Читать книгу Free The Children - Craig Kielburger - Страница 12

4 BACK TO DHAKA

Following our stay in Bangladesh, we planned to go to Thailand. We would travel by a combination of rickshaw, bus and ferry to Calcutta, India, then take a flight from there to Bangkok, Thailand. We had already purchased tickets for this leg of our journey before leaving Canada. But getting out of Dhaka proved to be a major challenge. The transit dispute had spread, and now the city was gradually being shut down by a general strike. All public services were affected. On the advice of Alam’s relatives, we decided to leave early, before everything ground to a halt.

We packed our bags and headed to the bus station by rickshaw. The lineup for tickets to get out of the city was already long, with every seat in the waiting room taken and mounds of luggage everywhere. We lined up for our tickets, then found a spot on the waiting room floor. There were no signs of a bus anywhere, and no one had information about when we could expect one. There was nothing we could do but wait. I strapped myself to the luggage and fell asleep.

At about eleven at night I was awakened by Alam’s gentle prodding. A bus had finally arrived. It was not our scheduled bus, which was lost somewhere en route, but a bus substituted to transport people to the Indian border. The bulkier pieces of luggage were thrown up onto the bus’s roof rack. Whatever was left was stuffed inside. Off we went into the night, a herd of humanity, draped over our possessions, all longing for sleep.

At about two or three in the morning, after two hours of weaving a route through the maze of vehicles in a constant lurching line of stop-and-go traffic, we came to a dead and final stop.

“What’s going on?” I mumbled sleepily to Alam.

“It doesn’t look good,” he said.

In the blackness, we had little idea what was happening. The bus driver shouted back at us the dreaded details. The trucks and buses were coming off the ferry at the other end. In their hurry to get to Dhaka, they were using both lanes of the two-lane road. We had met them head-on, with a ditch on either side of the road. We were going nowhere.