Negligent Bideshi Aunty

Another thing I may have mentioned just once or twice is my little friend next door, Momu. She has just turned two, and entered the "terrible twos" big time. She asks "what's this?" about everything. She has a very short temper if she doesn't get her way. But she's so so so cute that it's almost impossible to stand firm and not give in to her 2-year-old demands. She calls me "Moni" but often other people refer to me as her "bideshi aunty" (bideshi = foreigner).

One of Momu's favourite things is to go upstairs to my "house" - if I haven't seen her for a few days, the first thing she'll say is, "go upstairs!" I think it helps that I am a total slob, so my room is invariably a pig-sty with plenty of interesting things everywhere for little girls to find.

I was on the phone the other night, while Momu was upstairs with me. She was having a great time going into my room, then coming out to the lounge room where I was sitting, with her newest discovered object to find out what it was. After about 20 minutes of this, however, she came out looking very sheepish and pointed to her pants, saying "shi-shi" (Bangla for wee-wee). Thus ended Episode 1 of Negligent Bideshi Aunty.

Episode 2 is somewhat self-explanatory from the following photo:I love the look on her face, it's as if she knows full well that she's found something that firmly belongs in the "adults only" category. She sounded so cute saying "beer" though!

Not appropriate

Yesterday, I cooked up a big pot of a lentils and vegetables for my dinner... and today's lunch... and tonight's dinner... and tomorrow's lunch... and tomorrow's dinner. Typical single person cooking, really - same as what I used to frequently do back home.

The others who live here find that quite intriguing, and one of the men was asking me about it tonight.

Tofail: You not cook tonight?

Me: No.

T: But you eat?

M: Yes, I cooked this last night. One day of cooking, then three days of eating. It's a good system.

T: But if you are cooking for two person, then is not three days eating.

M: Well, no. But I am only cooking for one person.

T: But when will you cook for two person? [NB: This is not an attempt to weasel a free meal out of me, cos they don't like my cooking. This is an indirect way of asking when I will get married.]

M: Ummmm... I don't know. [Brainwave.] Only Allah knows!

T: But how do you know Allah knows?

M: Ummmm...

T: Did he tell you to eat tonight? Now?

M: [Somewhat confused.] Ummmm... [Brainwave.] Yes! I heard the singing from the mosque, but because I do not understand Arabic, I think this is Allah telling me to eat my dinner.

T: [Cracks up laughing.] This is not appropriate.

Short hair!

Now, I may have mentioned (just once or twice... or a million times) that my short hair is a constant source of confusion and concern for Bangladeshis. Beautiful women have long black hair. The only reasons a woman would have short hair are because she is sick, has lice or is crazy. Many, many times I have tried to point out the virtues of short hair (cooler in summer, easy to look after, suits my face etc) but with no success in swaying peoples' opinion. The standard trifecta of questions (what is your name / country / marital status) includes a bonus question for me: why do you have short hair?

The first time I had a hair cut here, the colleague who took me got a severe telling off by all the others upon seeing my trimmed locks on our return. When wearing a sari at a work function the other day, one of the most senior staff members told me that everything about my appearance was "most excellent - the only problem is you do not have beautiful long hair." [I also got told I was "heavy shundor*" which I was initially offended by, until I realised that "heavy" is one of those words whose meaning gets lost in translation.]

* shundor = beautiful

So I could hardly contain my excitement a couple of months ago when I spotted a female news reader - with short hair! I pointed this out to the other people who live with me, but they just dismissed this, saying, "But this is not Bengali system."

And then, at another work function today, I met a very funky young Bangladeshi woman with short hair. She was most surprised when I asked for her photograph, wondering what the hell was so photogenic about her. When I said it was because of her short hair, I don't think she could have been any more pleased than if I'd said it's because she is an Aishwarya Rai lookalike. This groovy chick has spent lots of time in Burma studying with Buddhist monks there, trekked illegally into Thailand and Cambodia, so far refused to get married... Pretty different to most other Bangladeshi women.
When I looked at the photo later, I was filled with jealousy cos her haircut's way cooler than mine! I should have asked where she had it done...

