My First Night in Bangladesh

MAY 23

Ding…Scrape…Thud

Ding…Scrape…Thud

As I lay in bed on my first night in Dhaka, this curious noise seemed to echo through the walls of my room. John lay fast asleep oblivious to the noise that seemed to be slowly making its way into our domain. Half expecting someone to appear in our window, I lay terrified, silent, and still, protected only by my draping bed net which acted as my imagined cocoon of safety. It was about ten minutes before I gained the courage and/or the energy to search out the source of this perpetual scraping. As I peered out the window, I made out the silhouette of two young boys hard at work shoveling gravel with the Ding of the metal shovel the Scrape of the rocks against its surface and the Thud as they were dropped into the foundation of the apartment building being constructed. In the city of Dhaka they are always building; there is never enough room for the 15 million people that crowd the streets everyday. These young boys could be no older than twelve years old. I found out later that they work at night because it’s the only time the trucks can avoid the chaotic traffic to make it into the city and dump the gravel. My curiosity, however, lie with the reason these young boys were working. Maybe they had to help support their families. Maybe they had dropped out of school. Maybe they were enslaved economically. Maybe they were just trying to eat. There’s certainly a different set of priorities for people here.

As I arose in the morning to the songs of birds, the glimmer of the light coming up over the tops of the rugged apartment buildings, and the smell of the market fish and sewage wafting in the air, there lay the two boys snuggled next to each other under a mosquito net on the ground where they had been slaving away all night. They looked very peaceful. I was forced to realize that no child that age in America would even dream of working through the night like that. However, they lay there with their hands just barely touching, as if to show some sort of kinship to each other through it all. I would guess they were brothers, but regardless it was a touching companionship to witness. My brief glimpse into their life just made me wonder more: Where was there home? Did they have parents? Why weren’t they in school? I guess I’m really not in America anymore.