Today Mehedi who runs the Bangladesh chapter of The Worker Rights Consortium, (and who also happens to be Charlie's boss for the summer) was supposed to pick us up at around 10:00am to take us to the Gulshan office of the Solidarity Center which is about 5kms (I promise I'm not trying to sound pretentious or cultural or whatever by using kms instead of miles, it's just that everyone here uses kms when telling me distances and I don't feel like doing the conversion. I'm not going to start writing "labour" or anything like that don't worry) south of our apartment. We waited.Drank some nescafe, and waited. More nescafe. More waiting.
At around 1pm he and his driver picked us up and it took us another 30 minutes to get there because traffic was so terrible (not in any unusual way, just the normal terribleness). People running a few hours late is I guess pretty standard here, and something that is going to take a lot of getting used to as I pride myself on my punctuality, and can be very intolerant of others who lack it.
The office is in a converted house and seems very informal but pretty nice, and I have my own little desk, computer, printer and sort of cubicle. I met some of the staff and they all seemed very friendly, although I didn't really get much of a chance to talk to them.
Shortly after we arrived, David who is the country director also arrived. We chatted with him for a bit and found out that there had been a miscommunication about where Charlie would be working. Apparently the Solidarity Center has quite a few offices around Dhaka, and there was actually no more room at the Gulshan office. (The AFL-CIO is letting the WRC use their office space but aren't directly affiliated with them, although they do work on some projects together.) Charlie and Mehedi then left to go find him an office (and they actually ended up using the office of another organization). His office is going to be outside of the diplomatic enclave of Gulshan, Baridhara and Banani meaning that we will have to get a car and driver. (More on that in the next few days hopefully.)
David filled me on the the kind of stuff the Solidarity Center does here, and its relationship with the Bangladeshi government (very strained to put it mildly) as well as the U.S. government (good and bad). He also told me that his wife and 2 kids (ages 1 and 3) live permanently in Thailand because he did not want to raise children here. (This is very understandable to me even after being here less than a week.) This means he travels there as much as possible.
It sounds like I will hopefully get a chance to travel to other parts of the country and see their offices there. I will also get to go to court with the lawyers and get some real hands on experience with actual workers etc. I'm very excited about this. He said that Bangladesh is the best place in the world to be if you are interested in labor law. (I'm glad to hear it's at least the best place in the world for something. I only kid. I think I have to be here at least a few weeks before I can start saying stuff like that.) The Bangladesh Solidarity Center is also considered to be the very best. In the next few days I will be reading from cover to cover the Bangladeshi Labor Code. Wish me luck (it's really really looooong).
In more trivial news, Facebook is still down (which actually I guess isn't really that trivial if you think about it in the free speech / censorship way not just the "i can't post links to slate.com" way which of course was my initial thought). The newspapers had said it would be back up by today, so we shall see what happens tomorrow.
I read an anthropology paper about tardiness once. In America, 15 mins is very, very late. In Italy, Mexico, Spain, France, etc., everyone's fine with an hour late. I still can't rectify this in my mind. Are their work days LONGER? I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteAlso there were parts about the appropriate length of stay of a visit and personal space. In some middle eastern countries you can just pop in for a quick 15 min and say hello. 3 days in the minimum. Elsewhys, you've wasted the death of a goat.
Have you encountered any personal space issues? This is a unconscious thing we become incredibly attuned to and most have difficulty putting into words. In the US it's a minimum of 18 inches; in Latin America it's less than a foot. It feels EXTREMELY CLOSE. I bet in Bangladesh it's further.
There is no personal space here at all because it is the most densely populated country in the world. There are 150 million people living in a country that is the size of Wisconsin.
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