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 The project flat M stays in has two staff to look after everyone; Babul and Bibar, a couple who I thought were in their fifties – M told me they are not much older than us, in their 30’s; the harsh life of Bangladesh takes a physical toll. They were very kind to us, concerned for our welfare. Bibar told me I should not walk alone with the children while M was at work, and I did wonder how I could steer the buggy and stop the boys stumbling into the sewers. But, being stubborn, I refused to be trapped inside or only go out in a car, so Babul and Bibar offered to come out with us. A favourite expedition became walking to the market, then taking rickshaws home.
Rickshaws are strange vehicles – they’re actually not that comfortable. You sit on a raised bench-seat behind a man on a bike – all rickshaw wallahs are men, wearing “dhoti”, cotton wraps. The seat is surprisingly narrow and tilts forward so that you think you’re going to slip off. There’s sensible room for two, maybe three passengers, but it’s not unusual to see whole families crowded under the hood.
Rickshaw wallahs are strong and pedal fast – they need to deliver you quickly so they are available for the next job. There are apparently 1 million rickshaws in Dhaka, all jostling for space and customers. A driver pays a daily rate for his rickshaw, hence the desire to be available for as many journeys as possible to ensure he can earn more money than the rent he has paid.
Rickshaws are driven with a passionate sense of urgency. They overtake each other, ringing bells as warnings. Straining for the extra space on the street they overtake recklessly, ride at each other head on and swerve to avoid pedestrians, stray dogs and cars which, with utter distain for pedal vehicles, pull out from driveways and side streets as if the rickshaws weren’t there. During the rush hours, roads are crowded with rickshaws, so close that you cannot walk between them Babul told me.
There are variations – some rickshaws have enclosed, cage-like carriages rather than raised seats. These are used as school buses, crossing the city packed full of children in yellow or blue cotton uniforms. Out walking one Saturday we saw two men with wooden carts attached to their bikes – one full of sheep and one full of goats, heads peering over the sides, eyes blinking in the dust, bleeting as they bumped past us.
Available rickshaws cluster at most major street junctions and crowd around as you approach. It’s hard to know who to go with. I always wanted to choose the most ornamental rickshaw – most backplates are decorated with vivid reds, golds, greens, blues and pinks; pictures of temples or Bollywood stars.
 On our first trip I was surprised by the speed. Racing over bumps and swerving round corners I was worried we were going to be flung off into the road. I was holding J who was tired and therefore unimpressed; she pressed herself into me while I hoped my weight would hold us to the seat because I had no free hand to cling on with.
Our next trip was more fun, B was with J and I and the rickshaw wallah was more sedate. There’s a great view from a rickshaw. You can see above fences and walls. We saw a cricket match at the Gulshan Youth Club; lady builders carrying baskets of stones on their heads and a crowd of curious men staring at these white children on a rickshaw. Riding high above the dusty streets you feel a sense of space that is rare in crowded Dhaka. The warm breeze blows in your face. Perched precariously outwards you feel the freedom of flying. All too soon you arrive at your destination and must climb down again to the litter and sewage.
Riding rickshaws was a highlight for us, especially 4 year old B. Although many urbanites are dismissive of rickshaws, I thought they were fantastic; adding colour and interest to the city and providing excellent entertainment for two little boys – and their mother!
Next Instalment – River Trip
First Instalment – Where We Stayed
I am very flattered to have been asked a few times when a report on the Bangladesh trip will appear on this blog – it’s gratifying that people are reading and interested. We experienced so much in our ten days in Dhaka that it’s hard to know where to start, so I’ve decided to break the trip down into smaller pieces on different subjects, starting with Where we Stayed.
 We stayed in the project flat M uses, which is in Gulshan. Gulshan is a “posh” area of Dhaka, yet there are still open sewers running down the sides of the street; more than once we saw men squatting over these to pee. On our first day, desperate to hold off the urge to sleep, we went for a walk. We were immediately followed by curious children – we saw no other white children in Dhaka, few expats walk I was later told, and I understood why. As well as the hazards of open sewers, pavements were blocked by tea stalls or piles of bricks for the endless construction sites. Space is premium in Dhaka, the 14 million plus people all desperate for somewhere to live. So villas are being pulled down to build high  rise apartment blocks on the space, which sadly means some of the character is being lost. We had to walk along the side of the road, bumping J’s buggy over the rutted bricks and potholes. Cars and rickshaws brush past; everyone is in a hurry and pushing for that extra bit of space. Car horns hoot endlessly.