World AIDS Day 2008

Happy World AIDS Day!

I spent this morning at an event in the Shit organised by the NGO I'm working with here, along with some other NGOs in the area and the local government. We started (well and truly on Bangla time at 11am, not 10am as advertised) with a "rally" - marching from the local government office to the edge of town, narrowly escaping being hit by oncoming buses and trucks on the busiest highway in the country. An interesting route, I thought, where we passed about 20 onlookers only, started approaching the busy part of town where we may have had an audience but turned around and went back to the local government office. This rally involved about 100 people, all wearing little hat-type things with something written on them in Bangla, and accompanied by a 3-piece marching band in full costume. Really. These Bangladeshis know how to put on a good program.

Then there were speeches by various important people in town, including my lovely self of course. I'm getting better at these sorts of things - I've worked out the trick is to speak quickly in my strongest Australian accent so nobody understands me anyway - and I'm also getting more assertive about not sitting on stage if I don't want to.

So it's been a great morning, but spent a bit more time there than I would have liked as I had patients to see at the therapy centre. I made a quick exit to head over there, before getting a call from my supervisor a minute later demanding that I come back to take tea with the local government social welfare officer. There were two reasons I didn't want to do this - (1) it was taking me away from my real work and (2) the guy in question was fairly young and I suspected that this was a ploy to scope me out as a potential wife. I made some quite strong protestations but my supervisor wouldn't hear of it... "You must come, he is a very important man for us!"

Reluctantly I went back to take tea with this guy, who within seconds of my arrival informed me that the rules stating that government officers couldn't marry foreigners have been changed so did I want to marry him? I tried my most polite but firm refusal and tried several times to change the subject, but he just kept banging on about it. "But you are not married... you don't have a boyfriend..." - as if it was the only possible logical solution to my "problem". The awkwardness of the situation was certainly not helped by my colleagues who were present, elaborating on my description of where I live ("Sitakund" - to which they added the exact location of my dwellingplace) and kindly giving him my mobile number after I'd left.

One of those "I love Banglade-... f#$cking Bang-... I lo-... f#$cki-... I love Ba-..." kind of days.

You can't be saving the world ALL the time

I just got back from Dhaka after my volunteer group's quarterly meeting... on the bus.

Why did I get the bus, when I'd already booked a plane ticket for 7:50am in the morning (so I could get back to work, being the diligent person that I am)?

Because I'd gotten so shit-faced the night before that I bloody slept through my tax-payer-funded flight.

Please accept my humble apology, Australian tax-payers far and wide who are reading this.

It was a very good lesson to learn... why I should not book flights in advance, because I am totally useless at catching them (remember the 3 flights missed in one day the weekend I came to Adelaide for mum's 60th and was also moving house in Melbourne?).

I love Bangladesh!

There are three types of day that I seem to experience over here.

The first is an "I love Bangladesh!" day, which is the category that today fits into. More on that later...

The second is a "f#$king Bangladesh" day, where everyone is annoying, everything goes wrong and I generally wonder what the hell I'm doing here. Acknowledgements to Amy for coining this highly imaginative phrase (I wanted to get it piped onto the top of a cake once, but thought the cake shop boys might actually know what it meant and didn't want to offend).

The third is an "I love... f#$ki-... I lo-... f#-... I love Banglade-... f#$king Bang-..." day, i.e. the type of day where something great happens, followed by something really shit - in cycles of about 2 seconds. This is the most unsettling kind of day, because I don't know what kind of mood to get myself into.

Anyway, today was an "I love Bangladesh!" day.

I had an interesting morning going on a village visit, with a frustrating start to the day getting there but I was feeling so chilled and excited about going to Dhaka that it didn't worry me as it normally would have. I lugged my suitcase around this village (normally I have a backpack but am planning a grog run to a duty-free warehouse, so a suitcase was necessary to discreetly bring a slab of beer back to the Shit) which was pretty amusing in itself.

