True Progress

Seeing as most of Bangladesh is a river delta, much of the romantic and nostalgic images that Bangladeshis have about their own country are associated in some way with the river or water in general.

Fish and rice are considered the traditional foods. Canals and ponds for irrigation, transportation, and drainage of flood waters are everywhere. The least expensive way to travel from town to town is still by ferries going up and down the major rivers waterways. The smallest fishing boats are still row boats. Sails used to power the larger and heavier boats, although they are almost totally gone now, replaced by gasoline or diesel engines. Traditional folk songs in Bangladesh often speak of fish and boats and life on or near the river.

Recently, as part of my job, I had the opportunity to travel on a boat up the river to another village outside of our project area and visit a few sites along the way. You might find some of these pictures interesting.

This is a mobile hospital boat visiting a village along the river. A few of these are around in different places in Bangladesh, and as you can probably imagine, are more useful during floods and and other disasters when reaching people in need of care is difficult.

Re-boarding our boat after a visit to a “char”, an island in the middle of the river that is constantly being eroded and shifted by the river’s movement and floods.

These nets are common all around Bangladesh, even in ponds and canals far from the rivers. They include a net and a long bamboo lever system for moving the net around, either placing it on the bottom and raising it up, or pulling it through the water to catch seafood. Often, they are fishing for minnows and other small fish that they will eat in a spicy curry sauce (extremely nutritious, but not exactly my thing). But, they can also use them to catch larger fish and other tasty things crawling along the bottom.

This is a small traditional fishing boat used on the rivers of Bangladesh.

Our ship had a young capitan, but luckily the chief accountant for our project could help him steer the boat out of the dock.

At a stop along the side of a river, we walked a short distance to visit a flood shelter, passing through this jute field along the way. Jute is a plant grown for its fiber, which is often used in rope and carpets (like hemp). You can also eat the leaves like mustard greens when it is young and tender.

This is a larger boat, similar to the one that we were riding, but used for cargo. In this case, it is carrying a load of straw (dried rice stalks) used as animal feed.

This is a picture of a village along the side of the river, with their fruit trees, crops, fishing boats, and hay piles for their animals all visible.

I’ve been meaning to put this on the blog for a while just because I think it is so funny (and scary), sort of like those dumb horror movies.

I wanted something to keep in my office to heat up water to make tea or instant coffee (the only kind of coffee you can buy outside of the big cities). So, I found this nifty gadget in a shop in the market of Gaibandha. It works great and does just what I wanted it to do, which is heat a small amount of water quickly. How it does that trick is the interesting part.

As you can see in this next picture, the whole contraption is basically just a plug that goes into a power socket, and two bare electrodes that stretch into the water. That means that it is just running an electric current right through the water in order to heat it up. If you were to touch the water while it was doing this, in addition to getting a burn from the boiling water, you would also get electrocuted. And, not even a warning sticker on that thing… [there was a small note on the box, now thrown away, that users should not touch the water while heating].

[For Engineers Only] If you notice, there is also a different in the corrosion between the two electrodes. I could ask you which is the anode and which is the cathode as there is obviously some difference in oxidation and deposition going on between the two, but it is a 220V AC line, so what it really means is that there is a DC bias in the power supply, and that I normally plug in the heater in the same way each time. Oh, and yes you can clearly see the hydrogen and oxygen bubbles from the electrolysis of the water when you first plug it in, before it gets hot enough for the steam bubbles to obscure everything else. It is also funny to think that this thing won’t work with distilled water as it is an insulator (unless you leave it sitting there long enough for some iron ions to work their way into it), luckily for this thing, the water in Gaibandha is loaded with iron and other minerals.

Then, it gets even funnier. The “Lipton” logo label is not real, the company that made it, Dhaka Plastic, is not associated with the Lipton tea company at all, they just put that on there so people think about having tea and needing this little contraption. How many more water heaters they sell because of that I don’t know.

So, you can get all kinds of things here, even stuff that would be outlawed in the U.S., meaning that you can make good use of your money, if you are also smart enough to not get killed by the things you buy.

It is a common conversation piece among those trying to understand how the world works: how did it come to be that Sub-Saharan Africa is far less developed than the rest of the contemporary world? While there is no one simple answer, there is an answer. One that involves several intertwining threads with some causes in the past and some existing today. This article points to 8 books that hold many of the keys to reaching an answer to this question, identifying the causes of the situation we see today, and hopefully sow the seeds of change for the future. Read the rest of this entry »

For background, I am describing some of my experiences from the US Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. More information on this series is available in the introduction.

