Karwan Bazaar

Multimedia journalism project from NTU Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information Going Overseas for Advanced Reporting (GOFAR) 2009 Bangladesh.

Vegetables from all over the country are transported to this location where it will be traded by respective middlemen from midnight till six in the morning.

Usually a sleepy bazaar in the morning, it transforms into a hive of activity where people are always on the move. Sleep is in short supply as some would steal forty winks while at work.

[After a long day out travelling and reporting for our main stories, we thought, what the heck, lets just go out in the middle of the night and check out this night market bustling with activity.

With the help of dearest Lablu, we walked everywhere around that place. And sure indeed, everyone was puzzled at our presence and what we were doing.

It was truly exciting to see the place change from a sleepy market to that where people are rushing all over. Hopefully this multimedia show will do the place justice. Hope you guys like it]

Before the Flight Out

(The team before flying back to Singapore)

I spent the last few days taking stock of photographs taken in Bangladesh and was surprised at how it turned out.

Not so much how the photograph was taken, but more of the effect it had on me when I started to re-look at them once again.

Then the memories flood in.

The countless bus rides from Dhaka to Dohar, where the true beauty of the country can be seen. The air fresh, and water pristine.

Rivers wider than the oceans I have seen. Paddy fields could not get any more greener.

Though I was a writer, I truly wanted to explore my abilities with the camera (regrettably without any proper end product).

Though there are basic rules to follow for photography, this time around I simply went with it and followed my heart.

What I was surprised with is the detail that I have missed or overlooked when I look at my photographs a second time. Or detail which adds to the photographs that I included unintentionally.

Its funny how this little detail trigger all the good memories I had of this country with its resilient people.

If you have read this far remain puzzled to what nonsense I am talking, look at the photograph below and compare it to the one above.

Cheryl squeezing in a smile – smug one at that – makes it all worthwhile.

Thanks Ongzzz.

Tempus fugit.

The Roman poet Virgil once said (in Latin, because I want to be fancy): “Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus”. It roughly means, “But it flees in the meantime: irretrievable time flees.”

Time really flies. It’s been a month since we came back from Bangladesh, and I can’t really say how much of the country stayed with me, and how much of it has been tucked away in the recesses of my mind under a box labelled “memories”.

So much work here in school and life is demanding for our attention now, and I’m anxiously awaiting the feedback from my story, that even blogging here has taken a back seat to the responsibilities we have. Sometimes it feels like my time in that country was from a lifetime ago.

Still, when I revisited the images taken of our time there on Flickr, it brings me back to the hustle and bustle, the crazy humidity, the crowds thronging the streets of Dhaka, the people, the paratha, the dubious lassi drink that didn’t give me an upset stomach.

While Virgil may have wanted to illustrate the speed time travels with that quote, the underlying subtext serves to remind us also that the many things we are concerned with now, before and in the coming days aren’t permanent, but we do need to treasure the memories that linger and to remember the lessons we took away – from our two trips to Bangladesh.

So here’s another post to refresh this blog, and another reminder of what we’ve done there.

Also, the website’s been overhauled! All the thanks and adulation should go to Clarence Koh, a very helpful third-year from CS, who lent a helping hand to us less CSS/HTML-savvy people. (The pen may be mightier than the sword but it is useless when it comes to deciphering webdesign codes, okay?) I hope the new design is kinder on the eyes, and more usable. Three cheers to Clarence! Hip-hip-hurray!

Lablu

The first time Lablu made me sit up, was when he reduced our lunch of fish curry to pile of spotless, translucent bones. We sat in a humid, grimy restaurant, floor black with wet prints of dirty shoes and dirty feet (it had been raining) having a quick lunch shoulder to shoulder with other sweaty, hungry men.

Lablu had insisted that I eat lunch at a better place, ” You- 200 taka at Imperial Hotel, I- 30 taka lunch, OK,” an earnest gesture which warmed my heart. It would have been indulgent, I thought, to reciprocate his well-meaning offer- travelling is after all, about getting out of your comfort zone, trying something different while you’re young and your body still holds up on you.

