I want to live in a mud hut.
Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, a house made of wet dirt exudes an elegant simplicity. If it blows down in a hurricane or crumbles in an earthquake, no problem! Just build another one-- it takes three days.
When I heard that the Mandi people of northern Bangladesh lived in mud huts, I imagined, well, big piles of mud, probably with some scraggly sticks pointing out in uncomfortable directions. In my mind, the mud was always still a little wet, probably dripping on the inside. I imagined lots of flies, too.
Well, there are no flies to be seen around the immaculate Mandi mud-houses, which have beautiful pale, smooth walls, and-- get this-- molding. The houses are quite lovely in an ultra-streamlined sort of way, like Shaker furniture.
We were among the Mandi and their mud houses for the duration of our trip north. The Mandi are ethnically different from the Bengalis that make up most of the country's population-- they look a lot like Tibetans or Chinese. Their society is matriarchal-- that is, women are the primary property-owners; men take their wives' names when they marry; and the husband joins the wife's family. This last point, especially, is a marked contrast to the strongly patriarchal system used by Bengalis. In Bengali Bangladesh, a marriage is often a time of grief for the bride-- she is leaving her family to join another forever. In another contrast with the primarily Muslim and Hindu Bengalis, the Mandis are traditionally animists, or nature-worshipers-- though many have converted to Christianity in recent decades.
That turns out to be fortuitous for us. We've stayed at a series of Catholic missions, including this one, St. Paul's in Pirgacha. Boy, thank goodness for Catholics! These missions are safe, comfortable places to stay, and are often filled with colorful characters (stay tuned for an article on Father Homrich, the surly-yet-saintly dean of Pirgacha.) The hospitality tag-team of Mandi villagers and Catholic priests is unbeatable.
I see now that my last article for The Dhaka Daily (3.22.01 -- "Real Life in Bangladesh") was merely a symptom of BADS Syndrome-- that is, Brain Affected by Dhaka Smog! Coming north has cleared my head and made me realize what an anomaly Dhaka really is in Bangladesh. Everything out here is so removed from the mess of the city. True, there is still poverty, and there are plenty of other problems they don't have in the city, like ethnic conflict. But people are not doing too badly out here-- people that have land, anyway. Many of the thousands of people that arrive in Dhaka every day do so because their land has been swallowed up by the rivers or, worse, by the government. There are many and various ways to lose your rural foothold. I think it must be an extraordinarily sad thing when it happens.
Out here in the country (and most of Bangladesh is country) life is completely different. Sure, in every district there's a concentrated "downtown" area that looks like a transplant from the capital-- squalid little stores, huge trucks barreling down the road at space-shuttle speeds. But these urban infections are small and well-insulated from the places where people actually live. Sure, rickshaws still ply the roads-- but here they are more likely to be carrying grain or produce than human cargo. More people ride bikes of their own than take rickshaws. Maybe I'm imagining things, but that in particular seems representative of a feeling you get out here in the country, among people who still have some land, people who might not have much money, but can feed their families-- a feeling of autonomy.
I see how different this world is when I ride my bike away from St. Paul's. The road is narrow but smooth and paved-- it curves past small houses and shops built of mud or tin, past dusty fields of pineapple. Then there's a sparse shal forest, and a wide field of low, scraggly brush. Then it gets really interesting-- the pavement ends and the road turns to a well-beaten dirt path. It winds past a scattering of mud houses, and soon becomes a raised track through a sea of green.
The dirt road grows wider and finds its way to a tiny village center-- a few small concrete buildings huddled around an intersection of two dirt roads, shaded by some trees. Just beyond the intersection, the road gets rough and rocky-- I have to hop off my bike and walk. I pass carts drawn by horses and oxen. The rice paddies are even wider now, and I have the sense of being far, far away from the rest of the world-- much farther away than I feel in Dhaka, or even in a district town like Madhupur. This place is truly remote, and truly difficult to get to. You need a Jeep or truck to negotiate these rough, narrow roads, and in the rainy season, even vehicles as rugged as those probably couldn't make it at all.
It's tempting to overestimate the progress of globalization in a place like this: after all, doesn't nearby Madhupur already have a Village Computer Internet Project where people can send email or browse the Web for a few taka? Isn't that a kind of global connection that this place has never had before? Well, yeah-- but Madhupur is three hours away on bicycle, longer on foot or by ox-cart. When it rains, it might as well be on another planet. Even if the tendrils of global telecommunication and commerce do eventually finds their way into every nook and cranny on the planet, this place will be one of the last to fall-- just preceding the mountain nomads of the Himalayas, and maybe the isolationist radicals of Afghanistan, too.
But anyway, these mud huts are great. Picture this: we are searching the villages around Madhupur on bicycle for a man who we've heard uses email. When we find his house, his family tells us that our suspect is out for the day. They think we look thirsty, though, and whoah, are we ever! Kilometers of tough pedaling have taken their toll. The head of the family cuts down some coconuts, chops them open, and we drink straight from the shell.
Sitting in the shade of a finely-made mud hut, surrounded by a large and curious rural family, guzzling sweet water from a coconut, I think: Hey, this is real life in Bangladesh, too. Not bad.
-RS.
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