Joy and Sorrow

But first, something that has nothing to do with the title. In continuing on with my series about Ramadan I managed to take a picture of my Iftar meal last night. That big mass of stuff in the middle is a mixture of puffed rice, lentils, and a crushed up fried thing that is pretty spicy. Along the top you'll see (from left to right) dried dates which are quite sweet, some fried thing which was somewhat akin to a fried bread, and last but not least, the jelapi which is basically some sort of deep fried sugar (incredibly tasty in my opinion). You eat this with your fingers and I was given a glass of lemonade with it. I get the idea that it is common for anyone with any kind of money to have some sort of fruit drink with the meal (the previous two nights it was mango juice). After you finish eating all of this, they bring out biriani, which is basically the greasiest rice you'll ever find with meat chunks in it. It is hands down the heaviest thing I've ever had in my life as far as how fast it fills you up. Basically, other than the lentils, dates, and puffed rice, the entire meal is nothing but grease. It is very heavy and I'm not sure how everyone's bodies can handle the shock of eating this to end a fast but somehow they manage


The joy in life lately was found upon arriving home last night. Roommate Nate was sitting outside with his guitar, singing to a group of neighbors. He's done this for the past couple of nights and they seem to love it. His broken hand is healing nicely and the return of guitar playing is a beautiful result of this. I stood out and listened to his song and then told him that if he picks a song from his book that I know, I'll sing along with him. I know I've mentioned this off hand a couple of times, but the singing is one thing I love about this culture. They could care less if you are really any good or not, just the fact that someone is willing to sing seems to always bring a smile to their faces. The other thing Nate and I agreed upon is that the best part of singing for the village is that they know incredibly little English so you can sing nonsensical things and they'll still think it was part of the song. I say all this to point out that those who know me best know that I love to sing but am quite confident that I'm not all that good at it. Suddenly, I have the option to sing in front of people and feel no pressure to perform well at all. This makes me very excited. I think I'll join Nate in the future, I can sing the melodies and he can harmonize to his hearts desire (something he is very good at). :-)

Unfortunately, with joy comes sorrow. One of our guards (a wonderful man) was telling us last night about his sick wife. From what I can gather, she had a large lump next to her eye. He called it a tumor but said the doctor pulled some sort of liquid out of it. He had to take her to Dhaka to find a doctor who could properly diagnose it and just that makes me very nervous about how bad of a situation she is in. He said they'll have an actual diagnosis of it by tonight but it is sounding like she'll need surgery which will cost about 30,000 taka which is roughly 4 months of wages for him. Basically, everything about the situation sounds horrible to me and I'm not sure I can do much to help. Please be keeping him in your prayers!

Ramadan

A little explanation of my understanding of the purpose of Ramadan. It is intended to be a month of time in which Muslims focus extra effort into following the teachings of Islam. As a result, it is my understanding that people are more likely to be honest during this time because of the strong push for purity. It is also a time of greater generosity for Muslims because it is also meant to be a practice that teaches empathy for the less fortunate. Not everyone is required to hold the fast. A few exemptions are young children, the disabled, the chronically ill, the elderly, and women who are pregnant or nursing who think the fast will be harmful to them or their child. For some of these people, such as the elderly or the chronically ill, they are expected to feed others as a penance for their inability to fast. For others, such as the women, they are expected to make up the days at a later time. Even for those who are not typically very devout Muslims in Bangladesh, there is pressure to observe the fast as it is a very public thing. Those who refuse to keep the fast do lose respect in the eyes of their fellow Muslims.

As far as what the result of this is on my life, it does cause some issues. Being that I am not a Muslim, I am obviously not keeping the fast. I previously mentioned that I have to watch what I eat in public though as it is considered rude to eat in front of those who are fasting. I also learned this past week that at sundown when the daily fast ends, everything stops and people eat their Iftar meal. This becomes something that you have to plan your evening around. In our situation, we were hoping to stop by the A&W Rootbeer restaurant for dinner only to find out that they were not serving regular food until after the Iftar meal was over. So we went to look at shops until such a time as we could get this food. Unfortunately, they kicked us out of the shops so they could eat their Iftar meal which meant that we were stuck on that side of town with nothing to do while Iftar was being eaten. We did eventually find a coffee shop that was operating through the Iftar time and sat down for a chat while we waited for things to open up again. We eventually did get our nice frost mug of rootbeer but the process did open our eyes a bit to how much the month of Ramadan does change how society operates here.

