Dried fish

I never visited Cox’s Bazar (formerly Falong Zee) until I was 22 years old. Could be that the patriarch never deemed it a priority to take his family there, or couldn’t realise the madness people inundate into for gazing into the ocean to carry their innermost blues, melding, turbulent, unending.

This time previous week, I coaxed a fragment of my belongings in a bag, dreadfully enervated and entropic in what’s to come. As myself being the organiser and participant in the fringes of Bay of Bengal at a training my job insisted I would learn a world from, I could fathom and not the extent of my overwhelm, speaking to half a hundred people. I’m a social butterfly, but even butterflies need a nest and rest.

Each day is 6 and a half hours long within the haphazard of stationaries and handouts, and the sun obscures itself fast in the precipice of winter days. After so, I had to be the errand girl, so you can assume sleep is for the weak. (To note, I planned two events at once, but my adviser ever so kindly took the helm for the 2nd one.)

The experience would actually be bitter as an americano if the field visit wasn’t placed at the 4th day afternoon.

Dried fish or shutki rage among the baby boomers are far from my pea shaped contemplation, but Najiratek Shutki hub allowed a tunnel vision in their nurturers’ livelihood and not to say lightly, vulnerable conditions.

Whilst men fish workers earn 1000 taka a day, women earn 400 taka. You could say: gender inequality? Yes. Because even the men workers expressed women don’t hold many grounds at once.

Single women workers with many children at home lament their luck, as they don’t get to send them to school. They don’t earn enough. The smaller feet fall around their mothers, with a similar busyness of bees around a honeycomb.

None of the workers have PPE, extra pays in festivities, social security and above all: a dignity people should extend towards as much as one would do to mute animals.

You only speak to us for nothing. Nothing ever changes.

A bolt out of the blue.

My fellow folks weren’t as flabbergasted as I was. They have experience of such remarks, whilst me, as unaware as a newborn baby of the world’s dooms, the sort I am not a part of.

I had always wanted to be a creative. Yet there’s always a but that made me give up. The next best thing was a development worker, hence I sprinted towards the 1st opportunity I was given, with a blindfold.

It’s not easy, but it carries a self fulfillment in a pair of warm arms.

The spoken words make me want to turn and run up the hill. Yet I choose the weight of the boulder they carry and attempt to carry it away.

Because hollow mindedness isn’t me. I can’t be a machine I am relentlessly encouraged to be.

I want to smell dried fish than run on the mill papers to sort and sign.