home sweet stench (VAL)

Cognitive research indicates that our sense of smell is one of the strongest triggers for memory and recognition. To me, this seems to especially hold true for places. I can't necessarily describe the scents, but when I walk into a familiar place--like my aunt's or grandparents' house, the gym, even my favorite restaurant--I expect a certain smell that is always there. If you could somehow capture these scents, I bet I could identify them blindfolded, devoid of any other context.

Dhaka is ripe with intense smells. The heat and humidity generate a thick atmosphere that absorbs scent like a sponge. At places lush with plants--the American Club or the park--it smells fresh like a greenhouse at the botanical gardens. On the traffic-congested main avenues, it smells of smoke and chemicals generated from all of the exhaust. At places crowded with people, like little shops and take-away restaurants, the heavy stench of body odor can make you feel woozy in less than a minute.

And then there's the distinct smell of our little street. Whether walking or riding in a rickshaw, once I turn onto our block, the smell hits me and I know I'm home. "Earmuff" your little ones because I'm going to be blunt in my description here: it smells like shit. Human feces, to be exact. Fresh, ripe, putrid, and fermenting piles of poo.

There are three reasons for our street's identifying scent. One is Dhaka's sewage system, which is a foot underground at the deepest, and on smaller residential streets like ours, is actually not underground at all. Half-canal, half-gutter, it runs alongside our narrow street, openly displaying whatever our neighbors have flushed down their pipes in the past week. And "runs" is a bit of an exaggeration, because it doesn't actually flow anywhere, it just stagnates, growing a rainbow of algae and fungi and attracting an entomologist's fantasy collection of flies.

The second reason is monsoon season. If you're thinking, "well, I bet the heavy rains are productive at flushing out the sewers and draining streets of trash and human waste", then you'd be in good company (I thought the same thing), but you'd still be wrong. The effect of these heavy rainstorms is that they fill the sewers with water, allowing all of that wonderfully pungent sewage to float to the top, level with the street. This provides for heightened viewing and smelling abilities. *Yum*

And finally, the third reason for the stench is open defecation. As if it isn't enough that we get to enjoy the waste produced by our neighbors in their toilets, random strangers and passersby contribute their own little byproducts to the poo cocktail. If the timing is right, sometimes we even get to see this in action: a stranger, squatting over the open gutter, no glint of shame in his eye as he goes about his business. Open defecation is actually a serious problem here, for a variety of obvious reasons, the main one being disease. In attempts to combat it, they launched a delightful little ad campaign that Matt captured in a photo: