With his fluorescent board shorts and muscular body, Jafar Alam does not look like a typical Bangladeshi.
While most men his age in this conservative Muslim country are obsessed with cricket, the 25-year-old is more likely to be found surfing the waves on one of the world’s longest beaches.
Alam, who says he is Bangladesh’s first surfer, is working to not only popularize the sport, but also to build international recognition for the largely untouched beach where he surfs.
This month he will hold his fourth annual surfing competition, when a group of 15 American surfers will descend on the beach to compete against locals.
Until Alam started the Cox’s Bazar Surf Club in 2002 — based out of the two-room house he shares with five family members — he said the sport did not exist in his country. He now has 48 students, including 12 girls.
Although home to a 125km stretch of unbroken coast, it was only the occasional intrepid international tourist who would test the waves, he said.
A decade ago Alam bought a surfboard from a visiting Australian tourist for US$20, and for five years tried to teach himself.
He found it difficult to stand up and would often lose his board as he had no leash.
Finally he was spotted through a pair of binoculars by Tom Bauer, founder of the Honolulu-based non-profit organization Surfing the Nations, which promotes surfing in impoverished countries.
“He gave me a proper leash and polished my board with wax. It was the first time I’d heard the words leash and wax,” Alam says. “He asked me how many surfers were in my country. He’d found none except me.”
Bauer, who will return to Cox’s Bazar for this month’s competition, likens the surfing conditions in southern Bangladesh to those at the famous Huntington Beach in California.
He says the sport has enormous potential to boost tourism in Bangladesh, where nearly 40 percent of the 144 million population survive on less than US$1 a day.
“It’s one of the hottest things for tourism in the whole nation,” Bauer says, adding that Alam has even used his surfboard to save people from drowning.
“Like all Islamic nations, people don’t go into the ocean. They go fishing, but so many kids drown. They don’t know about water safety.”
Bauer says that while the world’s surfers go out of their way to find waves off the beaten track, Bangladesh is still very much under the radar.
“When I first went there, people would say Are you crazy?’ But I always knew there were waves. We are showing the world,” he said.
International tourism is a tiny sector in Bangladesh. Just 0.1 percent of visitors to the Asia Pacific region will stop off in Bangladesh, according to the World Tourism Organization.
Cox’s Bazar local politician Mohammed Shahiduzzaman believes surfing could help bring foreign visitors to the region.
“It could create a lot of interest. The potential is endless,” he said.
Both Alam and Bauer say that trying to make the sport mainstream in Bangladesh is not always easy.
“The girls wear a T-shirt and cotton trousers while they surf. They can’t wear the saris that they normally wear out of the water because you can’t surf in a sari,” Alam says.
“Five of my female students have dropped out because some families say surfing attacks social and religious values. Some girls wear shorts and T-shirts.”
Running the surf club is now Alam’s full-time job and Surfing the Nations has sponsored him to visit Indonesia and Sri Lanka to take part in surfing contests.
Bauer says despite the challenges, he believes Alam’s legacy as the country’s first surfer will have a place in the history books.
“Surfing will revolutionize how people in Bangladesh think about the water in the same way surfing has revolutionized the beaches in Australia.”
If you are a Western and especially a white foreign resident of Taiwan, you’ve undoubtedly had the experience of Taiwanese assuming you to be an English teacher. There are cultural and economic reasons for this, but one of the greatest determinants is the narrow range of work permit categories that exist for Taiwan’s foreign residents, which has in turn created an unofficial caste system for foreigners. Until recently, laowai (老外) — the Mandarin term for “foreigners,” which also implies citizenship in a rich, Western country and distinguishable from brown-skinned, southeast Asian migrant laborers, or wailao (外勞) — could only ever
Sept. 23 to Sept. 29 The construction of the Babao Irrigation Canal (八堡圳) was not going well. Large-scale irrigation structures were almost unheard of in Taiwan in 1709, but Shih Shih-pang (施世榜) was determined to divert water from the Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪) to the Changhua plain, where he owned land, to promote wet rice cultivation. According to legend, a mysterious old man only known as Mr. Lin (林先生) appeared and taught Shih how to use woven conical baskets filled with rocks called shigou (石笱) to control water diversion, as well as other techniques such as surveying terrain by observing shadows during
In recent weeks news outlets have been reporting on rising rents. Last year they hit a 27 year high. It seems only a matter of time before they become a serious political issue. Fortunately, there is a whole political party that is laser focused on this issue, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP). They could have had a seat or two in the legislature, or at least, be large enough to attract media attention to the rent issue from time to time. Unfortunately, in the last election, Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) acted as a vote sink for
This is a film about two “fools,” according to the official synopsis. But admirable ones. In his late thirties, A-jen quits his high-paying tech job and buys a plot of land in the countryside, hoping to use municipal trash to revitalize the soil that has been contaminated by decades of pesticide and chemical fertilizer use. Brother An-ho, in his 60s, on the other hand, began using organic methods to revive the dead soil on his land 30 years ago despite the ridicule of his peers, methodically picking each pest off his produce by hand without killing them out of respect