Visit to Dhamrai

This past weekend we went on a field trip with 5 others from the embassy to an artisan workshop about one and a half hours away from Dhaka in the town of Dhamrai. We learned about and saw a demonstration of what’s called the “lost wax” method of bronze sculpture. The carvers start by making a sculpture out of a combination of beeswax and paraffin. The figures can be quite intricate, many of which are Hindu gods in a variety of sizes. These wax sculptures are coated with clay, first several thin coats followed by thicker ones. They evolve to look like pottery lumps which are then heated in a coal/coke-fired kiln. At this time the wax is vaporized (thus the lost wax)as the molds reach 1000 degrees F. Bronze is created from 88% copper and 12% tin and are mixed from recycled old metal scraps and also heated to 1000 degrees F in clay crucibles. The molten metal is poured into the molds. When the metal and molds have cooled and set the pottery coating is cracked away with a hammer and small chisel and the bronze sculpture emerges. This means, of course, that each original wax form, which can take many hours to create, produces only one unique sculpture. The U.S. embassy has given grant money to this workshop to promote and sustain what was becoming a lost art so they can train new artisans and find markets for their products. We bought a pair of peacocks as our support and souvenir from the experience!

"Lost wax" metal sculpting art from Dhamrai, Bangladesh

Wax figure, carved by hand over several days

Molten bronze being poured (note the artisan in sandals)

Metal and mold at 1000 degrees F

Breaking the once-used mold to free the sculpture

New members of the family!

The neighbor children are curious, too...

Laura's Listening Walk - Sounds of Dhaka

In an effort to overcome my writer’s block about how to encapsulate the culture and environment in words for those who might be interested, I decided the other day to try focusing on one sense at a time. For my daily walk I went to a new park in a nearby neighborhood that has a perimeter walk around a small lake, just a little less than a kilometer for one lap. I made note of and sorted through all the sounds that I was hearing; they included horns honking, rickshaw bells jingling, crows cawing, smaller birds chirping, airplanes overhead, construction sounds including hammers pounding on bricks, and the imams’ call to prayer. A closer look at the source of these sounds can give some pictures and insights into the Dhaka experience.

There is no denying that the chaos of the local traffic is a dominant element of daily life. The streets are crowded with cars, trucks, busses, motorcycles, bicycle rickshaws for people, flatbed rickshaws for goods (the local version of the personal pickup truck) and many pedestrians, including beggars at the busy intersections. Driving involves continous jockeying to nudge into an open spot and there is a lot of weaving, “lane” changing and general crowding. All of this involves the constant beeping of horns to signal they’re butting in, passing or just announcing their presence. In contrast to the obnoxious motor horns, the soft bicycle-type bells of the rickshaws are a more pleasant sound used when making any of the above manuevers as well as to get the attention of potential customers. Though it’s not a sound image, I have to share a common visual image – that of the slender, hard-peddling rickshaw driver or even a small boy on foot who puts out his arm with a hand up, indicating to the giant bus or car in his path that it should stop while he makes a turn or crosses the street!

There are a lot of huge crows in the neighborhoods and parks that caw obnoxiously, but taking time out to sit on a park bench can result in the reward of chirps and songs from other birds hiding in the trees. When willing to wait patiently I have been able to catch sight of them as they flit from tree to tree or venture to the ground nearby. Perhaps I will try to get a bird identification chart or book, because some of them have nice coloring - green and yellow or maybe a red spot on the head or tail with brown, gray and/or white feathers.

The airplanes overhead, of course, are a city sound heard anywhere in the world when your neighborhood isn’t too far from the airport. And the construction noises might be common too, except that they are different than the usual jackhammer and large earthmovers. One sound of hammers pounding on bricks, for instance, gives an insight into the availability of plentiful and cheap labor. Those willing to work hard for very little are employed to literally break up bricks into small pieces for the purpose of making gravel and coarse concrete used in the building process. Bricks are used extensively in building, more so than concrete blocks, because there are many brick factories in the country utilizing the clay-like soil. On a recent drive out of the city we saw many such factories with the bricks piled up for drying in the sun after casting. And are they moved around on pallets by forklift? No! At any building site you will see men carrying a dozen or so at a time, after carefully loading them onto a board on top of their head.

The imams’ call to prayer can be heard at the Islamic prayer times throughout the day. Sometimes it is loud; other times just another sound in the background. Generally, the musical nature of it is non-descript, but occasionally I have noticed that it can be really bad or pleasantly sonorous! Bangladesh is predominantly Islamic with around 85% of the population identified as Muslim, however it is considered to be moderate and that can be seen in the wide variety of dress styles. Most men wear either western clothes or the local dress of a simple pullover shirt and a sort of wraparound skirt, called a lungi. Women typically wear a sari (wraparound dress) or a shalwar kamiz, which is a long pullover top with loose fitting pants underneath. Almost all women, even those with western clothes, wear some sort of scarf loosely hanging over the chest with the ends draped to the back over the shoulders. Almost everyone, no matter what else they wear, has on sandals or flip flops. Only some men wear slip-on leather shoes if they want to look more business-like.

