An American Club, Swiss Ice Cream, and Bangladeshi Children Begging on the Street

 I have come to the conclusion that Bangladesh is quite possibly the least fun country to be an expat in. There is a good reason that almost every foreigner is here working for a foreign government or NGO (Bangladesh actually has the most NGOs per capita of any country) and not as a tourist or pleasure seeker. Because it is a Muslim country there is almost no alcohol served anywhere (besides for a few expat restaurants and hotels) and as I have explained before it is basically impossible to get around at night without a private car. This deadly combination means that my nights are generally spent watching American sitcoms (Friend and Scrubs in particular) on the Star India channel (I can only take so many hours of BBC news or Al Jazeera before getting too depressed). Besides the fact that they replay the same shows on repeat every few hours, the really terrible part is that they play about 10 commercials (which I have memorized). A surprising number are for skin lighteners, masquerading as skin care products ("wash away your dirty dark skin cells to show the beautiful lightness underneath"). When seeing things like this all I can think about is how in America there are a countless commercials for products to make your skin darker. Although the commercials here are obviously more disturbing given the inescapable racial element and lingering vestige of British colonialism, it does make me realize all the more how the beauty industry makes its money from making people feel bad about themselves.

Basically this last paragraph should be viewed as prime evidence that I need to get out of the apartment more. From what I have learned the key to having any sort of social life here is to join a club. There is an American Club, a British Club, and German Club, an International Club and a Nordic Club among others. The best one for me to join is clearly the The American Club. It has a pool, tennis courts, a coffee shop (real coffee, not Nescafe!!), restaurant, rooftop bar, gym, and most importantly provides a way to meet people. Once you have membership to one of the clubs you are also able to go to any of the others. To get a membership you have to be sponsored by an American Diplomat. Hopefully I will be able to swing this.
To get the required paperwork we decided to stop by the club yesterday. Walking into the club I really felt like I was walking into some sort of sanctuary of calmness. It's not that it is fancy (it actually reminds me of an average community center in any average sized American town) but more that it is quiet, peaceful and clean. After talking with one of the membership guys who have us the paperwork to fill out (and told us it would take a few weeks to process our membership once we turned it in) we went to leave. A guy who had been walking into the club at the same time we had been initially talking to the guard ran to stop us. His name was Denny, and he was here from Georgia (the state) here with his family running a Baptist NGO in Dhaka and he offered to sign us in as a guest so we could hang out there for awhile. This was really nice and unexpected. We took the opportunity to get a beer in the nice air conditioned cafe, but unfortunately couldn't stay and hang out too long because we had dinner waiting for us, and didn't want to keep our cook waiting. Even if it was only for 45 minutes or so it was still a nice respite, and I desperately hope we can get membership.

Later in the evening we had made plans to meet up with Misha (the Cornell student I had met the 2nd day I was here) at Movenpick a gourmet ice cream shop near our apartment. To get there we had to brave a monsoon storm, which was unlike anything I have ever seen (and this coming from a Seattleite). 10 minutes of walking and I was drenched to the bone. The streets were filled with stagnant water, and traffic was at a standstill. Luckily the storms seem to only last an hour and they cool down the temperature and clear out a bit of the pollution. (I don't know if I have mentioned this but Dhaka is really polluted in pretty much every way a city can be polluted.)
It was very nice to see Misha again, and I am so impressed that she is only 20 years old and seems to be totally thriving here. I can't imagine doing an internship here (not through a study abroad program or anything) at that age. At 26, and having lived abroad by myself, I still feel constantly overwhelmed.
She also brought her Irish friend Ciara who just got arrived on Monday. Ciara is getting her MPH at Trinity College in Dublin and is doing research for her thesis on Bangladesh's transgendered community. I was completely clueless about this, but apparently there is a long history on the Indian subcontinent of men who identify as women. They are know as Hijra and the Wikipedia article is definitely worth a look as the subject is really fascinating. I can't wait to hear about how her research goes.

I also learned from Misha about how rampant antisemitism is here.  She has had a few conversations with her some of her coworkers (who in other respects are very nice people) but have said things in praise of Hitler, and about how Jews will burn in hell etc. By far the most disturbing element of all this is that on nearly every corner there are boys selling copies (literally photocopies) of books. These include mainly American bestsellers by authors like Dan Brown etc. but interspersed with Angels & Demons are always copies of Mein Kampf. This obviously makes me very paranoid, especially now that anti-Israel sentiment is running even higher all over the world due to what happened with the flotilla to Gaza. I'll try to just be safe and smart, and obviously not advertise the fact I am Jewish. Hopefully this won't become an issue...

We left Movenpick at 8:30, which is definitely the latest I've been out since I've been here (as if you needed any further evidence of the dire state of my social life). As soon as we got outside we were approached by 2 little kids (I think about age 4 or 5, but it is hard to tell, since due to a combination of malnourishment and genetics Bangladeshis are a lot smaller than Americans or Europeans). Misha gave one of them some money. As we parted ways, that kid decided to follow Charlie and me asking for more money. This made me so worried, as we had to cross busy streets, and he kept crossing them with us. A few times I had to reach out and make sure he was safe from the oncoming cars. I honestly think that at that moment if someone told me that I could have adopted him, I would have. I'm not kidding. I didn't know what to do. He was so little, and had such sad, weary, beautiful, brown eyes. He didn't have that hardness about him like the children just a few years older than him, who when they look at you, you can tell they are sizing you up. (It is sad but true.) Telling him no, and walking away (continuously) made me feel sick to my stomach. We didn't want to give him money because we didn't want to encourage to follow people, which we were sure he had seen success with in the past, given his insistence with us. I still don't know what the right thing to do is. I know he will not get the money that I give to him. I thought about stopping at a store and buying him food, but if I didn't know if that was the right thing to do either.