Early Morning in Sylhet

I'm in Sylhet, an area in Northeastern Bangladesh, just near the India border.  As with every other morning on this trip, I am awake by 5am with a couple of hours to process my time here before I launch into another very intense day.  This time, I am staying in an "all-things-made-in-China" hotel with an arrow pointing to Mecca on the wall, hearing the first of the day's call to prayer and having a very distinct feeling that women don't stay here alone very often.  After a monsoon rain and small earthquake our first 24 hours in Dhaka, I am also very aware of the substandard nature of most of the buildings here.  

This was to be a "rural" site visit and I was expecting rural.  I somehow forgot the incredible concentration of people in this relatively small country.  Rural is not really so rural.  Sylhet is filled with all the paradoxes of the developing world - children picking through trash heaps to find a scrap of something that will either serve as food or a toy right next to high end shops selling jewelry and embroidered silk saris.  The traffic is beyond insane and it's clear there isn't a lot of fear of head-on collisions as cars go head to head with large trucks barreling down the road, swerving at the last second only to miss a rickshaw by mere centimeters.  I have stopped looking out the front window and instead engage in conversation with my colleagues in the back seat.

I am also struck by how similar the roadside stalls and general day to day life looks so much like africa.  Then, I realized it's because 90% of what's sold on the roadside is all the same cheap plastic and metal stuff manufactured in China and sold in every corner of the world.  Local products are edged out by these unattractive Chinese goods that never biodegrade and don't do much for local trade.  Also, the produce is nearly the same as in Ghana and cooking methods similar, but the cuisine is very different.  The difference is the local herbs and spices.

At the end of the day, after visiting women and babies in their homes, touring a health clinic and running into people who are one step above being slaves with bundles of tea on their heads going to get their day's harvest weighed at the factory, the thing that sticks with me most is - we are really all the same.  We have beautiful differences in our cultures, food, clothing and beliefs, but at the end of the day,  we want to be happy, healthy, respected and loved and we do everything we can to make sure that our children are better off than us...........