Common Law

One of the interesting things that came up this last week in Bangladesh was in a discussion on gender issues. In Bangladesh, inheritance laws are based on religion. If you are a Muslim, then your estate gets broken up by the laws for Islamic people. If you are Hindu, your estate gets broken up by the laws that govern Hindus. If you are Christian, your estate gets broken up according to Catholic laws (sorry everyone else, they were the largest sect of Christianity when the laws were written). If you are Buddhist you get your estate broken up according to Buddhist traditions.

The interesting part from what I understand is that there are no provisions for any other religions or lack thereof. Good luck being an atheist here! For the common Bengali, that is not even a concept they comprehend.

Bangladesh is not like the US where there is a common law that governs and this division goes beyond just inheritance laws. For instance, Christians are not permitted to divorce since this goes against official Catholic church traditions.

Feel free to use this information to make yourself appear smart and cool at all your upcoming Christmas functions! I am allowed to mention Christmas now that Thanksgiving is over right?

Last week Dengue, this week a new job...

So the reason I didn't post last week was because I had dengue. Dengue is a viral disease that you get from mosquitoes much in the same way you get malaria. It is nicknamed the "bone breaking" disease. They call it this because it makes your body ache all over. Luckily, my case was a seemingly mild one and I got away without too much pain. I didn't however get away from the energy sapping portions of it. There is no treatment or cure for dengue. You just have to wait it out and even now, 2.5 weeks after it started, I still feeling tired from it. I am slowly regaining energy but physically and mentally I'm drained by about 8 each night which is quite an improvement from a week ago when reading a book would exhaust me within minutes. That my friends is my excuse for not posting last week.

In other news, I have had a job change as well. I have been asked if I would be willing to take on the role of F&SS administrator. F&SS stands for Financial and Support Services. I have accepted this role and will be moving to Dhaka. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this job. On one hand, I hate to leave Bogra but recognize that I would be doing that in 7 months anyway as a result of getting married. It will also be more work and responsibility at the same pay! Lol, I find it amusing that I even think about pay. On the other hand, I recognize that there is a need for someone to do the job and it is a very good opportunity for me to get some management experience. The end result is this, I told the powers that be that to be the F&SS administrator is not my ambition in life and should such a time arise that I'm not needed in that role, they could feel free to ask me to step aside with zero hard feelings. The fact that my timeline should force me to choose a new direction in 1.5 years actually is one of the reasons I work out for this position to begin with. As far as I can tell, it is a match for both sides that has to do with taking advantage of opportune situations. I guess that's all most people really ever hope for in life...

Sacrifice Eid

People aren't very good at following directions in Bangladesh...

The Eid sacrifice makes the lake run with blood. I thought of the biblical story of the Nile turning to blood in this situation. What you can't see clearly here is enormous amount of fish swimming around in the bloody water. They were having a hay day munching on whatever fish munch on in blood.

Trick or treat anyone? This lady was taking her two children around with bags to collect beef scraps from the local wealthy people who were able to sacrifice a cow. The street are filled with poorer people doing this on Eid afternoon. I've heard that rich people may even give out money with the meat.

This weekend was Eid-al-Adha. This is the sacrifice Eid. Everyone leaves to go to their village home and those who stay in Dhaka are either too poor to have a village home or rich enough to have a home in Dhaka. This creates a very empty Dhaka with what supposedly was 400,000 cows to be sacrificed. The cost of cows doubles or triples at this time of year and from my understanding wealthy families are expected to buy and sacrifice one if they are able. They are then to distribute 1/3 to the poor, 1/3 to their neighbors, and 1/3 goes to their extended family. It is kind of a big deal here. 

Moments I Could Live in

Do you ever have those little moments that just make you feel at peace? They are glorious things in my life and I never grow tired of them. I probably need to think back to them in the moments when I wish I had a baseball bat to take to someone on the street because they are doing something really annoying to me (seriously a reoccurring desire even if I have never come close to acting on it). I've had a few of these moments in this past week which I will  indulge myself to share with you now.

This week I joined the guys from the office for lunch for the first time all month. After traveling for so long the joy of returning to what is essentially my "home" Bangla cooking is sensational. The smell when you walk in and the taste which is something comfortable and soothing that says to me, welcome home is a very relaxing experience. The company is pretty good too!

A sit down conversation with my boss Mokhles discussing what I need to do in the near future and what priority I should give everything is also a simple pleasure for me. I enjoy the result which is a peace about what my near future holds even if that is a lot of work.

Cooking something for the first time and having it turn out far better than you had anticipated was another wonder of the week. I had a bunch of vegetables in the fridge and decided to try making a cream sauce for them. Remembering that I had a bit of cheese that tasted pretty terrible in the freezer, I threw it in along with some left over ground pepper from the day before. The end result almost floored me with how fantastic it tasted in combination with bread, butter, and a chaser of iced tea!

