Dr Nooooooo!

As if I needed another sign of the gathering momentum with which my fourth dacade aproaches, tooth decay has launched an assault on my mouth.

I sit here drooling over the keyboard and I wish it was because of the memories of flirtacious looks from a glamourous dentist’s assistant or even less realistically a refund off the dentist on account of my gnashers being so perfect and therefore some sort of reward was due their careful owner but no. I drool because the side of my head feels as if it’s melted.

The dentist asked if my bottom lip and the side of my tongue felt numb, this after he had speared my gum with a syringe of cartoon like proportions full of anaesthetic – at the time nothing felt numb. He made me contort my face into Maori style Hakka poses and then began the ‘probe’. (I’m convinced all the claims by alien abductees are really half remembered dentists chair episodes from their childhood that they’ve repressed, which have later resurfaced as Sunday Sport articles.)

In case you missed it I said, “at the time nothing felt numb”. Images of Bond villains kept running through my mind as I squirmed under the dentist’s deceptively strong vice-like grip on my head,
“Do you expect me to talk, Coldfinger?”
“No Mr Bongo, I expect you to die”
went the imaginary exchange.

I was informed, in a manner that clearly suggested that I should be ecstatic about the news, that I qualified for a cosmetically enhanced white filling at NHS prices and not cheap metal ones. Since you’ll remember, “at the time nothing felt numb”, and the dentist, his glamourous assistant and assorted sharp implements had encamped themselves in my mouth I wasn’t in the mood to disagree but I recognised a leveraged pitch when I heard one.

I somehow, heroically, survived the ordeal with out crying hardly at all. On the plus side the anaesthetic has finally kicked in and currently everything feels numb. Now you’ll have to excuse me while I go and empty my gob.

Moulvibazar Fishermen

Well it’s about time I got back to that travel snapshot thingy that I used to do — it’s a kind of birthday present for Bongo Vongo who’s just turned one – ahhhh.

So, there I was in the middle of Bangladesh, well actually in the North Eastern Division of Sylhet and to be precise my parents’ home district of Moulvibazar, watching a bunch of blokes splashing about in water. I’d spent a couple of weeks in Dhaka but the purpose of the trip had been to get back to my roots and that kind of malarkey. So we made the uncomfortable journey across the country along the barely maintained roads to my dad’s ancestral village of Kachua, near Moulvibazar Town.

The village is ‘run’ by one of my uncles but other than himself and his wife there were no other members of the family who lived in Kachua anymore. With the exception of a couple of uncles and cousins who lived in town, the whole clan now lived in either the UK or the US. This is quite a common feature of this part of Bangladesh and it has the highest proportion of bideshis (literally – foreigners) in the country. In fact it’s resulted in property prices in this otherwise remote region to be as high as, if not higher, than in Dhaka, (it’s like Sunderland housing prices being the same as London’s). All the ex-pat Bangladeshi’s plough their hard-earned pounds and dollars into property back in the Desh … why I don’t know, it’s not as if their children are likely to ever live there. But the guys wading through the village tank (an artificial pond stocked with fish but used for domestic purposes too — yeah I know but eventually you get used to the lax attitude to hygiene) didn’t know about house prices in the UK and I dare say they didn’t care.

My uncle had decided, one day, to catch the fish in the tank. We had used a fishing rod previously but I think he wanted to put on a show for me and if there’s one thing Bangladeshi’s like more than anything else it’s fish especially when there’s a show involved in their capture. So he hired the services of a team of tank fishermen, hence the blokes in the water, for the job — payment would be in fish.

The idea is that they would start off by stretching out a net along the breadth of one end of the tank and then teams of fishermen would wade along the edge of the tank, slowly but surely, catching all the fish in the tank as they pulled the net across to the other side. A genuine dragnet I suppose.

In reality not all the fish get caught, they’re quite clever these Bangladeshi fish, as the net is dragged across you can see the silvery flashes of the smart ones leaping over the floats and splashing back into the safe side of the tank. Thus continuing they’re fishy lives in the village communal bath water for a few weeks longer … I think I’d rather get caught! Having said that, Bangladesh has a serious problem with water on a number of fronts – in the Northern districts there is a severe lack of it due to the Farakka Dam up river in India and all the politics over India’s latest plans for diverting the waters of it’s (and by extension Bangladesh’s) rivers.

