When I was listening to a report on the not-new fact that many Bangladeshi garment workers - mostly women - make as little as 7 pence per day making our clothes(I was there 16 years ago and it was no secret then!), and in the next segment, how the Muslim world continues to blow itself up in the name of religion, I thought of...
Goalundo Ghat is grubby little town in Bangladesh, filled with long lines of trucks and tiny shops, just another truck stop in this not-always picturesque country. But down a minute sidestreet, there is another world, Daulatdia, the largest and newest brothel in Bangladesh.
A settlement big enough to count as a village in its own right, its alleyways have over 1,600 women and girls, where they live and sell their bodies. It's a successful spot because it sits right at the junction of two huge rivers, the Jamuna and the Ganges, which makes this a very busy place for truckers and others to catch a ferry. Trucks carrying goods from the west and south-west and back line up here for days at a time, waiting to cross the busy river, which is why this place does such a land office business.
While men wait to cross, they look for some "fun" which word-of-mouth has told them can be had in
this village-within-a-village, with its more than 2,000 rooms, each which are separated from one another only by cloth walls, sort of primitive versions of the one-hour "hotels" of Thailand, or the area American soldiers dubbed "Disneyland" during the Vietnam war (differences being, the "hotels" are not for prostitutes, rather randy office workers wanting a quick afternoon delight, and Disneyland was the product of a miserable war).
Late morning is busy for the women, and there are lots of taxi rickshaws waiting to take the men back to the riverside when they have "finished." The women say that they have no trouble finding clients and the lucky ones often make up to 100 taka a day; that's 75 pence or about 50cents. What it costs to buy two bottles of cola. The children - girls under 16 - can earn as much as 10 times that amount because they are "fresh."
About 300 of the prostitutes' children live inside the brothel with their mothers, ordered under the bed or outside when a john arrives.
Then there are the chukri, a sort of indentured servant, who often enter at about 14, fooled into working by their "boyfriends" who keep the money the girls earn, those who have been kidnapped, or those sold by stepmothers who don't want the expense of some else's child. Eventually, these women are allowed to buy their freedom, but what a price!
The cost of living is so high for these women - who are surrounded by shops that take full advantage of their prisoner-like status - that when the Bangladesh Women's Health Coalition offers safe sex courses, their promise of a bar of soap for attending brings the women in; they practice rolling condoms on a big plastic phallis and hear about what to look for to identify a "diseased" penis.
But, this does not mean that they are able to get all or even most men to use one, even when provided for free. About 60% of business transactions do not include condom use. Perhaps the saddest part of all is the women, when they get pregnant - and they do frequently! - in this most overcrowded nation on earth, say they always hope for girls so that they can put them to work at the age of 14...in the brothel.
This strictly Muslim nation has over 100,000 prostitutes.
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