Grace

I'm a little bit late with this post, I hope you can forgive me. This past week was the start of Ramadan. For those who don't know, Ramadan is essentially the Islamic holy month of fasting. Everyone gets up at 4am, stuffs themselves full, and then don't eat or drink again until sundown (currently 6:30 or so). Some people don't keep the fast for various reasons but it is still considered very rude of them to eat or drink anything in front of others who are keeping the fast. During the day all of the street food vendors have curtains hanging up over the entrance to their shops so that people can come and eat without being seen. Other changes occur as well, our office hours are different during Ramadan. We are currently working on an 8:30-3:30 office schedule which is much shorter than the usual 8-5 schedule. This is both so that our workers are productive (you get very unproductive in the heat of the afternoon/evening when you are fasting) and so that they make it home in time for the breaking of the fast. I think I'll wait to share more in my next post.

A couple of mildly interesting things happened in my life in the most recent week. I passed my motorcycle test and will finally be driving motorcycle legally in Bangladesh once I get the actual license. They say that I should get it next month sometime. That will mean that I finally get it 11 months after I initially asked about getting it. I think that's a good indication of how fast paperwork moves around here. Speaking of motorcycles, driving motorcycle after dark is probably the scariest thing I have ever done in my life. In the dark the buses can no longer tell that I'm an expat and they treat me just like any other motorcycle, which means I get run off the road or at least onto the shoulder of the road frequently. This past week I drove my motorcycle home for some reason (not sure why, I normally choose to ride bicycle) and I saw a bus passing a truck coming at me. I didn't think much of this and just moved to the shoulder of the road like usual. The part I couldn't figure out though is that I saw another headlight coming at me on the shoulder of the road. I just couldn't fathom why a motorcycle would be trying to pass a bus that was passing a truck. Then once I got closer I realized that it wasn't a motorcycle but another bus trying to pass the other two vehicles. Luckily for me, he saw me with enough time to swerve back over behind the other bus before we reached each other but I was afraid for a second that I was going to have to into the ditch to avoid him. That would not be pleasant.

I also bought a phone. This was a very troubling decision for me. I try to live a somewhat simple lifestyle and like to limit the amount of money I spend on "toys" or frivolous things I don't actually need. I'm getting ready to do some research in a field area and it won't be with our regular farmers. It will be with whoever is available and I will need to return to these same people frequently for follow up surveys. The problem this creates is how to keep track of them and find them when I don't know the area well. The solution that came to my mind was GPS. Nathan and Daniel have this on their phones already and I've seen how convenient it is at mapping out roads as well as marking important points. I decided that this could provide extremely useful for this work but didn't want to throw a whole lot of money at the problem. I eventually decided that I could probably buy a simple GPS phone myself with the idea that I could continue using it after my MCC term is done. The only problem with this plan was that GPS phones are a little pricier than I would normally want to spend on a phone and come with other little gadgets and do-dads. I eventually found the one I would buy if I were going to buy one. It is nothing real fancy as far as phones go but it is a nice phone but I was still left deciding whether spending that much money on a phone fit with my values of simplicity. This lead to a good conversation with Nathan who brought up a couple of very good points. He pointed out to me that technology in general will usually not fit with the traditional concept of simplicity and if you start pushing the simplicity aspect really hard you start becoming legalistic with it (some might argue that the Amish are an example of this). I think his point was that we have to carefully give ourselves some grace when incorporating technology into a simple lifestyle because it will always be at odds with a "pure" simple life but is also capable of doing many wonderful things. So when the microphone on my old phone died yesterday, I didn't feel any anxiety over the decision to just go buy my new GPS phone.

Women, Men, and Bangladesh

I'm going to ramble a little bit in this post, I hope you can forgive me.

