One of the difficulties of living in Bangladesh is the game of Bideshi 20 questions. Someone will accost you on the street, and run down the list of questions. They must have all read the same script because they very rarely vary. What is your country? What is your name? How long have you been in Bangladesh? What are you doing? What is your Salary? “What is your Salary?” is one of those questions which is culturally appropriate here.

If you get past those questions though you’ll often get lectured about how Bangladesh is such a poor country and how it has so many problems. The power goes out because they can’t produce enough. They have the twin problems of traffic jams and lots of road fatalities because the roads aren’t big enough and the vehicles aren’t road worthy. Just today I saw a man bloodied and dazed being loaded onto a vangari and taken to the hospital. There’s either flooding or water shortages. It’s often contaminated by arsenic, or bacteria, or pollution. People eat lots of rice, but not enough vegetables so they don’t get good nutrition. Businessmen manipulate food prices. Natural Gas one of the few natural resources of Bangladesh is running out and already there is a shortage in Dhaka which means people end up cooking in the middle of the night. The air is polluted. Dhaka was listed as the second worst city in the world to live according to the Economist. Buildings are falling down because they weren’t built to code. Politicians, public servants and police are corrupt. Facebook got blocked… etc. etc. etc. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, negative and advocate changing everthing.

In the midst of all these problems the challenge is to stay positive and determine what small things that can actually be done. This week I saw the first of a batch of new BRTC buses(the government bus company) that was clean and modern. There are thousands of buses in Dhaka, so It probably won’t last, but it made me smile, and I was reminded how small changes can make a big difference. matha beta hole matha kete phelbo? If you have a headache will you cut off your head?

All Rickshaws and Vangari’s in Bangladesh have only a single gear. It’s something like 61 gear inches and way to stiff when under load. We adapted a vangari with a retro-direct drive system which means that if you pedel backwards you get a different gear. The upshot of this over a normal geared system with derailleurs is that it uses much fewer parts and is potentially more rugged. This first attempt has got some issues to work out but it might have some potential. Here’s the Video.

I just got to Macau this evening.   So very good to be back here.  I left Cambodia yesterday.   I really enjoyed my time there.   So drastically different from Bangladesh, but in some ways very similar.  I put some photos up on flickr.  Probably the most notable event though was that I have a neice now, which makes me an Uncle.

I spent another day in Kaula Lumpur, however that was mostly a non event.  I stayed out at LCCT and while I did go in to the town center, I didn’t see much.  This morning I camped out in a Starbucks taking advantage of their free wifi.  I’ve been thinking about a redesign of the old blog for a while now, something a little more minimalist and this seemed like a good way to use a slow morning.  I’ve been reading Dive into mark and I’m liking a lot of his thoughts, especially things like Simplicity is hard lets go shopping.  So I started hacking this morning and by check in time I had something that looks like his site, maybe too much, even if it is the MIT license.   I’m not sure how important blog design is these days, I mean I use RSS feeds for most of my friends blogs.  It’s fun to have something that looks good though, or at least that I think looks good.  If it doesn’t look good, well, stop using Microsoft explorer, or let me know.