But the day didn’t start off with a particular fondness for Lablu. He was too tame when it came to bargaining with rickshaw wallahs, he didn’t speak the best English, and he walked so fast I couldn’t keep up- I remember feeling genuinely relieved everytime I saw his red shirt, after he disappeared for a few seconds in the crowd.
Imagine getting lost in Dhaka when you still have stories to do!

But as the day progressed, I realised that Lablu was a man with his own stories to tell. It was 3.30pm and we had been early for a 4pm appointment. There was nothing to do in that residential area, and tea shops are always a stone’s throw away anywhere in Bangladesh, so I decided tea it shall be. We found this shop under some trees behind a crumbling brick wall, there was a University right opposite.

I struck up a conversation about school and Lablu started telling me about his teenage love– Minu. They met in class 10, he said, ” can’t eat, can’t sleep without seeing her.” He would hide behind trees on the road back to school just to see her, and be near her house just for a glimpse of her– a sweet puppy love that sounds so much like Singaporean JC stalkers He said he wrote diaries of songs and poems for her, but he had to leave for Saudi Arabia for work some years later, and his father threw these precious writings away.

He also talked about his best friend (whose name I forgot) who would stand up for him in fights at school. ” He put some money in my bag for me, before I left to Saudi Arabia,” Lablu recalled fondly. He had made a pact for Minu to wait for him 3 years and 6 months before he came back to Bangladesh to marry her, but he could not return by then. Minu, he said, is now married to an Indian. I could see him sipping his dhut cha, holding back his tears.I hadn’t come to make anyone cry and was taken aback at Lablu’s emotional honesty.

Having lived my life in a different country, a different context, I was skeptical as to why someone would share his life so openly with a stranger he barely knew for half a day.I still am- which I don’t know is a wise or sad thing.

Lablu says his dream is simple- to go overseas and work again, so that he can afford the 80,000 taka Honda Hero he’d always wanted. ” That one,” he said, pointing out to his dream machine from our CNG.

I really thank Lablu for sharing his story- the human connection was refreshing. The days down at Chittagong were really draining for me- Alif and I started the day at 7, sometimes ending as late as 11 or 12, because it was tough to get hold of shipbreaking workers in the day. I remember feeling a sense of relief when I returned to Dhaka — the camaradarie in the team, in room 609 and around Thai Cream Soup in our favourite restaurant really kept me going. But it is small and unexpected stories, like Lablu’s, that really make the trip worthwhile.

These days I longer feel so distant when I meet a Bangladeshi worker round my block.
In fact, when I came home I was surprised that I didn’t mind curry by third meal in.

Hmm travelling his this weird effect on me: It makes the world seem bigger (there are so many places I have yet to see) , yet smaller (there are common topics between strangers) all at the same time.

Kash

Invisible bonds

The nature of our work opens us up new perceptions, but sometimes, I feel that I get so sucked into my article topics that I forget about the the experience as a whole.

Weaving through crowds on narrow, cracked pavements; dodging CNGs, buses and trucks while dashing across the road; laughing at people who got so caught up with staring at our weird foreigner faces that they walk into other people (or worse, something solid); the rickety, bumpy feel of rickshaw rides — these are the little things which made the trip so memorable.

Then there are the people whom I interviewed or sought help from. While I was there, they were all but reduced to subjects of interest for my articles, mere quote/information/contact-providers that I need in order for me to do my work. But unwittingly, they have become more than that.

I received SMSes from interviewees on the day we returned to Singapore, asking if I had arrived safely. Tonuja, my main translator, too, dropped an SMS a week later, expressing how she missed those crazy days where I made her go to places that would make her father cringe. Oops.

And then there was a touching email from a contact whom I met on the first trip, apologizing for not being able to meet me the second time round for dinner at his home because his father-in-law was hospitalized for a serious illness during the Eid holidays. I felt so sorry that he had to feel sorry about not meeting me.

There’s more – one took the initiative to email new information that he stumbled upon that he thought would be useful for me, while another even mailed by post a stack of photographs that he took with his own camera.

