by Roland Buerk, correspondent, Dhaka, 13 December 2005

The state-run hotel chain, Parjatan, has recently changed its slogan.

It has abandoned ‘Visit Bangladesh Before Tourists Come’ for the more hopeful ‘Come to Bangladesh and Discover a New You’.

The new me I have discovered has a surprising capacity for occasional foaming at the mouth rage.

Seemingly simple tasks often prove all but impossible. Like the first time we tried to feed from Bangladesh tv. The engineer wouldn’t unlock the door to the earth station until he had received a paper copy of the booking, but his fax machine was broken.

He and I went round in circles debating this problem at an increasingly loud volume while the minutes ticked away. We now use, store and forward to send pictures over the internet.

Then there is the frustration of working surrounded by curious crowds. In one village hundreds of people turned out. They insisted I was their first ever white visitor.

Plush suburbs

The camera added to the excitement and children climbed into the trees to get a better look. My interviewee disappeared in the throng.

In Bangladesh foreigners are still a rarity, especially outside the plush suburb of the capital where the aid workers and diplomats live in style.

Few countries as large as this are so little reported. There are 140 million people here but just three foreign journalists: me and the correspondents for AFP and the Chinese agency Xinhua.

The BBC has the best office, thanks to the Bengali section of the World Service. There are five correspondents as well as stringers producing reports for three daily half hour news programmes carried on FM.

I am their lodger and shameless user of their names to open doors. Qadir Kallol and Waliur Rahman Miraz are easily among the best known journalists in the country, their voices familiar to millions.

Our premises are on the 14th floor of a block from where we can see half of Dhaka.

On the one side there is a five star hotel, on the other a slum. The corrugated iron shacks are perched on bamboo poles on low lying land that becomes a stinking lake in the wet season.

Islamic bombers

Nearly half of all children are malnourished, but many of the sons and daughters of the rich suffer from a serious obesity problem.

Or take corruption. This country is a world beater. For five years in a row an international watchdog has branded it the most corrupt place on earth.

Even climate change is likely to affect Bangladesh more drastically than anywhere else. If sea levels rise by just one metre large areas of the country will be washed off the map.

The staple stories from here are floods, bombings blamed on Islamic militants and ferry disasters. We have had plenty of all three.

Last year an estimated 30 million people were left homeless in the worst monsoon season for years. Two thirds of the country’s 64 districts were under water.

The bombers are getting bolder. In August small devices went off simultaneously in all but one of the country’s major towns and cities.

And ferries capsize with astonishing regularity, once three in a single week. It’s rather alarming as they are sometimes the only way for us to get to a particular place.

But not all sinkings make a story. ‘Mmm, only 30 dead?’ mused an editor recently from London. ‘No, I don’t think we’ll need anything on that.’

In Bangladesh disasters are so commonplace that if the number of victims is under 100 I know it will be a hard sell.

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