I then got on a bus to Chittagong and because of the global economic crisis, falling Aussie dollar and my inherent tight-arsed-ness, I decided to try getting the public bus to the airport (at a cost of approximately $0.70, instead of a CNG at a cost of $4). After the first change of bus, I had a lovely chat with some men on the next bus, who were very helpful and gave me instructions on getting to the airport. I had to change bus at the same point where they were getting off, so they offered to help me find the next bus. Unfortunately, they were a bit wrong and I was going to have to take another bus to a different point, then change again for the airport bus. Making a total of 4 buses to get to the airport. At this point, I told myself not to be such a tight-arse and after beating a CNG driver down to a reasonable price and checking that he had change for a 500tk note, off I set.

When I got to the airport, the bastard driver told me he didn't in fact have change for 500tk. In a display of perfectly controlled emotions, I slammed my hand on the grille between him and me (perhaps why it is there, to stop angry passengers from being able to punch the poor guys) and demanded he find some change.
While he's off asking at the ticket counters and then asking members of the public for change (he came back to the CNG several times to tell me it was a useless mission but I wasn't budging), a police officer-cum-traffic controller started banging on the CNG with his bamboo stick. Someone told me that the quality of a police officer's stick is a good indication of his or her rank. So this guy must have been middle of the road, but regardless, he was not happy about this CNG loitering in the airport arrivals area.

After much arguing with my driver, and much stick-banging from the police officer, I finally got out of the CNG with my correct change (honestly - he picked the wrong bideshi to try to screw over) and walked into the airport terminal at 3:32pm. Not being sure beforehand what time I would make it to the airport, and since there are flights every hour between Chittagong and Dhaka, I hadn't booked a flight in advance. I asked someone which was the next flight to Dhaka... "GMG [the airline's name] - 3:35pm!" But it's already 3:32pm?! "No problem, just some small delay - just 1o minutes." And so I bought a ticket and boarded a plane (leaving behind another far more organised volunteer who'd arrived at the airport for his flight in an hour) to Dhaka.

One of those days where everything kind of "worked" in its own crazy Bangladeshi way. This country really agrees with me!

Rickshawala Idol

One of the most common modes of short distance transport in Bangladesh is the rickshaw. This is like a 3-wheeled bike, with the rider at the front and a bench seat with a retractable hood (like on a baby's pram) at the back. Rickshaws are not only for transporting people (and I've seen as many as 5 adults on the one rickshaw) but also animals, bicycles (as I myself have done), larger quantities of food, household items etc.

It is beyond the scope of this little blog to make any comment on the ethics of rickshaws - the drivers are hideously underpaid (average wage would be about 2000tk or AUD$40 per month) and it can be pretty demeaning work. On the other hand, the traffic pollution and congestion in Dhaka would be so much worse if there weren't the estimated 1 million rickshaws on its roads. And it terms of trying to ban rickshaws (as is often debated), there needs to be a pretty comprehensive plan in place for what these 1 million men are going to do for work instead.

Personally, I quite like riding in rickshaws especially on quiet country roads when there's hardly any sound and you're slowly passing endless green fields of rice. I do, however, refuse to let a rickshawala get off to walk me up a hill (cos the bikes don't have gears, they can't go up anything steeper than a short gentle slope).

Bangladesh is famous for its rickshaw art - painted panels, patterned vinyl covering the seat & hood and as many extra adornments as the owner or driver (cos most guys don't own their rickshaw but rent it for the day) can afford. When I first arrived, I wasn't that rapt in the rickshaw art, but as time goes by I am coming to love it more and more. It was something I hadn't fully appreciated until I went to Nepal and India, where they also have rickshaws. If people think the cycle rickshaws are inhumane, they should check out the hand-held ones powered by barefoot men running through the streets of Kolkata... that was a sight that made my tummy turn a bit. Anyway - these rickshaws look so boring compared to the ones in Bangladesh where rickshawalas often take an enormous amount of pride in the presentation of their chariot. I'm sure Dhaka would be far less tolerable if it wasn't packed to the gills with brightly decorated rickshaws colouring the streets and adding some visual interest among the grey concrete buildings.