I tried purchasing my tickets to go to Ireland for my wedding this week only to have the travel company contact me and say the price was going to be $190 more expensive than they quoted me. I cancelled my order only to realize that all the companies had raised their prices $200-300 since the previous day. You can imagine how great it felt when I found out that if I left a day later I could stay in Ireland an extra day longer than I had originally planned for a price that was cheaper than the ticket I originally tried to purchase! I don't know how the difference between Thursday and Friday is suddenly $350 but I'm not complaining one iota.

Prayer with a group of expats here in Bogra had to be by far the greatest moment of peace in my week. Saturday marked the first time since May that I was present for a gathering with a large portion of them all at once and just taking time to pray earnestly with them was such a blessing.

This has been a week of peace and blessings for me. What kinds of things have made you feel peace this past week?

Change happens all the time

It isn't just over 3 years that change happens. This morning I woke up and was thinking about badminton since the staff asked me about it yesterday. In the Bogra office we have a tradition of playing badminton each year starting about this time. They were asking me if I had a racket since we are starting to gear up for it. I do have a racket. I bought it one year ago at about this time of the year. At the time, I figured I would be using it for just 2 months and then giving it away since I would leave before it was time to use it again. Extending wasn't a thought in my mind. Neither was Esther. Little did I know that I would have at least 2 more seasons to look forward to at that time.

When you think about it, this type of change happens all the time. I doubt that my dad would have thought that he would be using a cane to walk one year ago. My mother probably would have called my bluff if I had told her she would have a passport. One thing that is different though is that when you put yourself in a job like mine, change happens far more often and rapidly than if you were "settled" somewhere. As I mentioned in my previous post, 15 people have left MCC since I started working here. That isn't including the friends from other organizations that have done so as well. In fact, I have watched our expat friend group in Bogra go from 7 to 14 back to 6 in just 3 years. Changing life and friendships are just the name of the game here and you have to be able to adjust.

15

Since I came to Bangladesh 3 years ago. 15 MCC expats have finished their time here. At the ripe old age of 26, I am now the expat who has spent the most time with MCC in Bangladesh. To be fair though, 4 of my current 5 expat coworkers have spent more time overall in Bangladesh than me.

I just find that interesting.

Food: A fascination

Whew, it is nice to finally have a slight respite from the craziness of life. Today I spent most of the day going through old emails that I hadn't had the time to pay much attention to since coming back in August. It is hard to believe that I left to come back almost 3 months ago already. Looking back it is even crazier to think that I was going through orientation at Akron at this time 3 years ago. Much of life has changed and so have I since that time. In light of that, I'm going to spend this week posting comparisons between then and now as I have time and thoughts to share.

First off today, I'm going to start off with an easy one. The availability of western foods in grocery stores in Bangladesh. It is weird to think this is a big deal but over time this has actually turned into a form of tourism for me. Every time I come to Dhaka I drop by the western grocery stores (there are 3 main ones in Dhaka) to see what is new or changed. I often times won't even spend any money, I just enjoy looking and make a point to know what I could get. This is important for a couple of reasons. The first being that you know when something rare hits the markets. I once found a 500g package of walnuts in the grocery store. I immediately realized how incredibly rare any kind of nuts other than cashews and peanuts are available here and snatched it up. It was a bit pricey but this was right before Thanksgiving and it made for a wonderful touch in several dishes when a group of 12 of us gathered together for a meal. Another reason for knowing this information is similar to the first. I want to know what I could make and serve people. I love baking and sharing food from home with friends and living on an MCC food budget allows me a few small purchases here and there for this purpose. For instance, this month I purchased pizza sauce and invited everyone in our office over for pizza. Normally I would just make the sauce myself from scratch but tomato is not really in season right now and pizza sauce goes a long way. It was a good treat and everyone had a good time. My final reason for watching these things is just my own personal fascination with how this has changed. Three years ago there was Mozzarella cheese, a few biscuits, a couple of sodas, lays potato chips, a few candy bars, instant coffee, and black tea available in a tiny crowded store. Today there are 20-30 different cheeses from a half dozen countries, 100's of biscuits, 20ish different sodas, a wide assortment of potato chips from a few countries, 30+ different candy bars (along with gummies and dark chocolate which was a newcomer in the last 6 months!), 15+ different varieties of coffee (including a reasonably priced local roaster of coffee), and 100's of herbal teas from all over the world in shops that have torn down walls and expanded numerous times to accommodate their bulging stock. One store has even added a western standard butchery where you can get everything from sausages to steaks (all halal of course).

As I alluded to earlier though, all of this stuff is expensive. It is also imported and therefore someone spent a lot of fuel taking it a long distance. For instance, some of the tea is picked in India, packaged in the UK, shipped for sale in Australia, and then imported to Bangladesh. It seems rather silly to purchase something that is produced a few hundred miles away when it has traveled thousands of miles to get here. It is a big waste of fuel and money. Sometimes I have to remind myself that these are luxury items and not really things I need. As the popular sesame street character cookie monster has taken to saying, “cookie is sometimes food!” Sometimes the simple lessons we teach children are the lessons we have need to remember ourselves.