Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [156]
Sometimes those trajectories lead to quick success in Karail. Ujjal Mia, a tall, skinny 21-year-old man with a mop haircut and a patient air, came here 11 months before with his mother and father from poor, flood-prone Khulna district on the Ganges River Delta to the southwest. Their family was in deep trouble: Their paddy land had been rendered largely infertile by increasingly frequent saltwater floods.‡ Ujjal had made earlier, seasonal migrations to Dhaka to bring the family cash income, during which he had learned some basic wiring skills at an office. Once a fellow villager had led his family to Karail and found them an abandoned two-room hut around a communal fire, Ujjal quickly found a job in a nearby data center, assembling bundles of Ethernet cables. It pays 5,000 taka ($75) a month, more than most of the garment workers earn. His father sold their farmland and used all their savings to set up a tiny vegetable shop in the slum, which earns between $75 and $100 a month. Rent for the two rooms is $25, and utility costs are two or three times that much (once again, slum-dwellers pay the highest rates in the city for utilities), and the family no longer needs to send money back to the village, so they are able to save money. Ujjal says he hopes to learn more advanced electronics skills, though he is unsure of the means, as most of his co-workers are fellow ex-villagers with little urban experience. “I’d like to do other things, but I don’t know the way to get there,” he tells me over the cooking fire. “But even if we have more money, we’ll keep living here the next few years. It’s a peaceful place to live now, compared to earlier days when there was crime. Now this is a really good place to be living.”
But too many people in Karail are falling into traps like those that cost Maksuda Begum her daughter or her neighbors their savings. Karail has the potential to be a successful arrival city, but the lack of support makes it tragically precarious. Government has almost no visible presence here, with the exception of water wells drilled by aid agencies and ubiquitous campaign posters during election season. (The slum supported the victorious Awami League in the 2008 ballot, which portends well for its future.) Those children who manage to get a formal education are sent across the lake to a school inside middle-class Gulshan; there are no formal child-care facilities or nurseries. Without the presence of the state or the secure tether of property ownership, small mishaps can ruin lives and create treacherous instability. Many have been forced to return to the village empty-handed, despite good employment.
Karail, like so many other places around the world, may be the beginning of a successful arrival city, but there is no question that it is in urgent need of outside help. It lacks vital amenities that can be delivered only with some significant infrastructure. Many of these are expensive: secure and flood-proof foundations for the houses and paving for the streets; institutions for schooling and child care; sanitation, sewage, and drainage. Delivering such things to an existing slum is much more expensive than laying them in the ground before construction (the usual path in the West). For a poor and corruption-riddled country like Bangladesh, this is an inconceivable expense.
The traditional response of governments and agencies to places like Karail has been to bring in the bulldozers, often at dawn, and tear them down. Luckily for the people of Karail, the city of Dhaka now appears