Expectations...

I'm sorry I haven't and won't meet your expectations of me actually writing my post when I say I'm going to. I'm on the Bangladesh time system now. You know, the one where I say I'm going to be ready in 5 minutes and no one is too surprised if that means 1 hour. I'm not sure how the adjustment back to the American time conscience is going to go for me when it does happen. I hate waiting around doing nothing myself but definitely see how nice it is when there is no stress caused by the timing of things. Anyways, I'll get you back to your previously scheduled programming.

Unfortunately, my computer's card reader is not working, so I can't show you the pictures I intended to show you. I'll let you use your imagination for the time being as a replacement. If you don't have a very good imagination, I suggest you draw the scenes out with stick figures.


Dimla trip:
The past week started off with a journey to Dimla. I think I've made mention of Dimla before but for those who might not know, Dimla is in the far north of Bangladesh. It's a 4 hour drive by truck from our office. I was told we were leaving at 8 am. We didn't leave until 9 of course. Along the way we stopped and had some nan with boot dal (chickpea curry) for breakfast. On this day a film crew for a tv station in Bangladesh followed us up so they could do a short segment on our work. This, of course, took precidence over all other work as they were our guests and guests always get precidence in this culture (something you have to learn to live with as a foreigner which results in you almost always being the most valued guest). This resulted in the head of the partner organization coming from his head office to assist in the hospitality and our project manager organizing lots of activities to happen on that day on very short notice so the guests could see what we do. The activities ended up being vaccination drives. We had the farmers gather their animals in a clearing so our workers could quickly give them vaccinations against anthrax. We did three seperate groupings. One for goats, one for cows, and one for sheep. The cows were by far the most impressive.

I think the camera crew was stunned by them. Imagine you are in a dusty clearing surrounded by trees that provide shade for bamboo houses. Out of the trees pours 400 cows kicking up dust like some sort of wild west cattle drive. Only these cows are being led by men in lungis and women in colorful saris. The clearing (about the size of a football field) is filled with with cows and colorful Bengali people all kicking up dust and mingling in caos. The camera crew ended up having to climb a tree like Zaccheus to take it all in. Then the staff went to work giving vaccinations. This was an impressive process itself. One guy was so fast and good at giving shots that he could literally be looking for the next cow as he in a fluid motion gave the shot without spilling any as the needle slid in and out. His perfection of this action brought to mind images of Benny Henn at one of his revivals knocking people down with "heals" to the head. As a result of all this the crowd dissapated quickly and smoothly within about 30 minutes.

One thing that also stood out to me as I watched this process, was how good the cows that MCC helped these people earn looked on average. It has been many months since I had been to this project. The last time I had come, we spent the entire day walking around diagnosing diseases and dealing with sick cows. This time the only visiting that we did after the camera crews left was to people whose cows had given birth so we could see how well the cow and calf were doing. In my job I spend a lot of time crunching numbers and writing/editing reports for these projects and a couple of hours of seeing how much these cows mean to these people along with how quickly they are learning makes it all worth it. I remember how many years it took our family to "figure out" how to raise goats well and am just amazed that these people (who don't have years to figure this out) are getting it to some extent in only months. I'd throw credit for this to a dedicated staff and my co-worker Jodi who has done a remarkable job of trying to teach the farmers proactively instead of just fighting the problems as they come.

The trip went well and there is more I could say but this is getting long so I'll move on to the wedding.

Catholic Wedding:
This adventure started off with a 9 hour car ride in a full vehicle. This time we went to a more southern part of Bangladesh. I think someone once mentioned that the Ocean is only about 10km from where we were but I can't be certain I'm correct on that one. We arrived the night before the wedding and relaxed at a guest house. The next morning at 9 was the wedding. As always in Bangladesh, things turned out totally different than what I expected. Apparently, going to the wedding itself is not a very Bengali thing to do, it's the reception that everyone goes to. There ended up only being about 50 people at the actual wedding. I had never met the bride and groom before, the bride was the daughter of our current Country representative and the groom was an American whom she met while she attended EMU. We arrived right before the procession to the church. I was promptly handed a video camera and told to film without much more detail. It turns out that my housemates and I played some pretty important roles in the service. Nate was designated as the official wedding photographer and Daniel got to be the best man in the wedding since none of the groom's family was able to make it. We were all more than happy to help them out.

We heard that the wedding was a little atypical. The Father preached for about 20 minutes on such subjects as: single people going crazy if they don't marry, the need to have lots of children, and death. Impressively, most of this was in English. I don't imagine the subjects of the message were very atypical, but would guess the short length was. There was communion, but the Father handled the exclusion of non-Catholics with great tact. The most peculiar thing to me was how during the important parts of the wedding people would crowd around them trying to get pictures and block everyone elses' view in the mean time. Bengalis have no concept of this being rude or disruptive at all. Other than that, there isn't much to report on the wedding itself. I have seen various parts of the rest of the wedding in weddings I've attended in the USA.

After the wedding we went to the bride's house and did some picture taking with the family and they cut the cake. Since Derek, our Country Representative, has two brothers living abroad, there were lots of family members around with very western mindsets. We had a good time talking with them and I finally met Allison (sp?) and Richard the bride and groom for the first time. Allison knew me and called me by my first name which was really freaky until she explained that she reads my blog. I didn't realize other people read my blog. I just figured it was a few family members and friends. It quickly became apparent that for all intents and purposes, they are very normal American people. After awhile of hanging out with them we all headed to the reception.

This is where things differed greatly from American weddings. Everyone and their brother comes, greats the bride, groom, and their family, then eats lots of food. During this time, the bride and groom sit on a stage in front of everyone eating and don't eat. They sit there and greet people for hours on end. There was seating for a couple of hundred people to eat and throughout the early afternoon it was generally full with a steady stream of people coming and going. There were also plenty of people standing outside chatting. The purpose of this all is to please the community. Rumor has it that they butchered 12 goats, a couple of cows, and a full flock of chickens for this meal. I think someone was speculating that in the end only about 1200 people showed up to this rather than 1500. Can you imagine having to greet and feed 1200 people!? After a bit it finally came time for us to leave and we missed out on any additional details of the post wedding activities. When we left at about 3pm the people were still coming. The final ending to all the activities was a 5 hour car ride in a van full of merry but tired people.

After the wedding we went back to the bride's house