We walked alongside the lake. M said in sarcasm “here is the delightful lake”. “What’s delightful about it?” T answered – it had a thick layer of sludge on the top. In Bangladesh, lakes and rivers are used for everything – drinking, washing and defecating. M’s flat looks across this lake to a slum, the houses built on stilts so that they are raised up, ready for when the lake fills dramatically with monsoon rains and flood waters. From our windows, listening to the Maghrib call to prayer, I watched children run on the muddy banks and fishermen spread their nets in the last light.
Next Instalment – Rickshaw Rides
I  like to read books set in a place I am visiting, so while in Bangladesh I read A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam. This is the story of Rehana, a widow, and her fight to keep her children, with her and then alive. It is set in 1971, the year when Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, fought for and won independence.
The history of this region is complicated, embroiled in the complexities of British rule and partition. A Golden Age makes this history accessible and alive. In 1947, when British colonial rule ended, the subcontinent was divided and East and West Pakistan were established, with India in the middle. The two halves of the country had little in common and there was conflict from the beginning, enhanced when the Pakistani government announced that Urdu would be the national language, a language virtually no-one in East Pakistan knew. The Language Movement started the roll towards Independence which culminated in the brutal Liberation War of 1971. Students played a key role and in the novel Rehana’s children are both active revolutionaries, which causes her great anguish, but pride.
Students still play a pivotal role in politics in Bangladesh. Sadly also still a violent one. The main political parties consider student support critical and back student activists. Therefore, students are polarised into allegiances, with mortal consequences. While we were there The Daily Star reported that a member of the Bangladesh Chhatra League was hacked to death by members of the Islami Chhatra Shibir at Rajshahi University. Days later we were advised not to go near the Dhaka University campus for fear of demonstrations.
A Golden Age vividly evokes life in Dhaka; the markets, rickshaws and monsoon rains. Anam tells of the fear of war and pain of losing children and friends, of a country’s passion for identity. It is a wonderful book. For anyone interested in a family story which shares so much about the culture, country and history of a little-known place, I would recommend it.
There have been no posts for a couple of weeks because we have been away: visiting husband M in Dhaka, Bangladesh where he is working, then staying with friends in Dubai on the way back through.
Dhaka is not a normal family half-term destination and I think some of the playground mums considered me mad to take three young children there, especially as I was flying with them by myself. But we are home safely, no accidents or illness or lost baggage, for which I am very grateful.
 Dhaka is an extraordinary place; 14 million people jostle for space and a way to earn enough to live. Walking with the children was hazardous – there are open sewers along the edges of the streets and rickshaws racing past your toes. It is dusty, noisy, crowded but so colourful and vibrant. I loved it there, more than I was expecting.
I plan to share more about Bangladesh on these pages but for now my head is spinning with all we have seen and experienced, compounded by jet lag. It has been an extraordinary experience and I have been reminded of the incredible adaptability and acceptability of children and how challenges can help them mature and develop. They were wonderfully behaved through the airports and on the planes; they were curious but not scared by beggars tapping at the car window; they were patient with fascinated Bangladeshis squeezing their cheeks and taking their photos.
At times I did wonder whether I was being irresponsible – as I walked down to find a boat to take them on a river trip, the heat and sulphurous smell of the black “sewage water” engulfed me and I thought, should I put these children back in the car and run away to safety? But I believe it was beneficial to all of us to take calculated risks. We have all thrived on the experience and as a family it has been helpful to see where M works and lives and some of the places the water infrastructure he is working on will make a difference.
In The Times of Tuesday 5 January 2010, Anna Shepard wrote an article entitled Keep calm and carry on. It discussed the benefits of carrying your baby in a sling, especially for fathers. I certainly don’t object to this, but I did feel there were disparaging comments about mothers who put young babies in prams. Not everyone wants to carry their toddler/child or thinks that it’s beneficial to do so. So I am going to write about why I preferred to use a pram/buggy and how this did not make me a bad mother.
Shepard cites Dr Ronald Barr who says that using slings reduces crying. “In his 2005 study, he reports that when mothers increase carrying their baby from 2.7 hours to 4.4 hours daily, crying can reduce by up to 43 percent.” I’m sure it does, but does it reflect the realities of being a busy mother?
For many women, carrying their babies is liberating as they simply carrying on doing what they would do, with a baby strapped to their body – as women around the world are forced to do because they don’t have the luxury of maternity leave from their physical jobs.
My issue is that sling carrying was not for me, I didn’t feel comfortable bending and reaching with a tiny baby strapped to my tummy. I resented the implication from this article that such admissions made me a less attentive mother. “…babies are not always ready for the relative independence of their own prams. They like to hear a reassuring heartbeat as well as the motion of their parents’ bodies”.
My babies slept in their own cot from night one (okay, night two, no-one really slept on night one!) and went straight into a fantastic carry cot that clipped to pram wheels. They never complained about it and they didn’t seem discontented or lacking in body contact – I loved cuddling them (and was dedicated to breast feeding, so had a lot of intimate contact that way), I just didn’t want to carry them all the time.