Many often wonder what it is really like to live as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The fact is it can be a very different experience depending on which country and what position you are posted to. It has also changed significantly from the days in the early 1960s to the present, partly due to worldwide development, and partly due to changes in the Peace Corps methods and objectives. So, while every experience will be different from what I describe, this article will offer one perspective on what it was like for me serving in one place in the nation of Guinea from 1998 to 2000. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, this article on CNN.com revisits the idea of collecting solar power in space and beaming it down to Earth. With such a large world demand for energy expected in the next 20 to 50 years, and declining costs for access to space, could this be the time for this science fiction technology to become a reality? As our costs continue to increase, geographically sourced resources are seen as unstable, unpalatable, or insufficient, this idea may finally have come of age. Read the rest of this entry »

Increasing the quality and quantity of education in poor countries is critical and absolutely necessary to their development, but let’s not lose sight of how disruptive a free and generous education can be. Education changes cultures, economies, and governments, and for nations entering that transition period the way must be prepared. Read the rest of this entry »

And, I mean way off…

Picture yourself in a small tropical village a few hundred miles south of the Sahara Desert. About 800 people live there. You are probably related in one way or another to most of them, but you don’t really know how exactly, beyond your own close-knit extended family. There is no electricity, no running water, no telephone.

During 6 months of the year when thundershowers pass over most afternoons, you work hard in your small fields taking care of cassava, corn, peppers, eggplant, okra, tomatoes, and rice, and look after your 9 goats. During another 2 months in the dry dusty season you have work to do tending your small orchard of mango, papaya, cashew, and orange trees. You are good at what you do, providing almost all the basic food you need, and have a surplus of almost 20% in products you can sell for cash. This covers the costs in supplies and uniforms to send you son and daughter to primary school. Read the rest of this entry »

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Out Time by Jeffery Sachs, is an optimistic, forceful argument for the economic potential of developing countries and the necessity of increased in aid from rich countries to realize it.

Jeffrey Sachs is an accomplished macro-economist, currently at Columbia University, who has experience helping poor countries get on track to development. While, often described as left-leaning, he makes strong cases in favor of free-trade, market forces, and the role of the private sector in achieving economic development. He does often tout his own success regarding recommendations for economic reforms that enhanced development in impoverished. However, given the overall pessimistic attitude that many have towards real, subtantial economic development in these difficult places, I am not so sure it was out of place. Read the rest of this entry »

Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, provides a powerful argument that development and progress cannot be measured on the basis of economic output and consumption alone, that personal freedom is a very important and in some areas predominate variable in determining whether progress has been or will be made, and in defining what poverty truly is.

Amartya Sen chooses to describe poverty not as a lack of resources, but as a lack of freedoms. Those freedoms include choosing where to live and work, with whom to associate, freedom to choose our leaders and decide the rules we live by, and many others. This key point is useful in that it does not focus solely on maximization of wealth as a way out of poverty. The problem with poverty is not lack of money, but that lack of money means that people are not free to make their own way in life. They may be trapped being at the mercy of nature, an opressive government, or an economy cripled by bad policy. The conclusion therefore, is that money alone cannot fix the real problem. Government reform, economic liberalization, and the general increase of personal freedoms is the true end we are striving for. Increasing incomes is one of several necessary steps to be accomplished and not an end in and of itself. Read the rest of this entry »

One small step forward…

While I was serving as a teacher in the small town of Kankalabé (population: ~5000), Guinea in West Africa, the European Union financed a project to install a running water system in that town. The project, of limited benefit, was soon sabotaged and has since been nothing but a monument to unrealized progress. The rationale of the planners and managers, I cannot verify, but I will describe observations from the level of the townspeople during my time there. Read the rest of this entry »

Is this for them or for us?

A couple years ago, I was advising a group of undergraduate engineering students from Rice University on a project they were pursuing for Engineers Without Borders. They were designing a rainwater catchment and drip irrigation system for a village in Mali, West Africa. Having heard about their project and having experience in that part of the world, I offered to help and provide what guidance I could. Read the rest of this entry »

Please, That’s Not Appropriate Here…

Appropriate Technology, a somewhat condescending (from the receivers point of view) title for a movement that arose in the 1970s, focuses on providing an improved intermediate step on the technology staircase between developing and industrialized countries. While some of these ideas have been expressed for many decades (see The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick), the success of the movement has not been universal. Skeptics claim that while the ideas have merit in reducing the destruction of natural resources and improving living conditions with minimal outside investment, the entire idea typically fails to take into account the economic aspects of technology transfer and development. Read the rest of this entry »

Onwards and Upwards

Do we know what we are doing? Maybe the right question is do we ever know what we are doing? What are the true consequences of our actions today and tomorrow and hundreds of years from now? Are we responsible for those consequences or should we never be concerned with them?

I believe that too often we accept not having the answers that we could have. We have chosen not to know whether our ways of “helping” each other really turn out to be help in the end. We have chosen to push the solutions to problems we have today off into the realm of tomorrow. While some of that may be rational (I am fairly certain that my computer will be faster in 5 years), not all of it is. Read the rest of this entry »