All these are surprising to me because when I took their contact details and such, my primary reason was just in case I need to ask them additional questions. There were times during the trip where some interviewees would ask me to please, call them, when I am back in Singapore, just to say hello — but I’ve never really considered doing that.

I guess, for them, our brief acquaintance counts for much more — a start of a real friendship.

Indeed, we have changed each other’s lives without knowing. Now, what I can do for them is to tell their stories, from the impoverished women migrants to the bright-eyed children.

Then perhaps, I’ll do a round of calls. Just to say hello.

We go, so that others will know

Child labourers working in a small shop making water taps at the slum areas in Beri Badh, Dhaka.

“You know, if it weren’t for you guys, I wouldn’t have ever gone to all those places and met all those people.” These are the words that were said to me repeatedly by the various Nepalese and Bangladeshi reporters and translators whom I had worked with while in these countries. In today’s Saturday Special in The Straits Times, Desmond Lim, the ST photojournalist who has been reporting live from Padang in Indonesia where the earthquake happened, wrote a reflective piece on why he went through all the trouble of trekking through the ruins and rubble of destroyed homes to get to the earthquake victims.

In my various trips to slums, foul-smelling factories, riot-prone mountainous regions and plains and even mental hospitals, I often wondered what I was doing in those places. But as I came back to Singapore and started to piece together a story based on the photos I had taken, I started to see the power I held in my hands. This might sound cheesy, but I also realized the responsibility that came along with this power. As I go about putting up a photo exhibition in the school libraries, I had to choose which of the photos I wanted to exhibit. And every different photo I took has a story behind it. Do I choose to exhibit the visually-stunning photos, or do I go for the ones with stronger stories to tell about my photo subjects? Afterall, most of them had eagerly told their stories to me through the various translators, in hope of getting their stories heard by more people around the world. These people had trusted in me to make their voices louder, because they know they themselves can’t do that. Are these stories then worth telling, even though the pictures I took may not be visually-arresting? Or are they just photo subjects to me, to be treated objectively and chosen because of their technicalities?

Reading Desmond Lim’s article therefore gave me some extra food for thought. Universities are often the best and last place to practise idealism before we step out into the reality-driven corporate world. Cherian said that it is interesting to see the FYP topics that CS students, especially journalism ones, tend to do, which are often more socially-driven with a strong dose of idealism in wanting to highlight various social issues. And I can’t help thinking that this has also happened to our GOFAR trips. What started out as a economic angle to cover the effects of the global recession on a third-world nation has expanded and evolved into a more socially-driven theme of “Life on the Edge” for the Bangladeshis. I think it is because subconsciously we know that this may be our last few chances in getting to be idealistic, to help make the world a better place by highlighting the problems of the world to a larger audience. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think in today’s global context we are sorely lacking in idealism.

So as I go about telling my stories through my photos, I think I am not worried that my photo essays will turn out to be rather “generic or overly-done”. Sometimes, as journalists, we are too caught up with finding the “what’s new” in our stories that we lose sight of why we want to report a certain story in the first place. Yes there are many stories of child labour, but every child’s story is different. Every sad story behind the mentally-ill patient is different from the one lying on the bed beside in the mental ward. I do not aim to produce “scoops” and stunning stories that no one has ever reported before. I only want to let the rest of the world know that the story of yet another child who should be in school instead of breaking his back making machine parts in a fumes-filled dinghy sweatshop.

I go, because I want others to know.

the village

this second trip, i spent my first 3 days in the villages on the outskirts of Dhaka, and honestly, they were my happiest.
the simplicity of the people, the willingness to help, the kinship they offered, it was heartwarming to say the least.

i was talking to jute farmers who sometimes don’t even earn enough to get by, but still, they offered food, they offered drinks, and gave up their best chairs to accommodate a foreign girl from a foreign land, who amazingly looked like one of them.

their hospitality, and the slower pace was a welcome change to the impression that dhaka had left me with from the first trip. this one lady particularly has left a deep impression in my memory- a grandmother in her 60s, but hardly looking it, she checked out my earrings, my nose stud, and finally my hair. And she asked my translator why i dont use oil. I went all the way to the villages of Bangladesh to find out my hair is too dry- that was REALLY amusing!