The article moves on from the benefits of dads carrying babies in slings to “In the US, sling-wearing is as much a movement as it is a means of carrying your baby.” Thus we launch into the discussion of attachment parenting. I’m not anti Attachment Parenting. Whenever I read about Attachment Parenting I feel like a monster because I let my babies cry (not all day, but I didn’t always go straight to them). But I couldn’t parent in an AP way. I loved my babies but needed some physical independence to retain my sanity; my own place in my own bed and time to move freely as an individual to achieve things not directly related to baby, like emptying the dishwasher. And I used to enjoy walking with a pram or buggy, especially when we lived in Bishkek. It was therapeutic to rumble around town behind a buggy, and we both enjoyed watching what we passed.
Shepard agrees – “I believe that slings should be taken for what they are, rather than bound up in the politics of parenting…I don’t buy the attitude that to be a good mother you must fasten yourself together for every second of the day.”
Reading this article I did feel a little pang of regret that I’d missed out – maybe I should have ventured beyond the Baby Bjorn and tried a fabric sling, maybe it was the sling I used that was the problem. But I’d not warmed to slings and didn’t want to pay for something I wouldn’t use. Also, nostalgia aside, I know myself and I know that I needed those periods of independence and would have been quickly claustrophobic with too much sling wearing! The women interviewed felt freer, I would have felt more constrained: this is the key to the issue, all mothers are different.
In Saying No, Asha Phillips argues that babies actually need their own space to start learning about who they are as independent beings. “The beginnings of being on your own, of separateness, are very important…With a parent who responds quickly to any cry or communication, the baby may well believe that he is not separate at all…In trying to be the perfect parents…we sometimes interpret too early, before he has had time to taste his own feeling…By wishing to spare the child, we may in fact rob him of his own experience.”
Surely the conclusion is that there is room for many styles of transporting baby and parenting, or preferably, a healthy mix of both. Just because you prefer one or the other, shouldn’t categorise your parenting; pacing the house with a new born in a sling is not the type of parenting all babies and parents want or need.
I found a buggy easier with three children while other mothers swear by the sling. Neither option makes us bad mothers, just busy ones.
While the country was paralysed due to snow, book club met to discuss Rape of the Fairy Country by Alexander Cordell. This had been suggested by D who was introduced to AC’s books by her mother.
Rape of the Fair country is the first of a trilogy following the lives of the Mortymer Family. While the blurb on someone’s copy described the book as “lusty”, I would have used the words “grim” or “brutal.”
The book opens in 1826 when Iestyn, aged 8, starts work in the iron mines. The community the Mortymers live in is dominated by iron; “on the first night of full working I laid on my back beside Jethro and watched the room change from moonlight to red as Furnace One grew into blast”. Everyone works there, including very young children and pregnant women, tapping at the rock face, pulling trams or controlling the dangerous furnaces.
Although the books follow the domesticity and relationships (hence the “lusty” description) of the Mortymers, poverty and politics are strong forces. This is the time when oppressed workers were clamouring for unions and the Chartists were active. In the biography it describes how Alexander Cordell, injured in the British army, was convalescing in Wales when he discovered that “hand in hand with the tale of the mountain town of Blaenavon, went the last bloody revolution, in Britain, the Chartist Revolution.” Thus he found the climax of this book.
Book club members confessed to crying at sections of this book, some pages were almost unbearably difficult to read. Life was harsh. People suffered in a way most of us (in this country) now cannot comprehend. Everyone had to work. They were cold in winter (no-one stopped for a bit of snow!) When the town went out on strike, children died of hunger. Men fought brutally when they disagreed. AC describes workers drinking their pay packet, with children starving at home. One man forces his wife to quote bible passages before he beats her.
Chapel, church and religion, the aristocracy and politicians, corruption and the manipulation of the mine owners, desperate poverty and the extraordinary inequality between workers and upper classes are all mingled into the family story. Men were fighting for a system we would now consider ours by right – the six points of the charter being “universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, voting by ballot, equal electoral districts, no property qualifications for members of Parliament and payment of members…Behind this political formula there was the cry of millions suffering under a diseased condition of society.”*
We loved this book. It’s a powerful piece of social and political history. The characters are strong and you are drawn into the lives, loves and deaths of the Mortymers. It was also, for me, an interesting example of how being in a book club can successfully widen your reading horizons. We seemed hesitant when D suggested this book; it was obscure and completely unknown to us. But it gained the highest score of any book we’ve read, and many of us are planning to read the rest of the trilogy. This says to me that sometimes it’s good to be challenged and try something new and unknown.