(Also, all over the country people are now beginning to suffer the effects of years of arsenic poisoning because of the contamination of well-water. Rather tragically, tube wells were cited by well intentioned (British) experts as being safer for the population than the cholera-ridden ground water they’d been drinking from time immemorial. Hindsight can be a cruel critic.)

As it gets pulled in to the opposite bank the rest of the fishermen leap into the water and carefully bring the ends of the net together, grabbing the less smarter fishes when they find them and throwing them onto the bank. There the chief fisherman, more of a foreman really and the only one who doesn’t get his feet wet, puts the gasping, glistening and flapping fishes into baskets.

His crew continue to pull the net together till they all meet at a point whereupon they lift the remaining portion of the net and catch the last desperate and, it has to be said, delicious fish. My dad, who had witnessed such events since childhood, reckoned that the fishermen were pulling a fast one over on my uncle. He was convinced that they had secretly stashed fish away into the voluminous folds of the net while they were wading across the tank. Indeed, there weren’t that many fish in the baskets in the end — the wily fishermen’s foreman saying that they’d all leapt over the net and that besides there weren’t that many fish in the tank to start off with.

It has to be understood that as well as the legendary love of fish, Bangladeshi’s love a good argument — they’ll argue over anything — I suppose it’s just another form of entertainment, like a game of ping pong but with accusations of tog (fraudulent intent) instead of balls. And in this game you can’t actually accuse the other guy of cheating, unless you’ve got the evidence but in the end it’s all part of the bargaining process and eventually an equitable division of the spoils is made.

That evening I ignored the little voice of western conditioned hygienic reason, screaming in the back of my head for me to become a vegetarian if only for the night, and tucked into some lovely organic biryan machh aur bhat (spiced pan-fried fish and rice) with the rest of the village.

Sylhet, WiFi and ‘telephone ladies’

It’s starting to feel like I’m just relaying information from The Daily Star but I read this article, by Sayeedur Rahman today and it kinda fits in with things …

Recently, the use of wireless networks, and in particular wi-fi, has drawn a lot of attention as a relatively low-cost way of getting fast network access to rural areas and less-developed country like Bangladesh. Wi-fi is not the only wireless networking technology, of course. Packet radio, microwave links and even 3G phone networks could all do a similar job.

But wi-fi is the latest cool thing and — not entirely coincidentally — a growing number of companies and market analysts have started touting it as the next big thing, the focus for a second-generation internet-style boom.

Learn Foundation, a Sylhet-based non-profit charity set up in 1997, has worked to reach computers and the internet to isolated rural areas of Bangladesh, using wireless technology. The Foundation has already built seven radio towers in seven villages in the region and aims to establish a broadband network in a 2,500 square kilometre (965 square mile) area.

which is interesting enough but even more encouragingly, a bit further on in the article …

GrameenPhone ladies provide villagers with a vital link to services such as hospitals and to relatives both at home and abroad, in a country with the lowest number of phones in South Asia. Villagers flock to Village Phone ladies to use a mobile to call relatives, friends or business associates, paying for calls by the minute. The Grameen scheme has been hailed as a successful example of introducing technology to the poor.

The mobile technology has literally changed many village phone ladies’ life. At present, 32,000 village phones are at work in 52 districts and 50,000 Bangladeshi women are making a living as GrameenPhone Ladies, as they are known. And so emerged Bangladesh’s ‘telephone ladies,’ who gained social importance and income from selling wireless service to fellow villagers.

The women, who power their phones with solar panels, now make $500 a month, about the same amount as earned by the typical CEO of a Bangladeshi bank and a lot more than a Bangladeshi’s average annual income of $380. As for the villagers there is no more traveling to the city to make phone calls.

Regarding the first bit– what can I say — I’ll soon be able to blog wirelessly on my laptop from a remote village in Sylhet more easily than from the centre of Brum (but I’d have a problem recharging the batteries — I suppose I could try wrestling the solar panels away from the ‘telephone ladies’ … but I expect I’d lose).

On the latter, I seem to remember watching a news report about women in South Africa doing almost exactly the same kind of thing and making a (relative) fortune from it; which kinda begs the question – what are the blokes up to?

The Queen of Microcredit?

