For the past couple of months I’ve been going to a Bangla church service before our English service on Friday mornings. I’m trying to learn worship, prayer, and Biblical language as well as get to know the church here better. The service that I’ve been going to is “majority” language, which means that they use much of the same Bangla that Muslims are accustomed to in religious dialogue. In other words a lot of Arabic and Persian words are employed. One of the Bible translations here uses majority language. Most of the believers at this service are Muslim background believers.
Each week I can understand a bit more. This morning when I arrived the prayers were underway. I was surprised to find myself able to understand most of what was being said and even more surprised by the content. The man praying was saying “Lord, please send rain. So many people are suffering under this heat in Dhaka city. So many people are sick and have to go to the hospital from so much heat…we need rain to cool off…” The temperature has been over a hundred during the day for the past couple of weeks (prediction for the next two days: 107 and 105) and stays above ninety at night. This puts millions of people in misery at night because not only is it extremely hot, but the power is shut off frequently in most places of the city. Lately the power has been turned off ten or more times each day—for an hour, half hour, hour and a half at a time—so that people can’t run fans at night for half or more of the night. Which adds a further complication because people need to choose between the extra heat of the mosquito net or no net and the mosquitoes. So people lay in bed and sweat and hope to have enough energy left over for the coming day.
As if this wasn’t quite enough misery, the frequent power cuts mean that water often doesn’t get to people’s houses. Instead they have to find a pump somewhere and fill up containers and bring it home. These problems will probably be increasing for a while since people continue moving into Dhaka. When we were in Kathmandu, Nepal last month the same problems were going on there. The infrastructure of these cities was designed for far fewer people than they need to contain presently. Kathmandu was apparently set up for about five hundred thousand or so but now needs to accommodate two million some. Dhaka has fourteen or fifteen million and judging by the standstill traffic and sheer intensity of humanity throughout the city, it’s safe to say that it’s a bit overpopulated for the original design.
So far things haven’t become too bad in our apartment yet. The power constantly goes off but we have screens on the windows to keep out most of the sceeters and the building has a generator to run a few fans in each apartment. But the water problems have started and we’ll see what comes of them. Sometimes we lose pressure, but so far things have been bearable for us. But we’re praying for the many others who are suffering bad these days, and the prayers this morning gave me insight for prayer into how much suffering people are enduring.

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