If you love fiction based on historical fact, and don’t mind grappling with a few Welsh names, I can thoroughly recommend Rape of the Fair Country.
*quote from The Age of Improvement by Asa Briggs
Nick Clegg has been criticised in the media for taking on Gina Ford and her parenting formula. I agree he was unwise to dismiss what does work for others. We all have our own parenting styles and what is right and what is wrong is not always obvious – and a very subjective and emotive matter of opinion. Clegg is a third-time parent with years of practical experience, which I have learnt is the most useful lesson! His comments could also be interpreted as belittling the importance of routine. This is not helpful because some form of structure is very valuable for babies and children and greatly missing in society, to all of our detriment. What I did relate to, however, was his criticism of the effect of being too reliant on Gina’s book. “I subcontracted my parental instincts to this book” Clegg admitted.
I understand that parenting classes, books and endless new government initiatives have sprung up to fill a vacuum – it is recognised that many people do not have positive parenting models in their lives and attempts are being made to break the cycle of bad parenting. The problem is that the help has gone too far. Rather than simply teaching a common sense approach, classes and books have become prescriptive about detail. Parents now feel inhibited from thinking for themselves in fear of getting it wrong. This was what Nick Clegg was criticising, that his wife felt compelled to check a book in the middle of the night rather than assessing the situation and making her own decision about what was right for her child at that moment.
Getting the balance between responding to and “ignoring” babies is very difficult. In Saying No: Why it’s Important for You and Your Child, Asha Phillips explains “research has shown that a mid-range of responsiveness works best for healthy development – that is, when a parent makes errors in interpretation and the parent-baby couple recover. It is reassuring to know that as parents we are not expected to ‘get it right’ every time…what babies need is “good enough mothering””.
This, for me, is positive advice. There is a political will to help vulnerable families, but I often cynically wonder if any of the new, expensive, complicated, bureaucratic schemes achieve the desired results. Anxious/young/first-time parents need to feel empowered to make positive parenting decisions for themselves, rather than just doing what the health visitor, or Gina Ford, says. Or, more sinisterly, not doing anything at all.
The Demos report found that “parents who combine warmth and consistency – a style described in this report as ‘tough love’ – are the most successful in developing character capabilities in their children.” The difficult issue is how best to help parents learn to give “Tough Love”.
I am very excited to have been chosen as the British Mummy Blogger of the week!
It may seem small but to me it’s a huge compliment, I feel very honoured. Thank you Potty Mummy for your support! It helps to know that people are reading and enjoying what I enjoy writing.
Welcome to my new look blog and website.
This would not have been possible without the technical help and support of my husband, M. So a big thank you goes to him.
Thank you to all who have supported my blog so far by reading and commenting. I hope you update your RSS feeds and continue to enjoy the discussions!
Saffia
School was open today and weather forecasters are predicting a big thaw over the weekend. Now I’m starting to panic how I will cope next week without my “snow day”. Despite my objections to the principles, I’ve got used to our days off. It’s become a treat to be protected by the muffler of snow from the normal requirements to chase and chivvy and frantically dash to school. The twilight, ethereal, glowing world of snow has become a sanctuary where we can enjoy being at home and catch up with ourselves.
Joking apart, my whole point in these last few postings has been to highlight the bigger issues behind the decision to close schools. With this in mind I thought this article in The Sunday Times was interesting. Jenni Russell discusses how the state has interfered in our lives to such an extent because Labour don’t trust us to make our own decisions. This goes to the core of my problem with schools closing – we can’t be trusted to decide whether it’s safe for us to get to school and there are endless petty health and safety rules strangling every practical decision. “By putting the state in the middle of everything, we’re destroying society” says a mother whose 15 year old son was forbidden to do work experience with a stockbroker in London because the council’s health and safety officer had to check all premises beforehand and he was not allowed to travel that far.
I appreciate that all these rules are supposed to be for our benefit, but they are actually counter-productive because, rather than protecting people in a practical and pragmatic way, they simply annoy and frustrate, turning people away from what would be sensible behaviour. I’m not launching into politics on this blog but I would love to see a government who can allow society to be responsible and stop marring our lives with petty and nonsensical regulations.
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The project flat M stays in has two staff to look after everyone; Babul and Bibar, a couple who I thought were in their fifties – M told me they are not much older than us, in their 30’s; the harsh life of Bangladesh takes a physical toll. They were very kind to us, concerned for our welfare. Bibar told me I should not walk alone with the children while M was at work, and I did wonder how I could steer the buggy and stop the boys stumbling into the sewers. But, being stubborn, I refused to be trapped inside or only go out in a car, so Babul and Bibar offered to come out with us. A favourite expedition became walking to the market, then taking rickshaws home.
