Jaflong and Other Thoughts on Sylhet

After the house visits on the second day, the project people took us on a “tourist visit” to Jaflong, the town on the Bangladeshi-Indian border. We drove for about 50km to the border, looked around for 10 minutes and drove back. While the view was totally amazing to see, I thought it was great that they were so willing to drive for a long while just to see it. The Indian state of Assam is on the other side and as you drive through the rice paddies of Sylhet, these massive mountains appear majestically out of nowhere.

The border follows a large river and so the town economy is based on getting rocks from the river and processing them into bricks. The men take canoes into the river, using bamboo sticks as “oars” – the bamboo sticks are long enough to reach the bottom of the of river and they are used to push the boats along. They are amazing at filling the boat to the brink of sinking and then pushing it back to the river’s edge.

Other Thoughts 

One: So in Dhaka, you can pretty much walk around anywhere and someone will speak English; if you dress appropriately, you semi-blend in; and white people are just the norm. In Sylhet, however, this seems to be less so. As three white girls walking around, we got followed and gawked at everywhere. And not discrete staring, like groups of men blatently staring…we would walk around and have auto-rickshaws, rickshaw-wallahs, and motorcycles stop, pull-off to the side of the road, and just watch us. It’s not like we were doing anything exciting – just standing and talking to each other or sitting in a car or getting gas – and we would have people lined up around the block.

 (from in a car, stopped to drop someone off)

Two: What is also surprising is that A LOT of people here ask me if I’m Bangladeshi. I’ve never thought I’ve looked South Asian before – Hispanic if anything – but here people seem to know I have something different about me. I’ve even gotten called Indian a couple times. I’m not sure if it’s because they expect all Americans to be white and that they’re worldview is not big enough to include many other countries or if I can actually pass for someone from around here. Either way, it definitely makes me feel great that when alone I can vaguely blend-in to the local culture.

Three: One of the doctors who accompanied us to Jaflong invited us to his house for Iftar (the food you use to break fast during Ramadan). It was amazingly sweet of him and his wife and the food was delicious. The traditional foods were all present (dates, apples, jalabee, budjees, mango juice, and water) and she had also made channa (chickpeas) and cucumber and pasta. This was finished with some chaa (tea). We went to another Iftar dinner this week and they served pretty much all the same food – no channa, but these cabbage roll things. It would be interesting to me to see what the surge of sugary foods does to the body…doesn’t seem healthy to me. 

Four: Being in Sylhet gave me an appreciation for the independence that icddr, b gives us in Dhaka. Here, the staff was really overprotective us of and wouldn't let us do simple things - take a rickshaw into town, go for a run that was too far, etc. In Dhaka, no one really cares what we do or where we go. Here, we had an escort to take a private bus (like Greyhound) to the project site and almost home from the project site - we had to argue like mad for our independence. It's nice that they care and I know it's their job - if anything happens to you, they are responsible - but it definitely inhibits the experience you have here as a student. It's hard to figure out what it's like to live in Bangladesh if you aren't allowed to go out and the power goes out in the guesthouse at 9pm for the night...

So that's the experience I had in Sylhet. It was great to get outside of Dhaka for a week and experience more of what Bangladesh has to offer. Hopefully I will get to see A LOT more in the near future...