'Tis the Season...

The fact that I’m sitting here listening to Habib (featuring Kaya), a popular Bengali artist, off of the CD I acquired through last night’s Secret Santa gift exchange is a testament to the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed my first Christmas away from home. It’s also perhaps why this happens to be the case as well; I’m unfamiliar with the tune and can’t understand the lyrics, but I’m enchanted by its rhythm all the same.

Christmas in the key of B-flat was more than I could have asked for. While our gluehwein and eggnog party on the night of the 24^th (featuring fresh yogurt from Bogra) was less well attended than we expected, those who were there got a taste of the Norwegian Christmas I’ve grown up with and enjoyed the almost unlimited beverages we’d cooked up the day before. The interesting thing was that our Bengali friends and colleagues much preferred the chilled eggnog to the hot gluehwein while our fellow North American intern friends felt the opposite. Fortunately for us, however, the larger group chose the beverage in greatest supply. The gluehwein’s limited reserves were put in jeopardy by yours truly as I waited for our guests to arrive (it couldn’t just sit there simmering!), and it was quickly exhausted as soon as two of the girls from BRAC finally found their way to our building after being taken on a bit of a wild goose chase through Purana Paltan by their CNG driver. An insatiable desire for a hard drink after a trying transportation experience seems to be a frequently reoccurring phenomenon these days.

Christmas Day was spent in and around my bed. I took the liberty to sleep off the after-effects of the previous evening and dive into the two books that have most recently found their way into my library. The first, No Logo, is a book I’ve been hesitant to read since it first came out with such acclaim in 2000, but I couldn’t let it rest on Marc’s shelf any longer. Once I began my stage in a country known for its cheap labour and textile exports and started to read her columns online in The Guardian more frequently than before, however, my attitude towards Ms. Klein began to change for the better. Even if I don’t buy into (pun intended) her hypothesis, “that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with high name-brand recognition”, I can now relate to the stories framing her argument more effectively than I thought I could in Canada and therefore figured it would be worth the read.

The second is my newest copy of the book I owned for three years before losing it somewhere between Montreal and Toronto this past summer. Robert D. Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth is a magnificent political travelogue documenting his journey from West Africa to Southeast Asia through the Middle East and Central Asia. It helped fuel my interest in international affairs and travel to largely unknown places, and its chapters on Thailand, Laos and Cambodia will likely be the basis of my solo journey (at this point, at least) through those countries after I leave Dhaka for Bangkok at the end of February. It’s once again in my possession thanks to my parents’ keen attention to my two-item Christmas wish list (‘my family’ was a tad too cumbersome to mail to Bangladesh), so this time I’ll try to lose myself in my return journey through its 438 pages rather than the book itself.

An afternoon of casual reading in bed passed by quickly, and it was soon time to get suited up in my nice pants and dress shirt for the second time in four months. The occasion, predictably, was Christmas dinner with sixteen other interns (Canadian, American and Bengali) at the residence of a local American diplomat whom one amongst us was housesitting for over the holidays. The strangest part was not the fact that we were all in Bangladesh on the 25^th of December, nor the fact that people from a variety of faiths surrounded the table; instead, it was the very familiarity of the house itself. Such a two-story, nicely furnished house with a Christmas tree in the living room, a well-equipped kitchen, distinct dining area and two or three bedrooms upstairs is commonplace in suburban Canada. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city characterized by its once colourful but now weather-beaten and often crumbling apartment buildings, it’s a luxury of enormous proportions. In the diplomatic neighbourhood of Baridhara only accessible after passing through a security checkpoint, however, it’s commonplace.

On our way up to dinner in our organization’s microbus – available for our personal excursions on Fridays and Saturdays – Marc and I were discussing our shared feelings of guilt that stem from not being able to empathize, to the degree that we think we ought to, with the torture victims and other individuals in utterly tragic physical, psychological or personal circumstances whom we’ve met over the past four months.