I had to climb a pretty steep slope to get to this lady’s house, and I was afraid to climb down because my sprained ankle was still recovering. But she held my hand and brought me down, and I think the reason the incident is still so fresh in my mind is that i put all my trust in her. Not a life or death situation for sure, but then, again, spraining my ankle on my gofar trip might have felt like dying to me.

On another note, the streets of Dhaka were SO empty this time round, thanks to Eid and Durga Pooja, big celebrations in the country that made many Dhakaiyas head back to their quaint villages to their families. This means Dhaka was in it its full glory with colourful rickshaws, even more colourful clothes, but just without much of the life-consuming jams.

I must admit that without the jams, i felt a little too relaxed, a little less excited. The jams did really sum up Bangladesh for me.

I will be back with more soon!
Toodles!

I am a parachute journalist.

Yea, I totally felt this way when we went on an excursion to Mawna Village in Gazipur, a 90-minute ride away from Dhaka.

The video team visited the village to document how solar energy has impacted the lives of rural Bangladeshis. The trip was organised by Grameen Shakti, a pioneer in implementing solar energy projects across rural Bangladesh.

The nice people at Grameen kindly planned our itinerary and brought us around – we started with visiting their training centre, then the house of a Green entrepreneur, then the villagers who have installed solar home systems and shopkeepers at the marketplace who are making more money now thanks to the solar-powered light bulbs that allow them to stay open for longer hours.

I read about all these when researching for the story, so I knew to look for them when we were there. At some point during the filming, I suddenly felt I had been dropped into the village, and was only looking for things that I’d already told myself to focus on. I was beginning to worry if we had overlooked other facets of the story as we’re so caught up with getting what we set out to do.

But because language was a barrier and time a constraint, I had to make do with what was presented to us. It was like, okay here’s the subject, get in there, ask the questions, get the shots, and out we go. I remember having to hurry from place to place just to make sure we got enough footage before it turned dark. I’ve never felt so hurried while filming. There was no time to establish rapport with the subject, there was no time to dig deeper. It was, “GO, GO, GO!” all the way. Sometimes, I felt we couldn’t get the quotes we wanted even after much probing, and that’s when I really wished I could speak Bengali so that nothing got lost in translation and I could try harder to tease information bits out of the interviewees myself.

I requested to speak with certain “type” of villagers, and the Grameen guy had with him a folder of what I thought were project information sheets and names of people who have benefitted from solar power. I couldn’t be sure but every time I asked for someone with a certain story, he would flip the pages as he nodded so I really couldn’t help thinking that we’re being brought around to listen to stories we’re “supposed” to listen to. I disliked the idea of having to depend so much on someone to get me a story. But then again, I guess that’s not so much of an issue here because in this case, there isn’t anything potentially controversial that should be treated with more care.

We were in and out of Mawna in less than four hours, and almost half that time was spent drinking tea at the office in the training centre and travelling within the village.

I certainly hope we covered all our bases and did justice to the story, despite being somewhat like parachute journalists.

I miss bangladesh.

Finally, it has come to an end. My most anticipated October 1st did arrived and flew past and before I knew it, we were duty-free shopping in Changi airport, much to the rage of the rest of the tired go-farers. Sorry!

Yet, I suffered from withdrawal symptoms. When I was travelling in the aircon or shall i call it A/C? and plush seat comforts of SBS, my mind wandered to my encounters on the public bus in Bangladesh, where fellow commuters hands were full of, not shopping bags, but live chickens! The chickens brushed against my translator Maxim, who immediately got up from his seat and suggested we moved away from the chicken commuter. Haha. Good move i think.

When i was jaywalking near my house to reach the MRT station, I thought of the newly-acquired skills I’ve developed in crossing the roads of Dhaka, where no Basic Theory and Final Theory driving books will ever approve of. The familiar sound of the horn that assured me that Dhaka was alive was also absent. Suddenly, I felt a void. It’s the chaos of Dhaka that kept me awake and alert for my safety. Now in Singapore, everything’s orderly and somewhat boring. That can probably explain my zonked out and tired look in school these few days.

