Yes, I boarded the bus for Kolkata. And, to my dismay, the trip took 14 hours. I departed from my house around 8pm, to catch an auto rickshaw to the bus station. This endeavor, a distance of perhaps 3-4 miles, took 1.5 hours. So, my bus journey began after I had inhaled a great deal of exhaust. No worries, though - the bus was a luxury bus. Large, imposing, with clean, assigned seats and no evident rust. I was worried that as a woman travelling alone at night, maybe I'd be harrassed. So I learned how to say : "Hey. Don't touch me" but it was not necessary.
(In case you are curious, you can say: Hey. Amake dhoro na.)
It was a very comfortable ride...except that at midnight, they began a movie very loudly. At 2 am, we were in line to board a ferry, which took us and the bus across a river. Around 4:30 am, we reached somewhere near the Bangladesh-India border at Benapole. Then began the excitement.
- 4:30 am -- Arrive at the Green Line office. Exit bus sleepily. Look confused. Watch others stretch out to sleep, wash for prayer, or go in search of tea.
- 4:50 am -- Receive a boxed snack, containing 2 suspicious sweets, a cold and rubbery roti, and a plastic baggie filled with some oily spicy vegetable. Proceed to drink coffee instead.
- 5:20 am -- Still confused, decide that it might be good to wash face and brush teeth. Go to ladies room.
- 5:24 am -- Exit ladies room, and find that my bus companions are no longer in the office. Get a little afraid, grab my bag and wander outside.
- 5:25 am -- see people getting on the platforms of cycle rickshaws with their bags. As I am travelling alone, I don't merit 1 whole rickshaw, but they are quickly pulling away as I decide what is happening. I ask 2 men if I can just sit on the platform with them...they ask me if I have a confirmed ticket. I say yes. They say that I have to go in the car. I turn to look for the car, see none, but then they are gone. A van pulls up, I get in, and wait. I am attacked by the most vicious mosquitos you've ever imagined.
- 5:30 am -- Drive 1 kilometer down a road, pull up to the actual border near lots of large trucks, and get out of van. Am herded into a line in front of the immigration office. Get in line, and am then told that I must go to the ladies line.
- 5:30 - 6:00 am -- Stand in line, fending off 10 beggars who have materialized out of no where. Watch women fight about cutting in line. Hear some guy shout...my interpretation: "If you need taka, go stand in line over there." Well, I didn't need money, so I stayed put. Realize that I need to fill a border tax, and go stand in another line.
- 6:00 am -- Attach myself to a family so that people don't cut infront of me. Am told to go stand in the (much shorter) ladies line. Do that, while being viciously attacked by pre-dawn mosquito monsters. A door opens in front of the men's line. Men barrel forward shouting and waving money. Men blocade the door, so people can't exit and make space for more people. Someone asks if the door infront of the ladies line will open. It turns out there is no seperate ladies line. Men decide to let us in. The the ladies push and shove each other. I am sandwiched between the door and 2 people. I get into the little hot room, where people are waving passports and money. I join in, pay my money, and get a piece of paper. Fight my way out of room.
- 6:15 am -- Go back to ladies line, which is longer now. Am still holding passport. There is a 3rd line forming, for people with Indian passports. Then, someone tells me to stand in it...it is a multipurpose foreigners line, and is not segregated.
- 6:30 am -- Immigration office opens. Ladies are told to go one way, men another and foreigners to follow ladies. Go into a building that says "Arrivals". Am confused. Give passport to some official. He walks away with it. Wait for him to return with passport, while being shoved.
- 6:45 am -- Go stand in another line for customs. Am near front of line. Watch despondently as people just walk up to the front of line and push others aside. Watch angrily as people claim that their family member is waiting in line for them, and then insert 5 people. Attach myself to another family. Literally. We are now standing so close together, no one can enter the line. I am pressed up against strangers. The beggers come to harrass us.
- 7:30 am -- Customs officials FINALLY arrive. All thought of lines are erased as people begin mad dash for door. I push forward, give tax form to a man who puts a (very official) 2 inch tear in it. Go in another direction. Get another tear in form...very officially perpendicular to the first.
- 7:45 am -- Look confused again. Go through a gate with a machine gun toting guy in wierd blue and yellow fatigues. Stand in an immensly long line to enter into India. Watch dejectedly as 1 solitary Indian official checks each person's passport and visa maddeningly slowly.
- 8:10 am -- enter India. Go wait in a Green Line office.
- 8:30 am -- Finally get on an Indian Green Line bus, headed for Kolkata. Traverse 85 kilometers in 4 hours. Decide to fly back.
Potato Farms
Yesterday, I went to observe one of my teams of interviewers. They were working in Chainpara village near the Malkhanagar health center, in Munshiganj district. I was to meet Shahinur, team supervisor, at the Chainpara primary school.
I reached the school first, so I got to be an object of show and tell. The kids could not sit still in their rooms, and kept wandering out to peek at me. Some random guy who spoke english decided he wanted to ask me lots of questions. He had no apparent affiliation with the school. Then a teacher paraded me from class to class, telling me to speak english, so that the kids could hear what it sounded like. How do you respond to such a request? I thought about saying the pledge of allegiance or singing a song, but decided instead on: "What are you studying? Do you like school?" and received in return blank little smiling faces.
This area is currently in the midst of a potato harvest. Hundreds of people are involved in harvesting potatoes. Some are turning over the earth to reveal the tubers. Others are on their hands and knees, putting each tuber in a basket. Others still are moving them from basket to sack, and then their are chains of men with bicycles, loading 2 or 3 sacks onto each bike, and then very slowly walking the bikes to the potato depot. I have never seen so many potatoes. I was flabbergasted.
A potato depot is a large 5 story building, about the size of 1/2 a city block. It is where the potatoes are stored, until they are needed around the country. I saw at least 3 such buildings in and around this village. We walked from the school to a house where one of the interviewers was working. There aren't really roads... so we walked on a dirt path, which lead to a 3 bamboo pole wide bridge over one of many gullies (treacherous for the unaccustomed!), to a 2 person wide embankment between 2 fields (lower than the road, so that roads stay drier in the monsoons), over another bamboo pole bridge (this one had a railing on 1 side, thankfully), past mounds of potatoes, to a 1 person wide embankment around another field, ... over the hill and through the woods... to a 1 shoe wide embankment where missteps would land you in a nasty green pond, and finally up a steep slope to the house. Process repeated several times throughout day. Remain in awe of potato mountains. I am clearly not a farm kid.
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