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.