A rickshawala is a guy who rides (or drives, as some say) a rickshaw. They are among the poorest of the poor people in Bangladesh and work long hours at one of the most physically demanding jobs for very little pay. To see these guys struggling through the streets during Ramadan, when most of them are fasting from sunrise to sunset, would arouse sympathy in even the most hard-hearted Hannah. The rickshawalas typically wear a lunghi (which is a tube of fabric worn like a sarong) and a shirt, many of which are so hideously ugly that they're fantastic. Some of the other volunteers have wanted to offer money on the spot to buy the shirt off the rickshawala's back.

It is an extra treat when you score a rickshawala who sings. This was recently turned into a "Rickshawala Idol" (not it's real name, but I reckon that's a better name than the one they came up with) contest - a singing contest for rickshawalas.

And here is the winner - in one of the rare times that Bangladesh makes it into international media for something other than a natural disaster or the latest political fiasco:

Wheel of fortune turns for singing rickshaw rider

Just call me Kylie

Kwong, that is - not Minogue.

Since getting back from India, I've had a huge burst of energy and enthusiasm for life in general really.  I've been getting up in the morning to go either walking or cycling.  I've been far more motivated about cooking in general, including making a couple of batches of brownies.

But last night was by far my most gourmette venture yet... oven-dried tomatoes.  Clearly not very difficult, all it involved was cutting tomatoes into quarters, drizzling (yes, I drizzle now because pouring is for amateurs) over some oil (it's supposed to be olive oil but that's difficult to find and hideously expensive here), cutting up some garlic into small strips and poking those into the tomatoes then leaving on a low temperature overnight in the oven.

So yeah - easy but check out how professional they look!

Can't wait to bake some in a loaf of bread with some herbs... if I stop eating them and there are any left, that is.

Mood swings

Another example of the inability to get settled into one mood here:

This afternoon, my supervisor told me that there was a letter for me on his desk. I went in to get it and noticed that the envelope wasn't (and hadn't ever been) sealed. Slightly miffed, I picked it up and then noticed that my name and address weren't in the see-through plastic window on the envelope. In other words, someone had clearly taken the letter out of the envelope, looked at it and put it back in again (the wrong way around). This really gave me the shits - it's one thing for people to pull my groceries out of my shopping bag and look at the price labels (seriously, this is what happens) but opening my mail takes privacy invasion to the next level.

I stormed out and found my supervisor, demanding to know who had opened my mail and why. Infuriatingly, he didn't understand why I had a problem. He just patiently pointed out that the fault lay with the phone company for not sealing their envelopes properly. I agreed that, yes, this was an issue but I still wanted to know why this was perceived to be an open invitation to read my mail. This time, he said the finger of blame should be pointed to the postal workers since they must have removed it. I tried to explain that this couldn't be the case, because the way the letter had been put back in the envelope meant that the name and address couldn't be seen - so this must have happened after delivery, otherwise they wouldn't have known where or who to deliver it to.

I have no doubt that it was someone at my work who opened the letter, and I'm pretty sure which person it would have been. It really really really gets on my nerves how little respect for privacy there seems to be here - which I don't know is widespread or if people feel somehow entitled to go through my things because they are "looking after" me.

So feeling like my head was going to explode with fury, I headed into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The cook, Moriam, had rearranged lots of the furniture in one corner and gone through all the cupboards to clean and tidy everything. I asked her why she'd done this, wondering if there was a specific reason or just a spring clean.

Her response? She wanted to rearrange everything so there was more room for me to prepare my meals at the table because she knows I struggle a bit with doing it on the floor. (She'd laughed at me taking "knee stretch" breaks the night before when using a floor grinding stone to make some home-made peanut butter.) Also, a vegetable peeler that I'd bought (for about 40 cents) had gone missing which was giving her considerable stress since she's the one who washes the dishes and felt personally responsible. Which I guess she may have been, but it really didn't worry me and I'd already gone and bought a new one.

