Bangladesh: Cyclone

I felt I had to write a little something about the cyclone. As usual, it's ended up being a bit rambling, but I decided not to edit it too much. So it's kind of a personal view of what's happened and happening, as a counterpoint to what you're seeing on TV.

What did I experience myself? Not an awful lot, to be honest. In Dhaka, the heavens opened on Thursday morning as the cyclone approached, and there was a general sense that this was not a good day - but no more than that. That's not to say we hadn't seen the storm warnings. We'd been aware that a cyclone might be on its way for 2-3 days, but I was assured by friends and colleagues that things wouldn't be that bad in Dhaka: just stay in your hotel and you'll be fine.

As it happened, I'd been running on empty for a couple of days and when it got to Thursday night (the end of the week here since they moved to a more 'Islamic' calendar in the 1980s) I was exhausted and more or less collapsed into bed.

So, Thursday night I was aware that there was a terrific storm going on outside, but not massively so, as I was drifting in and out of sleep. Also, I only have a small window in my hotel room which looks out onto the building opposite, a metre or so away. So I didn't get much perspective on the storm.

The next day I was so tired that I couldn't get myself out of bed until early afternoon. When I did, I discovered there was no electricity. The hotel has a generator, but generators need to be turned off to cool down every few hours, so it was off while I was stumbling groggily around the hotel.

In the end, the power came back on, and I watched a film on my laptop and then went back to sleep.

And that's it, really. Saturday I sat in the hotel, worked a bit, even checked my emails. Today, Sunday, is a working day here so I was back at work. In Dhaka, after 36 hours of power outages, things are getting back to normal and there's not much sign of devastation. Of course, people are talking about it, and the minute you open a newspaper or switch on the TV, the immensity of the damage further south is painfully apparent. But here, life is pretty much ticking on as normal.

Actually, I guess things are always that way. When some big event happens, you always think that the whole world stops, whether it's a natural disaster, a death in the family, a declaration of war, or whatever. The weird thing (and sometimes painful, when it's you who's directly affected) is the way that life chugs on regardless. It couldn't be any other way.

We all know that's the case from our own experience, but sometimes, the more distant an event is, and the further away from our knowledge of the situation, the more we imagine the worst, fuelled by news that inevitably trades in horrific images. I'm not saying that things further south aren't horrific - they most definitely are, and in a way it is a bit uncomfortable to carry on where I left off two days earlier as if nothing has happened this weekend. It's just that things are never the way you picture them when you're not there.

I was actually going to write a post about this earlier, but it's kind of appropriate now, I guess. The thing is, all the images that you probably have of Bangladesh are negative: cyclones, floods, enormous poverty, chaos, etc. All of them are there. It's just that it's not the whole story. Maybe my posts about the craziness of the traffic don't do it justice either. The point I'm trying to make is that all these images and descriptions are just fragments, and seeing something with your own eyes - feeling something with your own heart - is just totally different. Yes, there's enormous poverty, and being accosted by beggars everywhere is both tiring and upsetting. Yes, hundreds of thousands of houses have been wiped out and people are destitute. And yet, and yet - it's not the whole story. People here are still people. That might sound like a ridiculously patronising thing to say. Maybe it is. But I think what I'm trying to say is that the images of elsewhere in the world that we are fed, no matter how much they focus on 'personal' stories, do not truly encourage us to think of Bangladeshis (or Ugandans, or Pakistanis, or Ecuadorians) as real people. Probably there's no way that they can, unless it's people you've met yourself. If instead of 'Ugandans, Pakistanis, or Ecuadorians' I'd said 'Americans, Dutchmen, or Mancunians', you might have found it easier to think of them as 'real', because you know, at least to some extent, what it's like to be American, Dutch, or Manc.

Hmm, have I laboured my point enough? Probably. Whatever you see on TV, people here (as anywhere) are not simply destitute peasant victims and nothing more - even at times when they are destitute and are victims of an horrific natural disaster. Life is just as vibrant, vital, pulsating here in Bangladesh as it is elsewhere in the world - quite possibly more so. I may be finding this place stressful, noisy, overwhelming, exhausting, etc etc etc, but I certainly shan't go away thinking that everyone here is a downtrodden victim - the image that if I'm honest, we all carry somewhere with us in the back of our mind when we think about much of the non-Western world.