My Urban Field Site Visit

Sunday was my first visit to my urban field site, where I will be collecting all my data for my “urban low income communities”. It was just a pilot run, for me to see it and take everything in, get the lay of the land, etc. before going in for the surveys and sampling. WHAT a good idea my supervisor had with that, as I was thinking it would be no big deal to start on the first day! Unfortunately I did not take any pictures, I just never felt like any of the times were appropriate for me to pull out my camera and snap like a tourist, especially on my first visit. So you will have to read on for descriptions, rather than seeing for yourself.

There is one section of town in which we were going to, called Mirpur, that is one of the poorer areas, but also a very diverse population within the low income housing. The icddrb already has a pretty strong relationship with that community as they also have a long-term field office and clinic over there. We had decided on 6 different “compounds” or block groups of housing that we will be using for our study, and it was our hope to visit all of them that day. The six were chosen as they represented 6 different types of low-income housing, water sources/pumps, and people groups.

Our first stop was to the poorest of the poor. We got out of the bus and wandered down a muddy road down to some bamboo houses, held up by their bamboo stilts, teetering over the ever-mordant water. As we walked closer to the “compound” we came upon our future site of interest, our water “source”. It was a broken pipe sticking out of the ground, municipal water source that has been dug down to, split open, and repurposed with an additional piece of scrap pipe stuck in to help raise the water to a usable height.  Here at this broken pipe, was crowded several women, an undeterminable amount of children, a smattering of ducks, chickens, dogs and feral cats, all vying for a spot at some water. There was one small girl at the water source using a small plastic pitcher to fill the surrounding buckets of various shapes, sizes, and states of deformation. And just next to her was a woman washing her naked baby’s bottom in the pool that had formed below, while chatting with her friend while she was washing her family’s clothes in a little basin collected from her run-off. They were all excited to see our group; we were ushered into their homes by women with beautiful gold nose-rings and smiles of red-rotten teeth, missing due to overuse of the so common beetle-nut chew.

It is very rare when I go on adventures that I ever actually feel unsure, or afraid about doing anything, but going into these houses, I felt that very unfamiliar feeling of hesitation. These dwellings were somewhere between 20-30 households must have lived, each in a room the size of my walk in closet back home (barely an exaggeration,

They were probably 8’-8’ rooms, or rather homes). One solid elevated platform took up the majoring of the space. I’m assuming the bed for the family. All of these rooms were constructed as one long skinny corridor. With floors of halved bamboo slats, laid over the support of whole bamboo sticks. Held up by some more bamboo, stuck into the water. Walls were a mixture of corrugated iron sheets and halved bamboo slats.  In the central “hallway” however, the bamboo slats were not nailed down, nor reinforced in any way. As soon as you step on them they begin to slip around, and heaven forbid you step right on the end of it, as it might flip up. My immediate fear was I was somehow going to fall through the floor, be it by slipping through the moving strips, or by crashing through it to the sludgy, halved-coconut-shell-strewn, water below. To make the treacherous obstacle course even worse, there was clothes and blankets hung by string across the way, so either I was ducking under string, or dodging blankets and shirts, in the murky darkness from the palm frond roof.  I made it through however to the communal kitchen/ bathroom area at the very end, where several women were squatted over on an open burner (still on the bamboo) mixing up a delicious concoction of something. I was able to observe their sanitation facilities, aka, bathrooms, aka, long drop to the water below, separated for privacy by your hung scarf (also only one facility for all 20-30 women, or whoever else wanted to use it, children normally go outside just in gutters, ditches or trash-heaps). 

Much of our other visits were quite the same, although from there, most houses were on solid ground and made with brick/cement/etc. There was still much treacherous ground, as a few times I had to hop through down the “hallways” of these compounds on little rocks and bricks places as stepping-stones, so as to avoid splashing into the river of fresh sewage that filled the path. Also there was usually a pump at the other places, as opposed to a stolen pipe. These pumps however were one pump for anywhere from 20 (at a good place), to 200 (at another site there was 4 pumps for 800 households). Also pump water is run for 6 hours a day only, 3 in the morning, 3 in the evening. So trying to get 200 households supply of water out of that much time I’m sure is quite tricky.  After going through such hassle, its no wonder families don’t want to boil their water, or waste any on washing hands. At a few of these compounds we saw some of the chlorine dispensers from a current icddrb study, however, use has been met with very low uptake.

At each of the sites I was able to visit with some of the families there, and see what their living conditions were as well, and to hear about the normal families in these areas. Many of these families were primarily Urdu speakers, and were either past Pakistani refugees, or recent ones, that have now ended up here. In one of the houses I visited there was a very old lady, or at least she looked old, I have long since learned age appears much earlier overseas than in the US. This lady let me sit on her bed/ table/ workstation with her. And this is when I saw what she was doing. She had a slab of wood with a stack of papers on it, and a bucket of glue/paste in front of her. She would then dab some paste onto the edge of the paper and fold it up into the neat, tidy paper bags I use to carry my chapattis and samosas home in.  I had never, ever, in my life though that anyone made these bags, especially for a living. Its like meeting the person who would make the plastic bags for grocery stores, or folds boxes for our food.

One of the areas we went was apparently famous for being the weaver district, and I was able to go into one of the rooms where there was three huge looms set up and men working on weaving some of the most beautiful fabric I have ever seen… EVER! Pinks and purples and reds and blues with gold and silver designs woven in. Apparently they would work on one piece of cloth for about 2 weeks, then make anywhere from 1000-2000 taka on it… that is about 12-24 bucks, for two weeks of your work, that will go to take care of your family of 5, 6 maybe seven? Poverty on a whole new level. I also saw some of the fabric later at a store, and out of curiosity I wanted to see how  much it was…the sheet I saw was going for 10,000tka. Where was that extra 8,000 taka going? It frustrated me.

It was a great day visiting the sites, I feel like I met a lot of great people, and I was able to get a good scope for what type of situation my project would be working in. It was interesting though, on our way back at the end of the day, one of my co-workers asked me this. He said “Now you have seen the poor of Bangladesh, and you also have poor people living in low income places in the US. How do they compare.” It was such a simple question, but something I had never even though of before. Compare the low income of the US to the low-income of a developing country. Can you even do that? The poorest of the poor (save for the homeless), you will always still have water pumped into your house. You will still have a sink, probably more than just one. You will still have a toilet; you will still have a wall and a roof.

I think we all know that people live in terrible conditions when we are still living in the US, we know it is bad, and we feel sad for them.  But if we saw this happening IN the US, how much more action would be taken on it. It took hours for people to react to people displaced by Katrina, houses destroyed by the Northridge earthquake, etc. Yet no one takes action against the injustices people live in every single day, a few countries over. Somehow the distance makes it an acceptable sadness?

Soon I will leave for a week in a rural field site, I will be back 6 days after I leave. I will have no internet, no ac, and one other person who speaks SOME English, it will be an interesting, and eye-opening week I think. I think I will have much to report on the flip side. So write more then!