Life, The Universe and Everything

It’s the end of our third day in Bangladesh and so far, we have only traveled around Dhaka city. This is not a small feat. After being out and about today for ten hours, I can still hear the sound of car horns echoing in my brain while I type this all tucked away in my hotel room. I yearn for a moment of quiet.



Across the street from me, there is a huge construction project. In fact, all over Dhaka city are huge new construction projects. Everywhere you look a new tall, sketchy looking tower is going up about 6 inches from the neighboring building. I wonder how long this rapid urban growth can be sustained before everything collapses on the fragile infrastructure. The traffic, the constant power outages, the hundreds of tangled cables spiderwebbing up each tall building, the construction, the waste -- there must be a point at which it cannot be sustained. And this is not just Dhaka city, I think about this every time I visit a developing world mega-city. Though I think Dhaka city might just take the prize here. The traffic is even worse than Manila.



Anyway, it has been interesting watching the progress on the building across the street. While we were out today, piles of gravel were delivered to the site and women, who have not been on the site before, are carrying basket loads of gravel from the pile to the cement mixer while a man sits in a plastic chair on top of the pile directing them as they dodge cars and rickshaws with their baskets of gravel balanced on their heads.

So, what have I seen so far? We’ve visited a TB clinic, a children’s hospital, a cholera hospital, and two urban health care clinics. It’s been a little overwhelming, the amount of information and experiences that I’m taking in. I went to bed last night and woke up this morning thinking about it; trying to sort it all out. We visited the neonatal ward of the children’s hospital and saw some of the tiniest humans I have ever seen. There was a one month old baby which weighed merely 850 grams. Low birth weight is a big problem here, mainly due to malnutrition in the mother. The neonatal ward was trying to coax along the very worst off.

We saw several of the other wards, large open rooms, beds filled with sick children and their mothers. We saw the cholera beds which have a hole in the center so that patients do not have to get up to evacuate and doctors can easily obtain a sample for diagnosis. Very convenient. Usually right now is peak season for cholera, but this year, they haven’t seen the normal peak that makes them have to extend the hospital to rows of beds under tents out in the dirt lot by the building.



At one of the urban clinics, we saw a very healthy, 10 minute old baby. At the other urban clinic, there was a woman in labor and all I could think was, Wow... it is really hot for that. At that same clinic, we saw mothers with their babies lined up to get the babies their routine vaccinations. Everywhere we visited was hugely busy and those urban clinics do amazing work with really limited resources, equipment, and infrastructure. But this is the highest level of public health care which means that these are the best facilities for the public. Tomorrow we travel out to the field where, I think, things are going to be much different.

Ok... another power outage. I’m just waiting for the time that I happen to be in the elevator for one of those. There is a very nice sign in the elevator that says In the case of a power outage and the elevator stops, don’t panic!! -- I love it. Don’t panic! And the answer is 42…