I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.
It’s hot here.
And not just hot. It’s not like any heat I’ve ever known. It’s hot.
Obnoxiously, unbearably, lethally hot.
The air is tangibly humid. Each breath is like taking a deep breath submerged in a lukewarm bath and your lungs fill with liquid. The humidity clings to your face like spider webs and doesn’t ever go away. You’re constantly glistening in a universally unflattering sheen of your own sticky sweat. And no matter how many showers you take (don’t forget to keep your mouth tightly closed or you might get cholera) you’ll never feel clean or cool or refreshed.
But for everyone who lives here, it’s just a part of life. Slightly smaller than Iowa, but with a population of 180 million hot, sweaty, sticky people, Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest countries.
There’s no AC-equipped oasis to escape to, because it’s just as hot inside as it is outside, if not hotter.
But in a place like this, the heat is the least of this country’s problems.
It’s unbelievably polluted, the water is dangerous to drink, the sewer system is virtually nonexistent, the government is disgustingly corrupt and cardboard shantytowns cling precariously from the sides of dirty storefronts—housing thousands of people who literally have nothing and nothing to live for.
The electricity goes out every few hours or so, it just happened (thanks autosave!) because the infrastructure is shot to hell. Electricity isn’t quite as pressing a matter, comparatively. When you don’t know if or when your next meal is coming, it doesn’t really matter if the lights go out for a few hours.
The country is plagued with endless problems…but none of these marginal things actually meant anything once I started talking to the people. I had, for so long, been tearfully preaching to anyone who would listen about how horrible and corrupt the countries are in South Asia all summer before I actually got here, I would climb up onto my soap box and wail on about the sex trafficking tragedies in Nepal and the disgustingly corrupt government in Bangladesh…like I knew something…but I don’t know anything.
At all.
There was a man I met in Bahrain when I had a stopover there on my way here, I don’t even remember his name.
I don’t even think I asked. I wish I had asked.
He is always smiling, but the weary, dead look in his eyes makes it clear that his smile isn’t quite genuine, the quietness in his tired voice, and the lag in his step…it doesn’t take much to realize that something inside of him has been broken for a while.
He worked as a waiter in the café I was eating in and he told me about his life while bringing me glasses of water and taking away my plate.
He told me wistfully about the wife and kids in Bangladesh he has, and how far away they are from him because he has to work 10 hour shifts every day in Bahrain (a Middle Eastern kingdom on an island that is 5 hours away by plane).
He sends the money he makes back to home them, but keeps some to pay for his housing in a 3 bedroom apartment with 3 men per bedroom. There are nine men total in his apartment.
He works every single day, 10 hours a day, only to go home to sleep and come back in the morning to work.
That is all his life is.
He sees his family once every two years because that’s all the vacation time he’s allowed.
He sees his family once every two years.
All he does for two years is wait to go home, and every single day until those two years end, he waits and he works and he survives until he can see his family. And once he is home, he spends each day dreading coming back. This is his schedule, over and over and over and over…
That is his life, and that’s all his life will ever be.
His children hardly recognize him, he says to me jokingly. But the bitter pain masked by the candor is searingly apparent. We both know that it’s not a joke. And at that moment, something breaks, and it all becomes painfully real.
He doesn’t get to talk to anyone because the people who eat where he works don’t really treat him as an equal, just someone who is there to clean up. He doesn’t talk to people at his apartment because he’s either sleeping, working or eating. His life is just a day in-day out, mundane, series of events, completely lonely, with no one to talk to, with hours of waiting on people, and nothing to live for but the distant reunion with his family—that is until he has to come back.
All he does is work and wait and that’s all he will do until he can’t anymore. As I finished my meal and left, he asked when I was leaving and if I would see him again. That was the moment when I realized just how lonely he was...and I realized that I may have been one of the only people to ever have an actual conversation with him in who knows how long. And more than anything he’d said before, this was what made me so sad…his hope that I might be back for dinner. That he might have a friend for a few more hours.
And I sat and cried because of this. Outside, the planes were taking off and landing and taking off again and I was sadder than I think I’ve ever been. I was sad for this man who only had his waiter’s uniform and his bleak life, I was sad for every moment he would miss watching his children grow up, I was sad for the children who wouldn’t know their father, for the wife who spends years waiting to see her husband, sad for the inevitably millions of people just like him. And I was sad for myself, sad for something I had lost.
When I got here, I met a girl named Lucky. She can’t be more than 14 years old; even though she fervently assures me she’s 18. She’s young, but the dark hollowness framing her black eyes tells me that she’s older than any child should ever have to be. I asked her how old she was when she started working, but she doesn’t even remember. She doesn’t really remember….that’s how long it’s been.
I asked her what her whole name was, and she told me she didn’t know. She just knows that all she has been called her whole life is “Lucky.” I asked her if she went to school, and she said she did when she was very young back when she didn’t really understand anything. She was sweeping and I asked her if she did this every day. She said yes, she did this every day, but she didn’t really feel like doing it anymore. I asked her why and she said it was because she missed home. She wanted to go home but she wasn’t allowed because I had come and they needed the extra help. I asked, “Are you mad at me? Because I’m the reason you had to stay?” She laughed and said of course not, how could it be my fault?!
But it was a forced laugh, and her smile didn’t quite meet her eyes as she assured me she didn’t blame me. She can barely read, but she uses context clues to make out what the newspaper says. Anyone who speaks to her for five minutes would realize just how brilliant she is. She doesn’t forget anything she is told to do, and memorizes strings of numbers without having to be told more than twice. And I know that if she had the opportunities I had, that she would be so much more brilliant than I could ever be. The injustice settled in my stomach like a cold brick as I spoke to her. I asked her about her brother and sister and mother and father, and her village at home and whether she missed it…and as she told me just how very much she missed them all she could no longer meet my eyes and towards the end of the conversation she sped out of the room, saying she had work to do. I know she didn’t have work to do, I know she was crying, because I saw her wipe her eyes as she left, and I heard her crying quietly in the crawl space she sleeps in through the wall.
The most painful thing for me, I guess, is that it’s not just one person, it’s never just one person—it’s not just Lucky or the man in Bahrain. It’s millions of people. It’s the receptionist from Manila who hasn’t seen her children in 5 years. It’s the hotel maid from India who is trying to raise enough money for her daughter to get married. It’s all the young girls who are taken from their villages to cook and clean for people who pay them nearly nothing. It’s all the young girls who are taken from their villages to do much worse than cook and clean. It’s everyone who works so hard and gives up so much, to the point that it nearly kills them, who sacrifice their lives to ensure that the people they love don’t have to do the same one day.
And each of these millions of people, each of them is somebody’s son or daughter, and they each have a family, and they are each individuals. Once you realize that the statistic is comprised of individuals, you become overwhelmed with the significance of the numbers…
I don’t really know anything about anything, I’m beginning to realize.
Because this is real.
It’s not a book, and it’s not a movie. It’s not facts I learned from journals or the CIA World Factbook or National Geographic articles…it’s real, living, breathing people.
And the brokenness of it all has never hit me quite like this…
…but now that it has, I’m not quite sure what to do with myself anymore.
But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning.
There will be no floating away.
