Ramadan is officially over now which means I can eat or drink whatever I want on the streets again! However, given the history of street food making me sick, I think I'll stick with being selective in that regard.
I'm still in Dhaka working on various bits of paperwork but am hoping to get back to Bogra this weekend. I spent a little time this weekend talking to our director about this and found out that it is going to take more work than I had originally anticipated. :-(
I had a realization the other day. That whole Qur'an burning idea really could have put me in danger. I don't hide the fact that I'm American when I'm traveling around and I'm sure a lot of people know at least that much about me. That said, everyone I have met has been incredibly nice. Unfortunately, it isn't the people that I have met that I worry about, it is the people who I haven't met who hear through the grape vine that there is an American around that worry me. The people I have met generally see me as a person and appreciate that I'm something different than what they hear about Americans in the news. I can't be so certain that others recognize this and have been warned by very kind people that I meet in various places that these people do exist. For the most part though, this has never crossed my mind because to be frank, it is one of the few problems that most people in Bangladesh seem to want to root out. The government is pouring extra scrutiny on NGO's like MCC to try and make sure we aren't being devious. Now, I never heard from anyone in MCC that the whole Qur'an burning idea might endanger me but everyone was certainly very aware of the issue for quite obvious reasons. The thing that I just don't think American Christians really have a good concept of in general is how sacred or vile certain things are. There are very few things in American culture that you could do that would be so disrespectful that they would incite universal rage from everyone in the culture. In an Islamic culture, any kind of disrespectful treatment of the Qur'an would do this. The closest explanation I can come up with as to why this is this way is to point out that the Qur'an is the word of god and as such it is god. As my co-workers were pointing out, if Americans burn a bunch of English translations of the Qur'an it would be insulting but because these are not the exact words of god, it would remain at just the "I'm going to protest for my faith" level. If Americans burn a Islamic version of the Qur'an, suddenly I get the impression that we've crossed into the, "I'm defending god" level. All of that said, I could be wrong. These are just my personal understandings and are based off of a limited experience of two years in Bangladesh. I have certainly never heard anyone within MCC advocate these ideas (I only wish to say this so that I might be clear that my personal views should not be correlated to those of MCC). The point I'm really trying to make is that we should think and be aware of what our actions mean. Others interpret them in completely different lights because they have different experiences and you can't just ignore that in our modern, globalized world.
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