See what I mean? With one person being fucking annoying one minute and then someone else being so delightful and thoughtful the next, it's impossible to stay in a bad mood for too long. (Conversely, it also means that good moods are often nipped in the bud!)

Now THAT's a beach

A couple of friends in Australia just got married and went to Fiji for their honeymoon.  They were very amused when they visited the self-proclaimed "world's 7th best beach".

Bangladesh's honeymoon capital (complete with advertising billboards for a particular brand of oral contraceptive pill using the slogan "Welcome to happy couple city, Cox's Bazar") is a beachside town on the Bay of Bengal which claims to have the longest unbroken sea beach in the world.  Now according to a reliable source, the longest (by another 100km or so) is actually in Brazil.  But, according to everybody here, Cox's Bazar is the most beautiful sea beach in the world.  No question about it.

My opinion - okay, but nothing special.  On another trip to Cox's Bazar recently with a fairly large group of other expat volunteers, one of the girls who'd organised our "programme" for the weekend had included a visit to a special, secret destination to chill out one afternoon between swimming at the beach and going out for dinner.  When we were trying to weasel out of her what and where this place was, all she would give away was that it was "really good... for Bangladesh."  This is a bit of a common theme - any other visitor here would possibly be a bit disappointed by many of the things that we get so excited about after 8 months of being here (and used to lowering our expectations).

It is nice to have a sea change, especially for people for whom it is so culturally entrenched to live close to the beach.  But - after taking Bren & Karen there when they visited - I don't think I'd take any other visitors there especially, cos it is pretty disappointing.  There are many wonderful things in Bangladesh, but if you want great beaches, go to Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia (or stay at home in Oz).

There's been a campaign recently to come up with a list of the New 7 Wonders of the World, including a category for New 7 Wonders of Nature.  Being so proud of their beach - and generally not terribly widely travelled to have seen other beaches to compare it to - the enthusiastic Bangladeshis nominated Cox's Bazar beach for one of the natural wonders.

Now, I know I wasn't there at the best time of year (it was pissing down with rain the whole time) but this is my picture of this "wonder":

Compared to the world's 7th best beach in Fiji:

Not much comparison, eh?

The funniest part of the story though?  There had been some dodgy websites set up or something, that were somehow rigging the voting system and so Bangladesh's entries got disqualified from the competition!  I think this is bloody hilarious, given the political history and current situation in Bangladesh (a national election due to be held on 18 December) where true democracy is looking like a bit of wishful thinking.  Happily for the Bangladeshis, they've been reinstated in the competition (I bet they tried to bribe someone to do it though!) and Cox's Bazar is currently #3 on the list... that's what happens when you've got a country with 150 million people voting.

So thanks to Dan for permission to use these photos here (well, I'm sure he'd give me permission if I ever get around to asking him).

Puzzling

It was with mixed feelings of horror and amazement that I watched one of my 11-year-old patients do a jigsaw puzzle today, helped by the therapy assistant I work with.  It was a very simple puzzle of Winnie the Pooh and friends containing about 20 pieces, each one about 5cm square.  A 5- or 6-year-old could easily have done it.  But it was fascinating watching this kid and my colleague attempting to put two "outie" bits together (as opposed to an "innie" and an "outie").  Or a middle piece into the border.  Or two pieces that clearly had different pictures and did not belong together.

I know the kid may not have had too many opportunities to do jigsaw puzzles in his life, but it was unbelievable seeing how he was totally incapable of applying any kind of logic to it.  (You know - does the picture line up?  Do the shapes match?  Etc.)  Even more scary was that my colleague had no idea either.

This incident might help to explain how some of my frustrations come about.  Trying to teach in an interactive way is nigh on impossible - people aren't able to come up with their own answers.  They don't know how.  They expect to be told everything.  Their whole life, they've rote learnt information and regurgitated this in exams that don't require any application of the knowledge.  They ask "what?" but never "why?" and don't wonder "how?".  Things are black and white - there's no grey.  They have all these separate bits of knowledge but are not able to work out how to make all the bits fit together into the big picture.  Or how to make the bits fit into different situations.