I went to Dhaka once this past week. It was just a day trip. To achieve a day trip to Dhaka you do have to put yourself through some paces. For instance, I got on the 5:15 am bus from Bogra. This meant that I needed to get up at 4:00 to get ready and go. I overslept and woke up at 4:30. Needless to say, that woke me up rather quickly and I moved fast. I got to the bus stand itself about about 5:10. I figured I'd be there for a few minutes since the buses typically run at least 15 minutes late. I was right but I saw something while waiting that I've never seen before. Two women were out jogging. They were wearing full exercise jumpsuits (think late 80's early 90's running suits)and had head/face coverings. I must admit, I stared. I couldn't help myself, it just seemed so out of place. Besides, when Jodi used to run at 5 in the morning the landlord and all our coworkers told her it wasn't safe. Speaking of women here in Bangladesh, I don't normally look at them. This mostly pertains to when I'm riding my bike. I find that if I look at them and they are looking at me, it just becomes awkward for both of us. Then by social custom they are normally forced to look away when all they really want to do is stare at me. As a result, I typically stare at the road ahead of me and give them the freedom to stare. Maybe that gives them some small amount of joy in a world that treats them pretty poorly. I also typically try not to look at men when I'm riding my bicycle but that is for different reasons. If you look at men it gives them confidence to annoy you to no end. Don't get me wrong, they are usually fairly harmless and just curious but when you have thousands of them who want to be your best friend for the vanity and prestige of being the friend of a foreigner, you tend not to want to encourage them. On the other hand, I have learned the problems of being a celebrity without ever having become one. Sometimes it is nice to have your original assumptions proved correct, I didn't think I'd like being a celebrity and I don't like the attention that I draw here. Even in the village that I have now lived in for over a year has not gotten used to me. I ride my bicycle through the village and children come and yell at me. You would think that they would eventually tire of this since I ride in and out of the village pretty much every single day, but they haven't yet. It could be that this is just a foreshadowing of what parenthood is like.

I know what else was odd this past week. When I was in Dhaka waiting for my return bus, the guy working the bus counter had a ringtone on his phone that really creeped me out. Have you ever seen Charlie the Unicorn? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5im0Ssyyus It is a fairly harmless and bizarre youtube video that was popular when I was in college. This man's ringtone was the candy mountain song where they are trying to entice him to go into the cave. Every time I heard his phone ring while I waited, I got the creepiest feeling that I was about to go into a cave (the bus) and they were going to steal my kidney. Odd but true.

Also, when I got on the bus, it looked oddly familiar. Then I realized the afternoon bus that I took back to Bogra was the exact same one I had taken at 5:30 that morning. This was later verified by the bus conductor who took my ticket and made comment on the fact that I went to Dhaka just that morning.

On a final completely unrelated note, our electricity has been crazy for the last week. Crazy in a bad way. At night it consistently goes off for about half the night. During the day, Nate said that it's been off for about 6 hours a day pretty consistently. On Friday though it was worse than usual. It went off at 8 am and was still off when I gave up on it and decided to head into the office for a bit. Later when I returned, Daniel and Nate informed me that it was only on for about 1 hour between 8 am and 6 pm. That's an ugly day. I'm not sure if this is going to continue but the amount of time it is off each night is startling and somewhat disruptive of my sleep. I guess this is life in Bangladesh.

Reading

One thing we all do quite a bit of here in Bangladesh is read. I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but Bogra isn't a place with much variety in the way of evening activities. This is more difficult for some people to get used to than others. Having grown up somewhat tied to the farm most evenings, this lack of variety doesn't feel terribly constraining to me. Most Bengali's deal with this same issue by spending massive amounts of time sitting around and shooting the bull (an expression that I have tried teaching some of our staff) with friends and family. I live with two introverts and since two other co-workers recently left, I have new openings for social time in the last several weeks. I've spent a chunk of that time making sure to chat with various members of the staff a little more. That doesn't fill up all the time though, so I've spent a lot more time reading lately.

I've finished off all of the Philip Gulley books my mother sent me. If you haven't read any of them, I recommend them highly as a humorous and insightful commentary on rural communities in the Mid-West. They are nice to have here because they're a connection to home. I've started a book given to me by a friend while I was home. So far it has been an excellent Christian perspective on suffering. I also started up re-reading my favorite book, "The Walking Drum" by Louis L'Amour. I had forgotten how much I love that book and have averaged close to 100 pages a day in it which means I'll probably finish it tonight. This doesn't include the reading I do at my computer before, during, and after work. It is actually quite pathetic how much I still follow sports. I also like to take breaks during the work day to read up on Bangladesh news. In addition to that I also do some reading on statistics, sociology, and agriculture. The best part about all this though, is that it seems from the collection of books MCC Bangladesh has, most people have shared this past time with me while they were here.