My mom informed me that the Queen of Spain was in Bangladesh yesterday — so it must be big news. And despite looking a bit bored in it, there she is (urm … the Queen of Spain that is and not my mom) sandwiched between the daddy of Microcredit, Muhammad Yunus and Bangladeshi PM, Khaleda Zia in this picture. They were attending the launch of the Asia Pacific Region Microcredit Summit which began in Dhaka yesterday, reports the Daily Star.

A succinct explanation of Microcredit is provided via the Meatball Wiki :

From “Looking at Poverty, Seeing Untapped Riches” [1], an article in the New York Times (October 26, 2000) by Tina Rosenberg:

Microcredit is the child of Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, who began in 1976 by lending 62 cents apiece to a group of 42 artisans — thus freeing them to buy a day’s materials in advance and sell the finished product to whoever they chose, at market rates. Mr. Yunus founded the Grameen Bank, which gives small loans mainly to women. The borrowers need only social collateral — they form groups of five and all are cut off if one defaults. Today more than eight million people in more than 58 countries get microcredit loans. A few years ago, a study of Grameen borrowers showed that one-third had escaped poverty.

[end of excerpt]

The actual figure is more like 50 million and the Washington based Microcredit Summit Campaign aims to reduce world poverty by providing microcredit to 100 million people by the end of 2005.

Spain for it’s part, according to Queen Sofia, has assigned $280 million for fighting poverty, especially in Latin America. Though what she made of the hartal (a peculiarly Bangladeshi form of general strike) causing misery for poor Bangladeshis outside the comfy confines of the Dhaka Sheraton was not mentioned in the report

Anyway, you can learn more about women and microfinance and women microentrepreneurs in the Daily Star or read what Grameen Bank’s founder, Muhammad Yunus himself, has to say about it at the self-styled Home page of Microcredit.

Envirogeekery

Apart from indulging my sub-geek wireless broadband passions this week I have been mostly throwing away paper. I’ve collected a lot of it over the past five years. It’s not a particularly exciting hobby I must admit but it’s one I seem to have developed quite a knack for.

I’ve got bills, xmas wrapping paper, pizza delivery offers, letters from MPs, court summons, more bills, offers for broadband, dollymaids (!), chicken and chips for 99 pence, books, cds, dvds, squash club membership, even more bills and a disturbing number of unopened erroneous tax demands, car hire agreements, ticket stubs for trains, planes and UGC cinemas and did I mention bills?

The above is not an exhaustive list but I’ll spare you and myself the undoubted pleasure of listing every single item of paper I’ve collected in the past half decade as I’m sure that that much excitment on a Friday the 13th could only lead to some sort of horrific yawning accident occuring. Suffice to say that there was a good 75kg of paper collected in the pile I have finally decided to build, of stuff I could throw away. That’s a small tree’s worth.

Feeling the need to give back to the environment that which had been torn out of it so needlesly in the first place I embarked on a well-intentioned quest to find a green and pleasant way to get rid of the paper. Alas, so far, in vain. There’s a number of paper recycling skips dotted about the 2nd city and they’re great for all the pizza and computer hardware boxes that I’ve also built up an healthy collection of. However, I’ve no intention of fueling my nascent paranoia by dumping my own body weight of paper, with personal details like how much I spend on pizza, what AOL rip me off for each month and vital medical details like how much I weigh, for evildoers to get their hands on.

So I figure on calling up the Council and finding a safe and secure method of disposing of my tree-load … what a load of council-tax wasting rubbish that idea was. There’s a phone number you can call, it’s listed in the stack of directories I’ve got serving as speaker stands but it yeilds nothing and no one. In frustration I called up Friends of the Earth and a very pleasant woman told me that Birmingham City Council has one of the worst records for recyling of any major city in Europe. She went on to tell me that Warwickshire County Council has one of the better ones and suggested a drive to warwickshire in order to use their abundant facilities.

There’s a word beginning with ‘i’ , with an ‘o’ in the middle and ending with ‘y’ which best describes having to pump petrol fumes into the air while driving into deepest Warwickshire for the sake of the environment of Birmingham — ‘i d i o c y’.

[UPDATE: 28/9/05 - Pat Bishop very kindly left a comment with a link to www.brumcan.co.uk which had I known about would have saved the world from the need for this blog entry!]