I was just watching this kid thinking, "No wonder they struggle to find solutions to the many problems in this country when people can't even solve a jigsaw puzzle!"  You know - not taking into account all the complicating factors of poverty, corruption, gender inequality, environmental problems...

Yet another time when, after thinking about it all for ages, I just shook my head and said, "It's all fucked."

No tension, no mention

On a sunset walk around the lake (where Gandhi's ashes were sprinkled) in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Pushkar, we met a Hindu holy man who was preparing himself for some kind of performance or something.

He stopped us and we got the usual questions (what is your name / country / marital status?) before this guy told us that he had, "No wife, no children, no money, no job - no tension, no mention!"

And thus "no tension, no mention" became something of a motto for the three of us, especially as we could relate to the bits about no wife/husband, no children, no money and no job!

No tension, no mention.  It even rhymes.  I love it.

Unexplained absence

I've been in India for 3 weeks.  Sorry to everyone who thought I was dead (Berna).

A little snap to keep you happy til I get around to writing something about it all...

You know you've been Banglafied when...

... you see your freshly baked garlic and herb bread crawling with opportunistic ants (who pounced while you took a quick wee and left the bread uncovered for a minute) before thinking, "Extra protein!" and brushing / blowing the majority off... then eating the remaining ones with the bread.

And I wonder why I'm sick all the time!

Eid false start

Eid-ul-Fitr is the end of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting.  The Islamic calendar is based on the moon, so it was uncertain until the night before whether Eid would be today or tomorrow.  If they saw the first sliver of the new moon last night, Eid would be today.  If they were unlucky, the moon wouldn't be seen until tonight and Eid would be tomorrow.  There is a "Moon-Sighting Committee" who would officially announce whether the moon had been seen or not - and phone numbers had been published in the newspapers for people to call if they saw the moon.  I think they were a bit ambitious to expect it to be today - they knew it was going to be today in Saudi Arabia but there they'd seen the new moon at the start of Ramadan a day before Bangladesh.  Someone else told me that it's always the day after Saudi and they didn't know why there was this "will it or won't it be the same day" every year.

The lead-up to Eid is like the lead-up to Christmas.  The shops are open all hours, with everyone buying new clothes for themselves and as gifts for their family and friends.  The traffic in Chittagong was insane, with jams at the major intersection near Tania and Bri's house (it feels so weird not to say "Carly and Tania's house"!) at 10pm and later, when normally it's pretty quiet well before that time.  Last night, the cook's kids were at the office for Iftar (the meal when they break the day's fast) and were excitedly showing me their new clothes and shoes, before packing them up to take to their house for Eid day.  It really felt like Christmas Eve - and was so nice to be with a family who were going to be involved in it all, not just hanging out on my own.

So I woke up early this morning, rushed down to the kitchen to ask Moriam if it was Eid day.  No... no moon last night, so it's tomorrow.  After all the excitement of the night before, it was a bit of an anti-climax to see everyone fasting still!  The weather today has been beautiful - sunny but not too hot.  The forecast for tomorrow is for a 100% chance of precipitation... not really compatible with all the walking from one house to another that is planned!

To top it off, my horoscope for tomorrow predicts:

You may have to be careful with your physical appearance or well-being today as you are vulnerable to accidents.

Bugger...  Hope that's not referring to my sari-wearing and walking in the mud.  I don't want any incidents of slipping in the mud in my new sari!

Cooking class with Minoti

Minoti is the therapy assistant at the therapy centre where I work 3 days a week.  She is really lovely, but we have a few issues because she speaks possibly even less English than I speak Bangla.  Which is not a lot.

