In 1976, after a period of unemployment in Connecticut, my father accepted a job with Save the Children (US), as country head of their operations in Bangladesh. He and I and my stepmother Nancy moved to Dhaka (then spelled Dacca) around October, 1976. We didn’t take much with us. Our furniture, dishes, etc went into storage in the US. I took a few treasures – some board games, my plastic animals – and whatever warm-weather clothing I owned at the time. 

Before leaving, we all got lots of vaccinations, and the dental work that we hadn’t been able to afford for a while – Nancy proved to have a mouthful of cavities.

I guess we flew from the US east coast to the west coast and then to Korea, where we were hosted by the Korean arm of Save the Children as an opportunity for my dad to learn from projects that the organization was carrying out there.

One of our first nights in Bangladesh we were taken to one of the very few tourist sights in town, a big open-air marketplace inside a red-walled compound, perhaps associated with a mosque. We pulled up in the company Land Rover and I got down into the dusty street lit by flaring kerosene lanterns. I had barely stepped away from the car when I was confronted by a beggar boy probably around my own age (14). He had a cleft palate resulting in one side of his upper jaw curling outward with teeth jutting out in all directions. Popping up in front of me in the uncertain light, this apparition scared and horrified me. 

There wasn’t a lot to buy in the market, nor indeed in the country. Upon the partition of India in 1947, East Bengal had become East Pakistan. After gaining its independence from Pakistan in 1971 in a bloody civil war, it became Bangladesh. The new country didn’t have a lot going for it, to the extent that it had been pronounced “a basket case” by Henry Kissinger. By 1976 many NGOs were operating in Bangladesh to try to help it develop; many or most of the expats in the country at the time were part of that effort. The primary and maybe the only export at the time was jute.

School

My first shock and disappointment in Dhaka was about school. I’d been a bullied misfit in the six schools I’d attended in the US between 1972 and 1976. None of us could figure out why. Now I was abruptly changing schools again. Dad said: “You’ll be back in an international school with other kids like you, it’ll be better.” He knew that there was an American school in Dhaka, but had not found out anything else about it. Once we were there, we learned that I could not attend it – it only went up to 8th grade, which I had just begun in Connecticut, but the 8th grade class was full. They offered that I could do 8th grade work sitting in the 7th grade class, but I declined: I was already a year older than other 8th graders because I’d repeated 6th grade, and I didn’t see how I would practically do different work than the kids around me in a classroom.

My only other option was correspondence school. We sent off to the Calvert School in Baltimore for the materials, which took some time to arrive. Meanwhile we had found another American girl who should be doing 8th grade work but could not be accommodated in the American school. Her mother offered to teach us both, so for a while I went to their house every day where the mother “taught” us.

This was not a success. The mother seemed to dislike me, which rubbed off on the daughter. I don’t remember how long this went on, but I was relieved when later in the year it was decided that I would go to boarding school in India starting in 9th grade. To qualify, I’d have to finish all my 8th grade work before June, 1977. Since I’d started it so late, I’d have to work faster to get it all done in time. I didn’t much mind abandoning the girl and her mother to manage my own studies at home.

Living Quarters

When we arrived in Dhaka we had first lived above the Save the Children offices, where we had several bedrooms and baths, and a U-shaped dining room lined with windows looking out onto a tropical garden. The wooden window frames were not tightly fitted into the concrete walls. They had warped in the monsoon, creating gaps that insects could easily crawl through. October was apparently bug season: when we tried to eat dinner in there, the lights would attract zillions of flying insects, which would inevitably get into our food – it was almost impossible to eat without ingesting a bug.

For that and other reasons, it was decided that we needed somewhere else to live. We did stay there through Christmas – I made an outline of a pine tree with green ribbon on the wall, which was as close as we would get to a Christmas tree in Dhaka. One thing I did like about that building was that I could go up on the flat roof and commune with the noisy crows.

A house was rented for us across the street. This was on a double lot so it had a huge backyard, dominated by an enormous mango tree. There was a nice garden in the front, which became one of my projects. I had a lot of time to spend on the plants. I was disappointed that the plumeria tree died (not my doing). There was a big bush of white roses outside the front door. I pruned it carefully and observed the effects, how its growth changed.

Adults

My stepmother Nancy started work soon after we arrived, doing appropriate technology projects with Jim and Willy (from Ireland and England respectively), who became family friends.

Various other people circulated around our household, sometimes staying with us. On weekends groups of expats would get together to play and sing – there were several talented guitarists in the bunch, including my dad. I loved those home musicales. As a direct result of those musical get-togethers, we all got a private concert with Cat Stevens.

There was an American club in Dhaka with a pool and restaurant. We’d go there to eat and swim. If I could have spent more time there I might have had more contact with expats my own age, but I needed the company car and Sham the driver to get me there, so it wasn’t always possible.

Servants

In Dhaka, as in Thailand earlier in my life, we had live-in servants. We hired Buddhists because, unlike Hindus or Muslims, they would cook any meat, though they would not kill it. Our cook had previously been a junior cook at the Italian embassy where he had learned to make home-made ravioli – a good solution for serving the bitter local spinach that was about the only green vegetable available in winter. Bacon was available, but not very good and the rind (with  hairs) had to be removed before cooking. I remember liking aloo paratha for breakfast, cheese sandwiches with chanachur (spicy mix) for lunch. Many of the Bangladeshi cooks could do amazing things with sugar – it was not unusual to be served as dessert a scooped-out pineapple full of pineapple chunks, topped with a nest of spun caramelized sugar which frankly looked like reddish pubic hair.