Travelling in our personally chauffeured transport; living in a massive (and partially subsidized) apartment with plenty of security to protect us from things that go bump in the night; and, enjoying the benefits of being a rare and much appreciated foreign face in a country relatively devoid of tourists, are all intervening factors that prevent us from truly understanding the everyday challenges and tragedies that typify life for the vast majority of Bangladeshis. Just as the photographers we met at the Chobi Mela exhibition agreed that they all felt, at one point in their careers, that they were somehow making a living off of the suffering of others, we somehow felt as though we were doing the same.

Perhaps it’s the spirit of the season that brought out these concerns, and if so, then it’s also what lead to our coming-to-terms with this common moral dilemma for journalists, photographers and NGO workers. Unlike drug dealers who are actually making a living off of the suffering of the poor souls who constitute their clientele, we’re making a living because of it. The relationship is therefore a positive one: the more effort we put into our work, the better of the people we’re trying to help will be. Moreover, most people in our position are bound to feel even a little guilty for leading privileged lives when living and working alongside those who aren’t nearly as fortunate for reasons beyond their own control. We shouldn’t be concerned about not being able to empathize to the degree that we think we ought to, for it’s a perfectly natural reaction; instead, we should only be worried if this wasn’t a concern in the first place.

With this moral dilemma behind us for the time being, we were able to enjoy the feast and festivities of Christmas Dinner 2004. The two large cuts of roast beef, chicken, mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, dinner roles, gravy, stuffing and fresh green salad that filled up the long, dining-room table were the delectable products of a joint effort that included at least ten people and several visits to a variety of bazaars, local grocery stores and the American Commissary (a replica of an American supermarket open only to the US diplomatic community and those with connections to same). The gingerbread cookies, apple tarts and pumpkin pie were an equally impressive sight to behold, not to mention the wine and other spirits originating from both underground and over the counter suppliers.

The evening finished off with a Secret Santa gift exchange in the living room, and it felt as though I was back at home with long-time friends rather than on the other side of the world with new ones from across Canada, the United States, Bangladesh, and even Norway. It turns out that even from here, a country with a telephone network described in the CIA World Fact Book as “totally inadequate for a modern country”, the world can often appear to be much smaller than it is. [Wait a minute...who said Bangladesh is a modern country?]

Cecilia, the Norwegian girl with an accent strikingly similar to that of my aunt Marianne and who is interning with BRAC, is a perfect example of the "It's a Small World" phenomenon. Not only is she from Oslo like my father, but her mother also grew up in the exact same neighbourhood as he did. Moreover, both of them played handball growing up on or around Professor Dahl’s Gate, the street on which he used to live, and are now almost exactly the same age: both were born in January of the same year (which will remain vague at risk of a serious neck-ringing when I get home…). The girl I met in Dhaka, Bangladesh might therefore turn out to be the daughter of a childhood friend of my father’s. Sounds like a story more suitable for Halloween than for the Christmas season.

After much merry-making, obligatory multiple servings of the main course, the over-consumption of dessert and available beverages, and receiving a long-awaited Christmas phone call from my family on Marc’s mobile, we made our way back to our neighbourhood at the entrance to Old Dhaka. It’s only a 15-minute drive south by car in the dead of night, but far more than 15 years behind the wealthy communities of Baridhara, Banani and Gulshan I and II.

Instead of finishing up a phenomenal day of skiing at Whistler like I did at this time on Boxing Day last year, I’m wrapping up the story of my equally phenomenal two-days of Christmas festivities from my desk in Dhaka. It’s a good thing that Boxing Day shopping isn’t a tradition in my family, as I’d have serious trouble finding discounts, (let alone open shops), during today’s hartal.

Ironically enough, this citywide shutdown of most non-essential services only reiterates what the past few days has made me realize: the Christmas spirit in its rawest form has no regard for borders, geography, climate or consumerism; it transcends all faiths, but can also exist in their absence. It is a spirit that can be heard in the sound of a loved-one’s voice, seen in the smile of close friend, and tasted in a meal cooked with care, and is therefore one that I will look forward to - regardless of my location - each and every year.