Farmgate

Experimenting with bus travel as a way of getting around the city -- tricky when you can't read the destinations. Usually people hang out of the bus door shouting the route incomprehensibly quickly; tickets are sometimes bought on the bus, at other times from men sitting behind small desks on the pavement near the (unmarked) bus stop. Farmgate is one of the city's most manic hubs - these photos don't do it justice.

Bardihara slum visit

Met Julian (on the right in the photo) who is starting a small scale project, teaching only 5 children (all girls, aged 12-16) from a slum near Baridhara tailoring and general education with the aim that they will enter a government school within a year or two. Spent the afternoon walking around the slum and talking with Julian and her students. The tailoring class shown here is also the tailoring teacher's house.


On the way home with my flat mate - we get mobbed by increasing numbers of very excited children each day.

Bowniabadh school visits

At last doing something resembling primary research - last Thursday went with two colleagues to visit a school run by a local NGO, Surovi, with technical and financial support from Plan Bangladesh. The area, Bowniabadh Colony, has been around since 1971 so is relatively developed compared to most slums in terms of housing and the services available there. (Coincidentally it is near Mirpur, the location of the zoo in the last post).

The school has around 500 students aged about 6-14 (primary and lower secondary). According to the headmaster, drop-out and grade repetition were very low (less than 5 per cent) and attendance very high (over 90 per cent). Teaching is in two shifts - the lower grades are taught from 8 till 10.30 and higher grades from 11 till 2.30. Teachers' salaries start at around £300 a year. The headmaster said that one of the strengths of the school was child-centred and participatory learning, although we had our doubts about that.

from my notes...
Class visits: First we visited a grade 1 class. The children were taking turns to stand at the front and repeat a call-and-response rhyme about health. The room seemed fairly well decorated with teaching materials and equipped with blackboard; there was plenty of space for the number of students. Later we visited a grade 5 English class. The students were standing in an arc; one student would face his or her neighbour and say, “My friend is X, who is your friend?”, then the second student would turn to face the next student along and repeat the same formula. The teacher walked around the arc listening to whoever was currently saying the phrase.

The parents of children in this school are apparently mostly employed as day labourers (usually this means in the market or on construction sites), garment workers and rickshaw pullers. In retrospect it would have been good to have met some of the parents -- we met one parent from the School Management Committee, but as a relatively well-off businessman he was probably very atypical -- but it was getting close to lunch-time and we needed to get back to the office before the canteen closed. Making more similar visits this and next week.

Mirpur zoo

Set up some appointments to talk to people, so feeling less deskbound. Talked to Sabina Faiz Rashid, a medical anthropologist, about some of the difficulties in research with people living in slums. (She asked, 'You're going to be here for at least a year, right?' Umm...).

Today I'll be going to the Centre for Urban Studies who conducted a slum census, to talk about possible study sites.

Leisure-wise I went to the zoological gardens with my flatmate Hailey.

Very peaceful and nice to get away from the pollution of the city, but many people ignored the animals to stare at us and take photos.



The rhinocerous is a friendly and pacific animal that likes nothing more than to be teased by children with sticks.

Bird flu text

Every mobile phone owner received this message. If the Ministry says it's okay it must be...

Still no survey

It's looking like my research will be combined with a larger study conducted by BU-IED. This may mean things take longer to get going as it's a big project. Still, hoping at least to get out of the office for some preliminary informal interviews and to talk to other researchers a bit, and to start thinking about study sites. The BU-IED survey will cover around 2000 households in 4 slums. One of them will be the huge Karail slum mentioned below.

In the meantime, more photos of unsafe construction sites and everyday life...

We found this tarantula on the kitchen wall and decided to leave it there, in the hope that it will catch some of the mosquitos. To be honest though it seems better equipped for small mammals. It doesn't bother with a web, preferring to wait for something worth jumping on.

There are also a couple of camera-shy geckos which we hope won't get eaten by the spider.

Me outside the flat, trying to hear the mobile over the traffic noise.

Kids playing in the (somewhat unclean) lake near Karail.

Not kidnapped just lazy

Thanks to everyone who has complained about me not posting anything here. Hope you haven't been put off and stopped checking. The first month was allocated to settling in, learning some basic Bengali, finding a place to stay and being ill. All four of these tasks now completed, I can start looking towards starting my research. In the mean time here are some pictures from the my daily journey from the training centre where I've been staying to my Bengali language school.




The training centre (and also the Institute for Educational Development) are in Niketan, which according to my 2004 Lonely Planet map is part of a big lake, but is now a huge construction site full of unsafe-looking bamboo scaffolding.


Large gates punctuate the journey - these seem to function partly as a zoning system for the city's rickshaws.

The next part of the journey is a series of market lanes.
Taking this photo caused a retinue of small children to gather around and follow me for the next half hour.
Emerging from the market area onto the congested main road at Mohakali





Further on I cross the land-filled bridge through Bonani Lake, surrounded by slum housing and with a few skyscrapers visible through the heavy smog. The city's largest slum, Karail, with over 100,000 residents, is near here, although this slum is apparently being cleared.

New flat

Moved in on Friday to this new, wastefully huge and slightly under-furnished flat in Bonani. The photos don't do justice to the echo-y expanses of empty space. Had to find somewhere quickly and this place was available for short let and reasonably priced, but yes, there are some contradictions involved in doing slum research whilst living in a flat that has a laundry room bigger than most people's entire dwellings.