The hustling streets filled with women in Burkas and men in Kufi, a city that many people can barely even pronounce, a city filled with street venders selling homemade sweets, is a city that I once called home, and a city I have left behind.
Born there, and raised up until I was about 7 years old, Narayanganj has been my entire world. I remember the large coconut tree in the backyard of my family home, taking the leaves and intricately weaving the stems into a synergetic work of art that I wore on my wrists as bracelets. The clay that I molded with my cousins to create small pots and pans that we played kitchen with, trying to imitate our mothers we saw cooking delicious meals we could later devour.
At 7 years old, that was all I needed. The small comfort of a schedule, the comfort of similarity, and the comfort I gained because of ignorance.
When I moved to New York at 8 years old, I remember missing those optimistic aspects of Narayanganj. I was in a new environment, where I barely understood the language and went to school with kids I’ve never met. To me, Narayanganj was where I belonged, a perfect place filled with family, friends, and familiarity.
It was only in 2015 when I realized, the place I believed to be utopia, was dusty lanes of trash, filled with countless people begging for a few cents. It hurt me, to see the city I admired so much to have been suffering.
Bangladesh is a third world country that holds the record for being one of the largest garment exporters. Much of the country lives in poverty, as large corporate companies have sweatshops sparse throughout the country, employing Bengalis for cheap labor.
At 12 years old, it broke my heart after learning about how my very own people were facing such extreme living conditions. This city no longer was a place of comfort, but rather a feeling of malaise.
This experience led me to change the way I continued to see my city. While it still held some value of comfort, all I can think about when I mention Narayanganj is the negative aspects I encountered.
At that young age, I knew I wanted to learn more about why these systems operated and controlled so much of the ways people in my city lived their lives. This led me to realize my passion for Urban Planning. Of course when I was 12 I didn't even know that field of study existed. To middle school me, the paths that I would travel down were Med school or Engineering.
I wanted to study the ways cities and the economy worked. The way labor and capital functioned in various parts of the world. I became interested in the social and community aspect of how a neighborhood thrives. In a way, I wanted to figure out the ins and out of the one city that mattered the most to me: Narayanganj.
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