Our cook was a relative of Chacha (“uncle”), an elderly man who more or less ran things at our home and the office. Among other tasks, he supervised our garden; I learned about gardening from him. 

As with other servant situations before and after Bangladesh, we took some responsibility for our servants’ overall welfare. We learned that the cook’s young wife had miscarried back in their home village. When she became pregnant again, Nancy insisted that she come stay in our servants’ quarters in Dhaka and be seen regularly by a doctor. She eventually gave birth to a girl, whom they gratefully named Namita Nancy.

Pets

Lacking people my own age to hang out with, I wanted pets. We took two puppies from the watchdog at the office. Both got hit by cars. We had a cat for a while, appropriately named Ubiquitous, but he wasn’t terribly friendly. Eventually Chacha took me to the market to buy goats – male and female, both black all over. The male was smaller but had huge testicles. Chacha built a pen for them in the backyard to try to keep them away from his vegetable patch. They frequently escaped, but showed no interest in the vegetables – they’d go into the front garden and eat my flowers. They weren’t great pets. After we left they were donated to a Buddhist temple where they’d be used for breeding stock and milk, rather than simply slaughtered.

Illness

We were all sick a lot the first months – it’s hard to avoid parasites and other water-borne illnesses in such a place as Dhaka was back then. I remember hours of crouching on a squat toilet, shitting my guts out and seeing faces in the terrazzo floor. Sometimes it hurt so much I really thought I would have preferred to die than go on feeling that bad.

A friend got hepatitis and we nursed him at our home (we had a bedroom and bath somewhat separated from the rest of the house, ideal  for the purpose). We all had to have gamma globulin boosters – in those days the only vaccine against hepatitis, it was a thick serum: the doctor friend who injected us all likened it to trying to blow a milkshake through a straw. It left a big lump on my thigh for days before it finally worked into my system.

We all got giardia more than once, and learned to recognize its characteristic sulphur-smelling farts (as well as intense cramps and diarrhea). I got worms. Dad got creeping larva, probably from contact with one of our dying puppies after it was hit by a car. The symptom was a red, itchy trail under the skin of his back, which was spotted by a tropical medicine doctor while we were all hanging out at the pool of the Intercontinental Hotel.

International Development

Most of the adults around me were working in international development. This had also been true of many of the people we had known in Thailand, but now I was old enough to understand it, and to see where it sometimes went wrong. Appropriate technology was a response to earlier failures: well-meaning international agencies would bring equipment like generators and tractors to remote villages. These were appreciated for as long as they worked. But over time equipment would fail, and the parts and know-how to repair tractors and generators did not exist in a remote Bangladeshi village. Appropriate technology sought to design, create, and disseminate simple solutions with local materials that could be created, understood, and maintained by local people.

Save the Children was then famous for its ad campaign in magazines: “You can save this child or you can turn the page”, with photos of big-eyed, appealing but clearly needy children. A donor would be matched with a specific real child in a country of their choosing (among those where the organization operated) and would receive periodic updates about the child and how their money was helping to improve the child’s life.

Donor money did not go directly to a sponsored child, but rather to projects (health, nutrition, literacy, etc) in their home area that would benefit everyone. The donors understood this, but sometimes they wanted to send small gifts specifically to the child and their family. One such donation was a 16-foot American flag. That was quietly intercepted and disposed of; the agency feared that if it was taken to the village, this meaningless (to the villagers) large piece of cloth would be cut up for clothing – it would not be good PR should someone happen to photograph Bangladeshi villagers dressed in a cut-up American flag.

One of the projects begun as a small industry to help a village was a beedi-making factory. Beedis are a cheap form of cigarette that originated in India, the clove-scented kretek of Indonesia are a close relative. This project was proudly explained in the donor newsletter as an example of improving villagers’ lives with the money they could earn making and selling beedis. Not surprisingly, an American donor objected that we should not be encouraging smoking. I could see both sides of that argument.

Loneliness

With all the adults in my life working full time and few occasions to meet up with expats my own age, I was extremely isolated. I usually finished the day’s schoolwork by lunchtime and then had nothing to do. There was no TV, movies were offered by the American club once a month or so. The club also had a small library, which was my only source of books. Good thing I was already easily reading at an adult level.

I had brought with me from the US the small plastic animals I’d been collecting since our Bangkok years. They all had names, families, histories, and personalities. In the US I had built towns for them out of cardboard. There wasn’t much cardboard available in Dhaka at the time, so here I built their town on a cheap bamboo shelf, using whatever I could scrounge to make furniture and buildings. Following Nancy’s example, I gave them appropriate technology such as tubewells.

The movies shown at the American club were not often ones I would have chosen. I have always been extremely wimpy about scary movies – a frightening or gory scene can disturb me deeply, even now. As my life was in Bangladesh, the impact was even greater: I slept poorly for weeks after films that scared me (“Demon Seed” was one).

I was sleeping poorly anyway. Many a night I was afraid to sleep or couldn’t sleep. I’d stay awake, listening to music on my little cassette player, playing parcheesi or a horse race game or solitaire against myself for hours.

My parents didn’t have much time even for sympathy. Nancy once yelled at me: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself!” “Why not?” I yelled back “No one else does!”

My emotional state eventually led to illness. I had a night of terrible intestinal cramps and vomiting, so bad that my parents decided to place me in a small private hospital where I was given every care and kindness by the doctor and his staff. I don’t think a cause was ever pinpointed, I now think it may have been an abdominal migraine brought on by stress. Dad and Nancy were also very solicitous, and the attention was a balm to my soul.

We were all relieved when it was time for me to go off to boarding school in India.