Expat Blog Challenge-Day One: The View from Where I Write....

So, I'm a day late (and probably proverbially a dollar short).  I'd love to say those sentiments are atypical of the trajectory of my life, but I'd be lying.  It's not shocking to anyone who knows me well....or at all, really. As an unflinchingly idealistic optimist with a enormously global artistic brain (I think the iCloud owes me royalties on that one, really) it's just status quo. Asi es la vida....se dice en la Republica Dominicana.....

Nevertheless, here we are...and happy to share in an authentic expat blog-a-thon (great brain-child, Cristin!).

Honestly, "the view from where I write" is....quite humbling. We currently reside in Dhaka, Bangladesh--which, according to the World Bank in 2012, housed 154.7 million souls. That's roughly half the population of the entire United States in the same year--all squashed together in a country slightly smaller than my great home state of Georgia.  If that little statistic doesn't blow your mind, you probably need some tutoring in math, my friend.

Our apartment is situated in "Bashundhara Residential Area" which sounds quite posh, but in reality is enveloped mostly by the entrails of unfinished apartment buildings and mud. Inestimable quantities of the stuff.  So much mud, in fact, that brick manufacturing is one of the major industries here in Bangladesh.   It could be the Bangla version of the old"lemonade" cliche--What do you do with a country full of mud?  Bake bricks!  There's so much dust and mud in the whole of Dhaka, that it's easy to find putty-colored trees--a.k.a. green trees encrusted with matte brown mud from root to leaf tip.

Nearly adjacent to our rather posh looking apartment building is a slum with its own little market.
Curiously one day, I asked our driver (we car-share with another family living in our building) how many children lived in the slum next door.  His response was a shocking "300."  Three-hundred children, mind you--and how many ever adults are attached to those children...in the span of probably an acre.  All told, I estimate that there are 500 people living next door to me in make-shift houses of corrugated tin, concrete block, and wood.  This, of course, is sadly rather typical housing for developing countries, but gives a hard yank to the heartstrings.

The division of the "haves" and the "have nots" in this is dramatically visceral.  Here we live in our 4 BR, 4BA apartment, whilst the "families next door" lack daily access to clean water in which to bathe or even drink.  Sometimes I feel like I've physically been picked up--like that little satellite icon guy from Google Maps--and dropped into a "Save the Children" photo montage.  The children on the street in front of us play in disparate clothing--despite the fact that Bangladesh is one of the textile capitals of the world--and like seemingly everything here, have their own distinctive layering of dust.  Not surprisingly, however, they smile and laugh and play like any other children on the planet, only, my neighbors play with rubbish and recyclables....sticks, bricks, and water bottle caps....and the variety of livestock and fowl (chickens and ducks, mostly) that happen to roam free on our little "residential" block.

And yet, we expats in "the Desh" are not-so-ironically juxtaposed with our neighbors in our very encapsulated abodes.  The literal view from where I write showcases "the things we've carried" with us from the Caribbean--family photos, cute "etsy.com" art print of previously mentioned home state, standard IKEA lamps and hand-me-over furniture owned by the school that employs me.  Perhaps in a conscious effort to make the inside not match the outside, I paint my walls artistic colors--usually a hue of blue (my favorite!).

Omnipresent in my view are two curly-haired, blue-eyed, blondes, who in this culture, accumulate their own paparazzi when ambling about the city.  Today is an early-dismissal due to "Bishwa Ijtema"--the 2nd largest Muslim pilgrimage and gathering to the Holy Hajj--which is concluding this week on the Turag River in Tongi (a township marking the northern border of Dhaka).

Since we've time on our hands, and little homework to speak of, the girls are currently choreographing a fight sequence (Jackie Chan style) in the living room.  I'd post a video, but as they are learning the "once on the internet always on the internet" rule, they are extremely conscientious about what goes on FB or the internet.  They settled for a picture and reassurance that I wouldn't randomly email everyone in the world their personal info (does that sound like someone with few personal boundaries to speak of?).  At least they conceded to recording digital evidence of their kung-fu mastery.

And...there you have it.  Our view is not awe-inspiring in the "picture postcard from an exotic locale" sense, but it has its perspective.  A perspective that keeps us (those of us Western expats that teach here in Dhaka) motivated to make a difference.  I am not able to personally effect change for my neighbors on a realistic, substantial level.   But every day, I hold fast to the idea that teach the 1% of this country values that hopefully will inspire them to make change in their own struggling population, and hopefully close the global gap trending towards extreme opposites--endangered existence and....exorbitance.