Bangladesh: Where the Rivers End
As Water Flows to Low Places, so Does the Tao Carry Your Narrator

I woke this morning to the sounds of bricks being broken outside my new home. Hammering bricks is Bangladesh's strange cottage industry. First workers make the bricks. Then other workers smash the bricks. Then they do it all over again. Bake 'em, smash 'em. After rickshaw puller, brick smasher is probably this nation's most common form of labor.

The reason for all this baking and smashing is Bangladesh's dearth of stone deposits and bounty of clay. Hence roads, walls, and landscaping projects require hammer wielding crews to wham hardened clay into dust, pebbles and gravel. This clay turned to "stone" is an apt metaphor for the country's geography in general.

Bangladesh is where several mighty South Asian rivers--including the Padma, Jamuna, and Ganges (which becomes the Meghna)--empty into the sea. After the Congo and Amazon deltas, Bangladesh's waterflow is the largest in the world. There's no real solid ground here, nothing outstanding to save this poorest of nations from being swept out to sea with the next monsoon.