There was this one time, during rainy season, it rained… Imagine that… However in all seriousness, the north west of Bangladesh doesn’t get nearly as much rain as the rest of the country. I thought rainy season should be more of an event, but the first two I experienced in Bangladesh were sort of disappointing. This summer it was more of a proper rainy season. The thing that you have to understand about Bangladesh is that there really is no rock to speak of. It’s silt the whole way down, which is part of the reason it’s so flat. If there’s high ground, chances are somebody made it that way. So when it rains you get a lot of standing water. Everything is a business in Bangladesh and fishing rights always need to be negotiated, but after a rain, flooding creates a lot of areas which are sort of common and thus able to be fished by anyone, so roads and drainage ditches alike become a place to find fish.

After a few days of rain in early August our front yard was relatively flooded, and people started to fish in our front yard. The fish they are after are really small, maybe only 2 inches long; “Chotto mach” as they say in “amader bangla basha.” They fry them up in as a curry, bones and all. I tend to think of fishing as with rods and hooks, but a net is the most common fishing method in Bangladesh. Our neighbors Momina and her children Momin and Masuda set up a net where there was a lot of water running across our driveway and waited for the fish. They caught quite a few too. Other villagers came out and joined them, standing with rain beating down on their umbrellas while the children fished. And there stand I, out in the rain, in a flooded front yard, watching this catching of fish. Food and fun is where you find it.

e.g. /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/GrammeenPhone

[connection]
id=GrameenPhone
uuid=b68882db-7e97-4fa3-a811-9234f64098f6
type=gsm
autoconnect=false
timestamp=1316411329

[ipv4]
method=auto

[serial]
baud=115200

[gsm]
number=*99#
apn=gpinternet

#nmcli con up id GrameenPhone

That rootedness is a bit of an illusion though. I think I’ve mentioned how little rock Bangladesh has. It sits on a delta and is silt a long way down. I may be crazy, but I think that this contributes to a sense of instability at some level. Last week there was an earthquake in Sikkim and all the buildings in Dhaka wobbled. I was on the 7th story of a building close to the MCC office in Dhaka at the time and the rattling made me pretty nervous. People ran out of their buildings and were scared to return. Earthquakes are a problem that is in the back of many peoples minds. There have been big earthquakes in Bangladesh’s past, and if a large one ever hits again, all previous disasters in Bangladesh are going to pale in comparison. Unfortunately like so many issues here, nothing has really been done about it because there are more immediate problems.

I find myself thinking a lot about stability, especially now that after 3 years, my term in Bangladesh is quickly winding down and I’m not sure what’s next. I’m waxing nostalgic about where I went and how long that journey has been. There have been times of deep contentment and also pain. In a little while I will return to the US and hope to reconnect, but I will find you at a different point in your life. With this in mind, I ask the question, as you sit back and think about the last 3 years, Kothay Geyechen? Where did you go?

In Bangladesh if you need some work done at your house, you’ll call a mistri or tradesman. I think it literally might mean master, as in master of a trade though that sometimes might be a bit optimistic. The mistri will show up barefoot, with a little bag of tools consisting of a saw, a few chisels, a plane, or maybe some trowels if he works with brick, but there will almost be a hatul or hammer. A hammer is the tool of choice for everything. Bangladeshi’s have a penchant to pound. Specialized equipment like motorcycles and bicycles often needs some special wrenches to work on certain parts. However if you don’t have that wrench, a screw driver and hammer tapping at a protruding corner might work. Tools are used to death in Bangladesh and often don’t last as long as I think they should. For physical things don’t there isn’t a sense of permanence. Maybe it’s because things are changing so quickly, or maybe it’s because at the very core Bangladesh is a delta and even the land isn’t permanent. There are very few old ruins in Bangladesh. Other thinking on the other hand seems to change very slowly, for many Bangladeshis, no meal is complete without rice–without it, it’s just a snack. I eat a lot of Bangladeshi food, but when I try to share dishes from other places I’ve lived, it often goes unappreciated. I’ve heard it said by Bangladeshi’s, “your food is not suitable for us.” From my perspective, what Bangladeshi’s consider suitable food, is very limited.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a certain amount of functional fixedness that is required in society. It allows one to make assumptions that form the basis of further development. Without a core foundation of assumptions or design patterns, it is difficult to design or build upon previous work and a project that makes sense when it was started can very quickly become irrelevant when those assumptions become invalid. To compensate, projects either need to be over engineered or restarted and both drastically increase costs. Sustainable technology work is in many ways on the edge. Sustainability implies a very long time, yet we talk about technology as having a lifespan, often very short. Most new technology, either the product or the idea behind it, doesn’t come from Bangladesh, and importing it without adaptation often puts it into conflict with local thinking and structures. When it comes to technology, I understand many ideas that are simply absent in most of Bangladesh, and am often asked to share them, but it’s difficult because often they are premature and simply won’t work here or if they did would require too much time or expense to get working. The idea behind sustainable technology is to bring wisdom rather than just knowledge and that is much more challenging. I’ve had conversations about how tools improperly used soon become noshto or broken and I’ve tried using the phrase. “shudo hatul takle, shop shamosha perekei moto decade” – If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. While I think it’s grammatically correct, all I get is blank stares. I guess the idiom doesn’t translate.