I'm normally quite stressed out at the therapy centre.  I enjoy it, but it's just hard trying to communicate when the majority of my patients don't speak English.  My Bangla is getting better all the time, but not good enough to get a decent history or provide any meaningful education to my patients.  So that's a bit stressful, combined with the fact that hardly any patients show up til 12pm, and the therapy centre is supposed to close at 1pm.  It doesn't bother me to stay longer, but there is pressure to just churn through the patients to get them all seen by 1pm (even if that means 5 or 10 minutes each) so everyone can have lunch.  I'd rather spend a good 20 minutes with each patient, even if it means they have to wait a bit longer (they should arrive earlier!) and I don't get lunch til later.

Also, the Bangladeshi approach to illness and disability is quite different to mine.  People really get into the "sick" role here - I've seen patients who are perfectly capable of doing everything for themselves but don't because they expect their family members to wait on them hand and foot.  Why?  Because they're "sick"!  From birth to death there's a general habit to do things for the person - if a little kid is a bit messy eating or drawing or whatever, the parents will just do the activity for them.  It gives me the shits!  So at the therapy centre, I'm forever slapping peoples' hands away so the patients can have an opportunity to practice and do things for themselves.  But then at other times, when I'm struggling with a dead weight of a patient falling to the floor or using all my arms and legs to keep a person in a good position and trying to ask another person to pass a ball or a toy or move an object... does anyone step in and help?  No!  I've had up to 6 people sitting watching me struggle with someone on the floor, before yelling in frustration, "Can someone bloody help me?!"  Anger management issues?  Who, me?

So poor Minoti is often on the receiving end of my frustrations at the communication and cultural differences that I face.  I wouldn't be surprised if she thinks I'm the biggest bitch in the world, cos I'm generally a bit grumpy after a frustrating morning of what often feels like useless therapy.

It was lovely, then, for her to invite me to her house today for a cooking lesson.  She'd made some coconut sweet things that I loved and asked if I wanted to come to her house to learn how to make them during the Eid break.

Her house is just on the other side of the railway line (but there's no such thing as "the wrong side of the tracks" here - it's busier on my side, but more beautiful on her side), near a creek, and surrounded by trees.  There's no electricity to her house, meaning she doesn't have the bloody TV on all the time!  It was so quiet and beautiful... I couldn't hear the highway noise from here and the only interruption to the peace and quiet were the infrequent trains.

I'd asked Minoti about her husband before, and she'd told me he was in Chittagong.  I'd presumed he was there for work, as quite a few couples here live separately during the week and the husband will come to the family house on weekends.  So when I asked Minoti if her husband was coming back to Sitakund for Durga Puja, she told me he's never coming back.  As in, he's left her.  Bastard!  So Minoti supports herself and her 2 sons on a wage that's less than $50 a month.

Her younger son, Mitu (11 years old), was keen to help and hang out with me (who wouldn't want to hang out with me?).  Minoti said he's very naughty, but he seemed absolutely delightful to me.  He was so good, helping her out by fetching water from the tube-well and various things from inside.

The "kitchen" was in a separate bamboo hut with a tin roof and mud floor.  It had a fire-place built into the floor (i.e. it was made of mud) and there were 2 more outside.  This was the first time I'd really been present when someone was cooking on a fire, rather than a gas stove.  Bloody hell, it was smoky at times and the fumes sometimes causing coughing fits in all present (not just me with my uninitiated lungs).  But Minoti was oblivious to the "hardship" that I saw - she just got on with the cooking.

We made shondesh which were like coconut toffee things - desiccated fresh coconut cooked in shitloads of goor (a different refinement of sugar, bought in solid form) and oil.  Pretty bloody unhealthy but, like all bad foods, really tasty!  Then we made pitha which were like sweet pasties with the same coconut mix (but cooked a bit less, so it wasn't so solid) in the middle.  She had special pitha moulds, which made them into beautiful sea-shell shaped pastries.  This was Mitu's favourite bit, assembling the pitha.  These were then deep-fried for about 20 seconds, making yet another healthy (!) but super delicious treat.

It was great to spend a few hours with Minoti in a much more relaxed environment than the therapy centre and to see her house and environment in which she lives.  Despite the many hardships life has dealt her, she is happy and her boys seem happy and are really good to their mum.  Another day where I was glad to be living in "the Shit" and felt really lucky to be able to share in the lives of these "real" Bangladeshis.