So, do I feel like a foreigner in a strange land? Well, of course, I know that my blond hair and fair skin mark me as a transplant, but there are so many people always on the streets that I figure I might as well jump in and be part of the milieu. It does not appear to be considered rude here to stare at others. Some Americans find this annoying, but I figure that if the locals want to stare at me that gives me license to observe them in return! Even though I used the sounds to jump start my observations, I have shared a lot of visual images as well. In such a densely populated city of some 15 million there is no shortage of sensory input – for this midwesterner, often resulting in sensory overload, but at least one cannot complain that there is nothing new to tell about!

Time for some pictures!

Medical Evacuation

Friday, February 06, 2009

Around the world in 14 days…

Life in Dhaka has moved along quickly and pleasantly through the winter. Laura is acclimating to the culture, people, language and weather very well. I continue to enjoy work and have found myself staying quite busy.

I had a recent flurry of activity and travel with an accompanied medevac (medical evacuation) to Washington, D.C. of a patient that needed specific care there, but was not able to travel alone. This is usually a 26 hour journey. We managed to make it into a 55 hour ordeal.

We took off from Dhaka at 5:25 am for London. Great flight, but the plane was diverted to Newcastle in northern U.K. due to a 7-inch snow/ice storm in London, the likes of which had not been seen in 18 years per BBC reporting. With no infrastructure to deal with snow that occurs so rarely, the city was paralyzed, including a closed airport, no buses, a shut-down underground system and motorways at a standstill. The flight landed in Newcastle at a small regional airport. The runway can handle large jets, but the local staff was overwhelmed by 4 international arrivals within two hours. Consequently it took almost two hours to get luggage and another hour to wait for a coach bus to drive us south to Heathrow airport. Once on the road (wet to slushy) we “enjoyed” a 6 hour tour of the English countryside under its rare mantle of fresh-fallen snow. My patient remained stable and comfortable, fortunately. I made good use of my international cell phone/Blackberry to communicate with the State Department MED office which was able to set up a hotel reservation for us near the airport. That was a stroke of good fortune.

When we got to Heathrow at 10 pm there was a line of 250+ people waiting for hotel rooms. Another line for re-booking flights had another 100 people in it. When I explained my needs to an attendant, we where told to just head to our hotel room and the flight would be re-booked for us for the next day. We grabbed 5 hours of sleep after the first 26 hours of the journey and got up for day two.

Snow and cold continued in southern England, but we were very lucky to be on one of the 25% of flights that made it out that day, heading for Washington, D.C. only two hours after the scheduled 11:00 am departure time. That flight was smooth and landed us at Dulles International by 4 pm local time. The next stop was the MED office of the State Department where the patient and I met with the MED physicians who would help to coordinate local care. It was decided that we should head to the Emergency Department of a Washington, D.C. hospital for likely hospitalization of the patient that evening. I was looking forward to handing over the patient-care responsibility to the next team after the now-48 hour work shift.

Well, the story gets more interesting. MED doctors had spoken with doctors at this particular hospital the day before with assurances that the patient would be cared for quickly. But with hospital after-hours policy very rigid, we were told on arrival that we needed to be evaluated in the ER prior to any thoughts of admission to the hospital. This was frustrating, since the patient had already been evaluated by State Department doctors.. So the process continued with a 1 1/2 hour wait to see the intern and first-year medical student, followed an hour later by an interview with the first year resident of the admitting service. This means I have gone through relating the complex patient history for the third time in four hours after having traveled with the patient for now-50 hours. The resident agreed admission was indicated, went to call the attending physician (on-call from home by this hour), and returned to admit four hours after we had arrived at the hospital that “no beds were available!” They had called two other hospitals similarly full and told us we needed to wait while they continued to call in search of an open bed.

Now it was time for plan B. Although the State Department hopes to evaluate medevacs locally in D.C., it is not a strict requirement. So it was decided that I would supervise the patient’s care for one additional night in a local hotel, hand over the care to a MED nurse practitioner the next morning and the patient would be transferred to the patient’s hometown under the care of her U.S. physicians. The 5:30 am “hand-off” went fine, and I headed to the airport for onward travel while the nurse practitioner helped the patient prepare for more travel and did eventually make it to the final destination. The patient was eventually hospitalized, is making the proper recovery and tolerated the travel amazingly well.

I was able to head to Minnesota for a free day with adult children Paul and Mary and catch up on some sleep. With a beautiful winter day, Mary and I actually got in some cross-county skiing. That is something I did not think I would be doing this winter, living in Bangladesh. Now I am off again, traveling to Honolulu for the annual education conference of half of the Foreign Service Health Practitioners (the other half meets in a few weeks in Lisbon, Portugal). I will meet Laura there and I look forward to meeting my counterparts from around the world. We will be back in Dhaka on Feb. 16, 14 days after I left to circumnavigate the globe.

When I joined the State Department last June we had a well-planned and thoughtful orientation at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, VA. Our orientation coordinator made the first presentation and gave the most important message about success in the Foreign Service career. “Stay flexible” was the advice and mantra throughout the training. I can now assure all that was, indeed, the best advice I could have received. Every person I encountered on the medevac was pleasant and tried to be helpful, but the weather must simply be dealt with and the strain on the health care delivery system is a problem for many Americans, not just State Department employees. All in a week’s work.