I miss the friends I’ve made in Bangladesh too. The classic “do you have a scissors, I want to cut my nose.” or “Can I use hand sanitiser on my nose” quotes from Munna when he was having a sneezing fit, the jokes by Maxim, haha. and I also miss the bond we shared with the whole go-far team, the jokes and laughter that served as a lullaby in room 609, the toilet mishaps and the classic “kash” moments. “I wonder if this is what it will be like in an old folk’s home, where we lie in our beds and do nothing.”-Kash on our last day in the room, where we were all so tired we just lazed on our beds in silence. haha. talk about comic relief that brighten our days!

How can we ever miss the food of imperial hotel? The creamy thai soup and thai noodles. The fried chicken wings and briyani. and oh, the constant breakfast prata and omelette.

I think perhaps the reason for my withdrawal symptoms is because this time, I am leaving Bangladesh for real. No more second trip. No more imperial hotel, no more meeting the translators. There is a sense of finality. And it is only when things are taken away from you, then will you treasure it! And it is because on this trip, I did more grassroots level interaction, compared to the first trip where I simply met the NGOs and policy makers. These grassroots interaction brought me right into the heart of the action. There was more bonding, thanks to the long journeys to the places, and the rough terrains we had to navigate together.

And perhaps I am feeling nostalgic because I have left a part of myself behind, and emerged from bangladesh as a stronger person. I have also seen how the whole team has grown, to be more assertive, stronger, and more “Bangladeshi”.

It is perhaps through this reflective glass that makes me miss Bangladesh, for all its ups and downs, and smiles and tears!

So, I shall say to Bangladesh, BRING IT ON!

This is Go-Far, this is not Sojourn.

- In the words of Shyam, on warning us that there wasn’t room to be atas in Bangladesh.

Although I have sworn, with Yenlin, never to return to Bangladesh, I am aware of the strange way fate can sometimes play tricks on us whenever we say never.

There are definitely stories galore to be found there, but until the country offers more than just a great way to travel about (rickshaws – love them), I don’t see myself returning in the near future. The uncertainty and flexibility gets quite addictive after a while and I’ll miss that sooner or later but can’t imagine living and working there on a long term basis.

However, having spent time in India before, I must say that I prefer the people of Bangladesh.

Ignoring the perverts and repressed males who make up the few bad eggs, I found Bangladeshis generally very likable. Most don’t have inflated egos, and judging from our translators, who are students like us, they share the same sense of humour. Sometimes they get over-enthusiastic about offering help, and we take it the wrong way, but I think most genuinely want to make your stay in their country as enjoyable and comfortable as possible. And they are truly grateful for your visit to their country. That is one thing our countrymen have lost as we progress economically – that sense of community. Suspicion is the default and everything that we do we only do if there is something to be gained. So although it seems like Bangladesh has nothing to offer materially, they have a lot heart and spirit.

I attribute the enjoyment I felt during the second trip to two things: my 20mm lens and having space to breathe. As compared to the first trip when we were all anxious about where our stories were heading, I think we were much better prepared for the second trip. Not to mention healthier too!

Healthy body means healthy mind, means better pictures. So here are the few random pictures that don’t fit into either the exhibition or the magazine but I don’t want them to go to waste…here goes..

Yen excitedly steps back into the GFC

Chian Hui waiting for Tanuja to get us a CNG. Imperial Hotel International - Shyam told my mum that the name is deceptive. He wasn't lying.

Empty -peaceful even- Dhaka streets because of Eid holidays

Strange Aarong commercial featuring kids who look like overdressed taitais. Aarong is the local atas brand which sells clothes, household items, books, bags, jewellery etc.

A picture of ten-year-old Asif sitting on Sheikh Hasina's lap. And he complains I'm atas because of my mosquito prevention band.

Yes we luv A&W.

View of the stadium from rooftop of Imperial Hotel International at sunset. Picture taken on the last day in Bangladesh.

Employees of the hotel enjoying the sunset at the rooftop.

Bangladesh, tomar shahajir jono donobaht!