2 in the morning at Dhaka airport

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Ridiculous – the only way to fly between Dhaka and Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is to set off at this ungodly hour, to then spend the rest of the day in transit in Karachi airport. This thought depresses me.

There are queues of men in white baseball caps at the check-in desks. They are all much shorter than me. They wear similar stone-washed jeans. Their caps say “Al-Dasha Dubai Project.” They are migrant workers, off to work in the desert for a few years. They have paid hundreds of dollars, maybe even a couple of thousand, for this. They will live in a camp and build something massive.

The queue really does smell of bananas and mangoes.

There is another man heading to the Gulf, or maybe stopping in Pakistan, who wears a green turban. There is also a husband with his veiled wife, accompanied by her maid, a village girl carrying a cheap-looking holdall.

Through immigration and there are dozens and dozens more men wearing matching baseball caps, or matching t-shirts. Some are Hindus from Nepal, their foreheads marked with a crimson smear. The last time I was here alone at night I was greeted by a group of extremely drunk men, staggering and shouting across the hall. I guess they were on their way back home.

These guys in the white caps are on a real adventure. They are pioneers. They have experienced nothing like it in their lives. Some come from the most unimaginably remote places. On one plane I took, the migrants sitting next to me didn’t even know how to open a can of coke.

It reminded me of when a friend in DR Congo saved himself from panga-wielding teenage tribesmen by handing out bottles of Fanta, after they had burst through his front door. They were so amazed to be touching and then drinking something so wonderful and new that they did not kill him.

Sudharshan

When we lived in Kathmandu last year I met Sudharshan, a young Nepali who was saving up to pay for a flight, a visa and a job in the Gulf. He might already have passed through Dhaka if he had saved enough by now.

He had an OK job as a salesman in Kathmandu, and he lived in a nice house in a picturesque valley two hours drive from the city, surrounded by rich fields which led down to a mountain stream. In front of his house was a statue of his brother ( I can’t remember his name). He had already left home for the Middle East but would not be coming back. He had found work as a kitchen assistant on a base for foreign contractors in Iraq the year after the invasion. Their convoy was ambushed by insurgents as they entered the country and the men were all beheaded on camera.

Sudharshan’s parents were terrified of losing another son, but knew they were too poor to stop him. Nepal is such a beautiful and friendly country but I’ve never come across anywhere so neglected and so badly run. It is a hopeless place, so most men try to leave. Many girls from the mountains are sold or stolen to work in the brothels of India.

So Sudharshan is determined. He has twice already saved enough to pay middlemen for jobs abroad, and twice been cheated. He lost his money both times and was then abandoned, once in Kuala Lumpur airport, once in Dubai airport.

By the stream, near Sudharshan’s house I talked to another man and his two young daughters. They were chipping away at stones, breaking them into gravel, to then sell to a builder. They earned enough to eat, the man said, but not enough for school fees.

I hope Sudarshan gets a great job somewhere and that his father stops crying.

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Tags: airport, migrants, nepal, planes