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.
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