Wow, I’ve been really lazy lately.
I got to visit aother factory last week with my flatmate and her supervisor. The factory is located in the North of Dhaka like most factories but is different from what I have experienced so far. It is a medium sized factory but you wouldn’t know it from the way it is built. The reception area looked more like a hotel than a garment factory and it just got better from there. The factory floor itself didn’t look very fancy of course but it was light and rather spacious. The meeting room was again ridiculously fancy and for just a few minutes it was easy to imagine oneself in London instead of Dhaka. Now far from being controlled by a foreign company with lots of money gained from oppressing workers, this factory was completely Bangladeshi-owned and is regarded as one of, if not the best factory in Bangladesh. The walls were littered with awards, both from domestic and international partners, exalting the factory’s labor and environmental standards. Having passed a three-day factory audit workshop just the week before I could see how they got all those awards. Nowhere else have I seen so much compliance with labor standards.
We were there because Tara’s supervisor wanted to pitch a new GTZ-initiative to various factories and wanted to get this well-respected factory behind the plan early. The project is a cell-based project which means the following: Since the goal is to empower female workers, GTZ will be hosting a month-long workshop for a select group of female workers and hopefully supervisors and basically educate them about their rights and opportunities for change in the workplace. Thus, the plan is to host this workshop for about 20 women from 5-10 factories and then send them back to their factories armed with knowledge, authority and some funds provided by the GTZ. The hope is then that they will start to pass on those teachings to their fellow female workers and thereby start a civil society from within the factory which looks out for itself and demands justice in the workplace and empowerment for women.
Having listened to basically this pitch, the factory management agreed to participate in the program and even offered to host it in their facilities since they had state of the art meeting rooms. In the smalltalk that came at the end of the meeting we showed our admiration at the multitude of awards that the factory and its company had won. The explanation the manager gave absolutely floored me. He basically said that while he did of course care about labor and environmental standards from a humanistic point of view, he was so adamant about their implementation because, as he said it, it made “good business sense”. I’m not sure if I’m communicating the magnitude of such a statement effectively enough but I was utterly amazed. Finally, here was someone in Bangladesh who had control fo a factory and thousands of workers and actually had a good business sense. He explained to us that the more awards he has, the more contracts he gets with foreign partners, which gets him more money. Having recognized the absolutely crucial role that trust, credicbility and reputation play in business, the manager we were speaking to had been recognized several times as Bangladeshi businessman of the year. It’s hard to describe how good it was to hear him speak about running a sound business with great output and great working conditions, when all one sees every day is the absolute inability of so many institutions, not least of which the government itself, to run a good enterprise. Too much of life here is simply not in that spirit and while I’m not advocating that every street vendor turn into a business-shark, the standard is so low for good business practices here that seeing such a well-run factory is a welcome change from business as usual. Of course, being absolutely jaded by living in an affluent Western society, my standards are too high but simple things like being good to customers and, on a behavioral note, not using the streets as a trash dump and personal toilet.
Anyways, so much for my frustration with business and efficiency here. I’ve heard that the antidote to all of this is simply getting out of Dhaka, a tip I definitely want to follow in the next few weeks. My flatmate Tara was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Chittagong, the second-biggest city in Bangladesh over the weekend and I hope to replicate that trip with some other interns soon. This sentiment of having to exlore things now is especially pronounced since I realized with some horror that my internship will be halfway done by next weekend. Thus, taking advantage of the time I get to spend outside of the office here is becoming increasingly vital.
In terms of curiosities, I got my hair cut today which was fun. After walking two city-sectors over from Baridhara only to find that the travel office I was looking for was closed, I figured I might as well get my hair cut on the way back. After looking around on the mainstreet connecting the city-sectors, I went into the one with smiling white people on the billboard because nothing says great haircut like David Beckham. It was also the cleanest I could find. Of course no one spoke English so after a lot of gesturing about what was desired in terms of length, he got to it. It looked great but apparently he had spotted a rogue patch of dandruff which he then committed himself to nuking with several hairproducts and some intense washing which doubled as a scalp massage judging by his intensity. Apparently this is what people go to a spa for. After every stage of additional washing I indicated that I had just come here for a haircut but my objections were brushed aside quite literally so I just went along for the ride, figuring that if my hair was ever going to get a spa treatment, it might as well be in Dhaka. So, after around 40 minutes, I left the salon feeling absolutely divine and I had only spent 10 bucks, which of course was probably with some Bangladeshi inflation in it, i.e., massively overcharging foreigners, but I was content. If you ever want to get your hair cut right, come to Dhaka.
In terms of a social life on the weekends, the circle of interesting friends just keeps growing. Being able to spend evenings drinking wine with Nepali, German, British interns from wildly varying age ranges is pretty amazing.
Here are the pictures I’ve been withholding for so long:
The immensity that is the Emirates terminal at Dubai Airport
I just love transliterations of English into Arabic
Duty-free heaven in Dubai
More transliterations
View from my uncle's flat, and yes, all windows here have bars on them, no matter how high the flat is
My uncle's flat
The street on which my uncle lives
This is hilarious because it makes absolutely no sense in this context. Probably some drunk expat with a spray can
The next few pics are from a park close to my uncle's flat
Wonderland, basically a giant Bangladeshi version of Dave and Buster's
The next few are from around the neighborhood of GTZ
It's always good to know your children are protected by plenty of barbed wire
Since Dhaka is constantly under construction, I figured this might be a good thing to see. Bamboo is used for all buildings in this stage of building and apparently works great to hold up large slabs of concrete, as there is another example of it in dizzying heights later on.
10 stories of concrete supported by bamboo. Gotta love bamboo
More pictures soon to follow…
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