Last year I had a motorcycle accident and broke my 3rd metacarpal in my right hand.  At the same time my power cable for my laptop went out and getting a warranty claim processed in Bangladesh takes longer than it should. I was without my primary computer, and I couldn’t use a keyboard like I normally did. The biggest single reason I bought an Android device is that it works as a standalone device, and during that time, that functionality served me well. For several weeks, my Nexus One became my primary computer. I used it one handed, and it turned out that for many things I wasn’t really limited. There was a big criticism about tablets was consume content rather than create content. I think has largely faded being I don’t read as much about that anymore.  High end phones are just as capable processing wise as the tablets and maybe a more important question is whether the device functionally complete: is the device able complete a task without physical access to another general purpose computer. While my Nexus One was my primary device, I couldn’t access peripherals such as flash storage and USB devices and I couldn’t develop on the Android for the Android.¹ These issues are basically the same on iOS as well, but the times they are a changing.  Smart phones are becoming increasingly standalone devices.  I’ve now got a Python environment on Android through Scripting Library for Android and the recent announcement of Android ADK is going to allow a plethora of hardware options.  Apple with it’s proprietary connecter offers a good deal of input output options and dongles like camera connection kit allow you to move data on and of a device. Recently I even saw that Oscium makes an oscilloscope/logic analyzer for iOS, which is something I would find useful.

As these phones become functionally complete, they’re going to start replacing computers.  As low end phones gain functionality and processing power, Android is going to start showing up in the developing world.  I wonder if Microsoft realizes how truly irrelevant it is becoming.  Desktops and laptops here run either open source or pirated software, but there are over a billion people who want to buy phones in the Indian subcontinent and another billion in China.  While I don’t think Apple is going to go after the developing world market, I suspect that Apple will continue to transition iOS toward a standalone OS which would position them with the option.² The personal computer of the developing world is a phone made in Shenzhen, and I wonder who’s thinking about that.

1 Not including a linux environment on a rooted handset.
2 My bet for the North Carolina Datacenter.

He claims that when we can graph stuff that costs a lot of money against stuff that has a big effect. Stuff that is very expensive and very effective is strategy. Things that are neither are trivia and he also observes rather tongue in cheek that consultancy is both expensive and not very effective. The final category he claims doesn’t have a name and is where details are key and have an effect out of proportion with the effort involved. Personally, I think that last category is tactics.

I’ve been thinking about how that applies to Bangladesh. If you look at it’s problems the first thought I have is that what seems to be lacking is strategy. A recent study showed that cost of traffic congestion in Dhaka last year was about 3 billion $US. It would seem this is the result of poor logistical planning. However, there is a plan. From what I understand it’s not even a bad plan. The problem is that it isn’t followed; buildings get built in designated free space, bridges are built too narrow and the materials saving pocketed, etc. etc.

My knee jerk reaction is regulation, but thats not exactly the problem either. Bangladesh bureaucracy is legendary, but it is mostly just a barrier to entry. From what I can tell the missing piece is enforcement: between corruption and culture, enforcement and penalties are for all intents and purposes absent. The biggest problem with corruption is not that it siphons off money, but that it actively sabotages much needed improvements. pukur churi koreche – they stole the pond…

The expression ” stealing the pond” needs some explanation. The village pond or pukur is the center of rural life so it refers to a really terrible sort of theft and is probably appropriate in this context.

It’s starting to get hot and as a result power outages are getting more frequent.  Last year with more than 12hour daily power outages and only 3 or 4 during daylight hours it was hard to get any work done.  This year however, we got a solar system setup and I hope that makes things go smoother.  There are still some quirks to work out, but we seem to have a system that is giving us consistent power through the day.  We have 960W array and a 48V 400ah battery pack.  The interesting bit is the charge controller, a Su-kam PCU 2k48.  I haven’t seen anything quite like it and it seems like a fairly ideal system for our situation.  There’s no net metering policy in Bangladesh, and even if there was, the grid power is so inconsistant that you would need some sort of battery backup anyway.   This unit ties together PV, grid and a batteries.  I haven’t tested inverter efficiency yet, but the design seems like about the most sane way to do it.  The documentation is fairly confusing, but there are two paths though it. There’s the PV -> Charge controller/Battery->  Inverter path which it prefers, but in the event that it can’t supply enough from that source, it fails over to the other path which is Grid power, also there is a battery charger which can charge your pack at the same time.

Rickshaws are somewhat controversial in Bangladesh. I sometimes ride in a car, and riding in a car one seems to wait on rickshaws a lot. Bangladeshi’s, especially wealthy ones, really dislike rickshaws. They view them as symbolic of a poor underdeveloped country. They are very understandably perceived as the source of delays and traffic jams. Interestingly enough the people who have studied transportation claim that moving people is a function of space and speed. Using those metrics Rickshaws are actually quite a bit more efficient than cars at moving people around.

I haven’t had to drive a rickshaw to earn my keep, so I don’t think I can fully tell that story, but I can tell you that the mechanics of the rickshaw aren’t ideal. Because it’s converted from a bicycle the geometry is wrong, the seat is in the wrong place and the handle bars are difficult to turn. The gearing of the drive train is also wrong. It’s generally 61 gear inches which means that it feels like pedaling up a hill in your highest gear. When all of this comes together you have a machine which is really hard on the pullers body. Gill Bedford one of my coworkers in Dhaka worked with Rickshaw pullers and tells me that it’s a job you can do for 15 years. After that your body is broken.

If we step back from the situation a bit we can start to understand the socio-economic situation that puts rickshaws, cars and busses together. Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world. There are a few city states more densely populated, but as country it’s the most denses. One hundred and sixty four million people living in an area the size of Illinois. 80% of the population works in agriculture and 70% of the land is used for agriculture, so roads are made as narrow as possible and in that space traffic patterns seem to be based on the game of Chicken.

So here are several different ways to look at at situation. Where you sit affects how you think and that place might be creating problems for someone else, just as they might create problems for you. Ek hate tali baje na – You can’t clap with one hand.