24th TERRA Festival - BANGLADESH - UNBEARABLE BURDEN OF LIFE

BANGLADESH: THE UNBEARABLE BURDEN OF LIFE

Welcome to Bangladesh. According to the local government slogan promoting visits to the country, “Come to Bangladesh before tourism arrives.” There is something about it, because Bangladesh is not a typical tourist country.

There are no spectacular monuments or landscapes here, and the media still talk about cyclones, typhoons, hunger, overpopulation and unemployment there. The main purpose for which we come here are incredibly hospitable residents, who live very hard and work even harder on a daily basis. And there are a lot of them, 170 million in an area five times smaller than Poland. This makes this country the most densely populated in the world.

Hard physical labor is ubiquitous here. The images that impressed us the most were porters unloading barges in the harbor, young bricklayers working all day in the manual production of bricks, workers of hundreds of small aluminum foundries, fishermen on small boats in the shape of the moon and of course, bicycle rickshers who can be found everywhere and at any time.

We will show the famous Bangladeshi repair yards, where hundreds of people use hammers and burners to repair or scrap large oceanic ships.

We visited a million refugee camp from Burma, members of the Rohingya Muslim community.

But the highlight of our trip was the huge pilgrimage of Biswa Ijtema Muslims. Millions of followers of Islam arrived in the already crowded Dhaka. It is compared, in size, with the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Janet and Jacek Govenlock

She is a designer - after the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, he is a computer scientist. On a daily basis, they are also engaged in the design and creation of museum exhibitions.

They have been travelers and spouses since time immemorial.

The most common targets of their cognitive and photographic expeditions are communities living in a traditional way far from the so-called civilization, those that have preserved and cultivated their distinct way of life. Such were the tribes of many African countries, in Ethiopia, Angola, South Sudan or the Central African Republic. They had the opportunity to learn about the life of the traditional inhabitants of Papua, Tibet or South India.

Another direction of travel is the areas where it was possible to experience an unspoiled landscape with unique flora and fauna. So they hit bears in Kamchatka, penguins in Antarctica or turtles and iguanas in the Galapagos.

And what always fascinates them the most is the great unusual gatherings of people associated with religious, political events or just fun or carnival. They took pictures at the Kumbh Mela festival in India, which gathers more than a dozen million pilgrims every 4 years, at the Shiite Ashura festival in Iran or a festival in Papua New Guinea. And most recently at a large gathering of Shiites in Bangladesh.

They could not be missing at the colorful carnivals in Brazil and Venice and at the opening of the Beijing Olympics.

Part of their trips are additionally combined with diving, which is their great passion.