Understanding Bangladesh

Final thoughts

Even the stragglers who stopped off in London for a few days have finally returned to Iowa Friday the 10th and Saturday the 11th, so the trip of 14 Iowa educators to Bangladesh is over, more than a month after it began.

We are furiously at work compiling our curricular materials that soon will be available in several forms, including on-line on the website of the Geographic Alliance of Iowa.

Before we completely put our trip behind us let us share what for nine of us was the long day home, last Monday, August 6.

The day began very early, even using Bangladesh time, which is 11 hours ahead of Iowa time. We left the Best Western LaVinci Hotel in Dhaka just before our target time of 5 a.m., meaning 6 p.m. the previous evening in Iowa! By the time we arrived at the Eastern Iowa Airport (or Des Moines or Moline), the time in Iowa was just after midnight as Monday gave way to Tuesday in Iowa, just after 11 a.m. Tuesday in Dhaka--more than 30 hours from hotel to final landing, and some of us had drives of a couple hours before reaching home.

Most of us rose around 3:30 a.m. so we could shower, use the internet one last time, and pack away the clothes we wore the day before. Our flight was not due to leave until 8:20, but we knew that with a group departing we should be at the airport very early.

Beating the rush hour, the ride to the airport took half as long as the ride from the airport four weeks earlier. With all our luggage we were glad to be beating the crowd at the airport as well. Five of us were rewarded with free up-grades to business class. Some of us stuck in coach, though, had a geographer's dream: window seats with great views.

The first few hours of the flight helped us see what we had been studying: floods in Bangladesh. We could see how extensive the floods have been this year that is wet even by Bangladesh standards.

Vast stretches were under water, with only roads and buildings on stilts or mounds above the flood. We flew over Rajshahi, the second of the five cities we had as a base. The Padna--in India the Ganges--was right up to the flood wall of the city.

As we flew northwest, leaving Bangladesh air space for that of India, we could see the jeopardy of life in Bangladesh: the Ganges Plain, from the border with Bangladesh all the way to the Himalayas, was flooded. Those waters, too, were headed for Bangladesh. The view was breathtaking and daunting as we saw the magnitude of the flooding.

Clouds prevented us from actually seeing the Himalayas until we had crossed from India into the "stans" of the former Soviet Union - Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakstan. When the clouds lifted we saw desert rather than flooding. The contrast was stark.

From a landscape crowding 150 million people in an area the equivalent of Iowa, we reached a landscape with almost no human habitation. We saw what we usually only get to read about, as I said, a geographer's dream.

Crossing the Caspian Sea on a diagonal from southeast to northwest, we were over water for more than an hour, such is the size of that inland sea.

Soon we could have been over Iowa as we crossed the southern stretches of the Russian Federation, then the Ukraine, agricultural regions with soils and productivity familiar to us here. The fields were extensive, green and gold.

As we crossed to Poland, then Germany and the Netherlands clouds obscured more and more of the landscape. Still, the views had been spectacular and well appreciated, a fantastic geographical scope from 40,000 feet.

Other than what eventually became a three hour delay in Chicago - prompting questions of whether we should get a car and drive the rest of the way home - the rest of the trip was routine, even mundane.

The transit between terminals in London was routine and with adequate but not ponderous time. Most of us slept on the flight across the Atlantic, and though each of us was very pleased to have had the opportunities we did in Bangladesh, each of us was glad to be home.

One of our group mentioned looking forward to getting weekends back because our trip was 28 straight working days. We all looked forward to being back with loved ones and friends.

We all feel enriched by the experience, committed to help the people of Bangladesh, and fortunate to be Iowans, given the security, quality of life, and physical well-being that we usually take for granted.

We also look forward to sharing our experiences and our lesson plans with you and anyone else interested. We hope our trip will in fact lead to increased interest in how the people of Bangladesh cope with their daunting physical environment - as well as how we as fellow human beings can help empower them to gain control over their lives.

-Rex Honey
Professor of Geography and International Studies
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