social business, but also many prominent leaders. For some, they couldn’t actually attend the conference, so they had recorded speeches to direct to us; Bill Clinton was actually one of them. Then Muhammad Yunus spoke, and he was actually rather disappointingly arrogant. I understand that he is extremely successful and a Nobel Laureate, but at the same time, the entire conference seemed more like a publicity event for his new book than actually directed at educating young people with entrepreneurial aspirations. He even held it on his seventieth birthday, and everyone sang him happy birthday…very kitsch. But all in all, we had a good time, and I met a really interesting French girl who is interning with Danone Grameen. This is a social business that pairs Grameen bank in Bangladesh with the French yoghurt company, and they make a yoghurt that can be sold extremely cheaply and distributed to the poorest families in the country. The yoghurt is infused with nutrients to help with malnourishment, and seems like a great idea, until you remember that refrigeration is rare in the villages, electricity is erratic at best, and even distribution is problematic given road conditions…it seems like every time someone comes up with a solution, only more problems arise. But it’s still good to be exposed to such things. I also got Muhammad Yunus’ new book autographed, it felt very contrived but I did get a picture with him, that I don’t much care about but everyone else seems to think is cool. Then we had a delicious catered meal, and I got hit on by some Bangladeshi medical students…it seems I have “green card” written on my forehead.
Then, we all clambered back on the bus, and commenced the worst trip ever...it took thirteen hours. There was a lot of traffic, and the bus was stuffy and odorous to say the least. The bathroom stops are few and far between, and the most disgusting conditions you can imagine…then, everyone seemed to get sick all at once, just as we were stopped in deadlocked traffic. This was past midnight, and we were on a dark and potholed road, that was flooded because of the monsoon. A few of us climbed out of the bus to see what was wrong, but I went right back in because there were a lot of men milling about on the road. I started to get nervous, because if we were stopped for a long time, the battery of the bus would die and we couldn’t keep the lights on, and you can’t breathe if you close all the windows…Brian and the bus driver walked up over two kilometers, and they said that there had been an accident. CNG stands for compressed natural gas, and it is much cheaper than regular gas because it is highly flammable. A CNG (the small little green car things that you see in my pictures) apparently was hit by a truck, and it ended up exploding. I saw the remains of it on the side of the road, there was just a gaping smoking hole where the driver seat is…I don’t know if there had been any passengers or not, but they would not have survived if there were. It was a very strange feeling to pass by it, the lights giving the carcass of the CNG an ethereal shine to it, catching the smoke and reflecting off the rain…I kept thinking, “someone just died here, someone was just blown up right here…” it’s a strange thing to think about. I think I was already a little delirious from the fever that hit hard the next day (when I got the 103 temperature), because there was such a dreamlike and strange quality to the rest of the silent drive back…we finally got home past 3:30am, and I couldn’t sleep even then. Insomnia is worse when you have a lot on your mind.
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