I understood that Bangladesh was poor, but I wasn’t prepared for how much of the labor is manual and done with primitive handmade tools. We saw fishing nets propped up with bamboo poles. A farmer was plowing his field with a simple handmade plow. In one of the villages, a man had harvested some kind of leaf. He stacked them in bundles tied with twine made from the bark of a tree. His baskets were made of the same twine. Simple weaving looms were set up in one of the villages. Precarious scaffolding was made from bamboo and tied with plant twine. Even the carts looked handmade except for the bicycle wheels. We passed numerous places along the highway where men were working on the road with shovels and pickaxes. There was no machinery that we saw anyway. Record keeping was done in ledgers.
Perhaps the cities are different, but the work done in the rural areas seemed to be done with handmade tools.
