East Pak Volunteers, Staff and Friends: BANGLADESH -- TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER Bill and Judy Hein (Pak 1)

Judy and I decided that the best way to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary was to return to the place where we were married while in the Peace Corps. So in October 1987 we traveled to Bangladesh for a ten day visit. We had no itinerary and no idea what to expect.

After consulting our “Bangladesh – a travel survival kit” (from a handy set of books for budget travel in Southeast Asia), we checked into the Golden Gate Hotel. With a name like that where else could we stay? For nine dollars a day we got friendly folks, cold running water, a mosquito net, the only room with an air conditioner and easy access to the New Market.

We had only a couple of days to spend in Dhaka because we had to plan our travels around a two day general strike – an ominous sign of events to come. This was enough time to wander around old Dhaka, ride an incredibly jammed bus out to the National Martyrs’ Memorial of the war of liberation and to rediscover our skills – or lack thereof – in negotiating with rickshaw wallas.

Bangladesh has changed in many ways. There is a new airport and development has spread past the old airport. The shops have most of the goods that our friends in the American Consulate use to smuggle to us long ago. Electricity has penetrated into many of the rural areas, jeeps have been replaced by cars and, we were told, it is possible to travel from Dhaka to every district by bus.

While change was apparent, we were struck more by how much was the same. Brightly decorated bicycle rickshaws were everywhere. Hopefully, someone has or will make an effort to catalogue and preserve this rickshaw art. Although there are many more paka buildings, they were of the same concrete, brick and plaster style with steel reinforcing rods extending from unfinished columns in hopes of future expansion. The buses we rode on gave us the same thrill-a-minute ride over partially paved roads crowded with every imaginable form of activity. Come to think of it, they could have been the same buses.

We had no way to objectively measure the level of poverty though in Dhaka it seemed even greater than we had remembered with far more people living on the streets and in the miles of paper shacks in the mud along the railroad tracks. We were relieved to leave Dhaka for Rajshahi, our Peace Corps home.

We traveled to Rajshahi by train. Although the trip took twelve hours, we enjoyed the lush, green countryside and the ferry ride across the Jamuna River.

Rajshahi had also grown dramatically and much of it was unrecognizable; however, the places where we lived and worked were still there and had hardly changed. When we walked up, unannounced, to the district engineering office where I had worked, an elderly man came out on the veranda, looked at me, and said, “Mr. Heen.” That made us feel very good. He was one of four Bengalis whom I had worked with that we were able to see after word spread that we were in town.

The new market that I designed was thriving and a second story had been added. I was pleased that the centerpiece of the market, a garden mall, had survived. Another project, the stadium didn’t fare as well as the concrete had spalled away from the reinforcement in several sections and part of the stadium had been rebuilt.

The hospital where Judy and Rachael Jordon, another member of our group, worked had been converted to an ear, nose and throat clinic. Other than being less crowded – the only place in Bangladesh that was – it looked exactly as it did twenty five years ago.

We visited the riverside apartment where Judy and I lived with Rachael and her husband Jack. We walked, as we did many times years ago, along the bank of the Padma River which was, for reasons we weren’t sure, no longer in sight. The walk brought back a score of memories.

From Rajshahi we went by train to Dinajpur with Father Corba the priest who had married us. The trains had been totally thrown off their schedule by the two day strike so it was quite an adventure. We left Rajshahi in the afternoon after a seven hour delay and arrived in Parbatipur about midnight. But since we missed our connections, we had to spend the night in the station. Fortunately, some Bengali students talked their -- and our – way into a crowded room inside the station. Judy slept on the floor and I, under a table -- the top was already occupied.

The students were enjoyable. They all had romanticized ideals, quoted Tagore and had been on strike for some time. Some things never change. One student, amazingly on his first train ride, remarked that he would never forget this night. Neither will we.

We finished our trip to Dinajpur on the morning local. Along the way we helped people tie their loads of produce and firewood so it would hang from the windows of the train. By the time we arrived, every square inch – and then some -- was occupied.

After ten days we were saying goodbye again, barely able to scratch the surface of what is happening in Bangladesh. The Bengali people we met went out of their way to help us. We were guided to places we wanted to see, invited into their homes for dinner, entertained by children and even escorted to someone else’s silver wedding anniversary banquet. Oh yes, we did get to the church in Tejgaon where we were married and got a twenty-five year renewal.

Who knows about our 50^th anniversary in 2012?