A year of the shits

So I've been possibly the most ill in the tummy that I've been in the 6 months that I've been in Bangladesh.  (Although the first time I got sick, "multi-tasking" was given a new meaning.)

We have a new housemate in the Chittagong house - Bri, who is here for 12 months as an English language teacher trainer.  She arrived in Chittagong on Monday afternoon to an empty house, as I was still in Sitakunda and Tania away for work.  I arrived at about 6:30pm, intending to go to my Bangla class.  My belly, however, had other ideas.  I'd been a little dodgy when leaving the Shit but figured it would pass.  This is an approximate transcript of the conversation that I had with Bri when I arrived at the house:

Bri (hearing me come in the door): Hello?!

MFT (hurriedly taking off my shoes): Hi.  Sorry, I really need to go to the toilet.

Some time later...

MFT: Sorry about that.  I'm Monica.

Bri: No worries.  I'm Bri.

Conversation continues for about 5 minutes.  Interrupted by another toilet break.  Repeat same sequence of events about 6 times.  MFT sits "sipping" (or so I thought) oral rehydration solution.

MFT: So where are you from, what do you do, blah blah the usual questions...  Oh shit.  (Makes mad dash to bathroom to vomit previously sipped rehydration fluids.)

So my last couple of days have been a bit of a juggling act, trying to achieve a fine balance between rehydrating adequately but not at too fast a rate such that I will just vomit everything back up again and be back to square 1 (or even a little behind).  I burst into tears today when Moriam (the cook) and two of her daughters came in to check how I was going, fed up with the whole bloody thing.  Even a visit from Momu wasn't enough to cheer me up, cos she just wanted to get up to mischief and I didn't have the energy to be keeping an eye on her.

I have been fed the following, in attempts to fix my poor tummy:

• flaked dry rice with water, banana and sugar (breakfast, lunch and dinner)
  
•  green coconut juice (between meals)
• Tasty Saline (a local version of Gastrolyte) - I thought 4 packets in one day would be enough, but was told I had to drink 10!

How I long for those carefree days when my digestive processes didn't have such a profound impact on my ability to function!  How is it that I can eat food at dodgy local restaurants and drink tea from cups washed in dirty buckets of water and be fine, but then NOTHING (I hadn't eaten since about 9am) can make me sick?  I was just bragging the other day about not being sick for a month and thinking I was finally getting used to these Bangladeshi tummy bugs.  Bastards.

Scientific advances

A bit of pre-reading for today's post - some research indicating that turmeric (commonly used in Indian - and Bangladeshi - curries etc) can reduce the size of a haemorrhagic stroke:

Indian Spice Reduces Size of Hemorrhagic Stroke

Firstly, the writer (doing their best to bring research into popular media) is obviously ignoring the fact that most Indian curries are cooked in a shitload of oil.  Or ghee.  Which, to my understanding, is pretty much just butter with all the healthy bits taken out.  May as well inject it straight into your arteries.

Secondly, the researcher was inspired to study medicine after his encounter with an orthopaedic surgeon?  Seriously?  I've met a fair number of orthopods in my time.  Most are wankers.  Some are okay.  Only 1 or 2 could be described as "nice and interesting".  Orthopaedic surgeons are like the rottweilers of the medical profession - blood-thirsty, anti-social and poorly-behaved.

Based on these two incredibly intelligent and well thought-out observations, the only natural conclusion one can come to is that the researcher has no idea and hence these findings cannot be trusted.

Bun in the oven

A few weeks ago when I was in Dhaka, I bought a second-hand oven from one of the AYADs who was leaving.  I'd been thinking about getting an oven ever since my visit to Rajshahi in May, where I stayed with Nadege and her bread-baking housemate.  It opened up a whole new world of possibilities - bread, roast vegies, cakes, biscuits...  Given that I'm really not a fan of the bread you can buy here (the standard bread is really sweet and more like cake than bread) I don't know why I even hesitated to buy an oven - $50 for a new one is a small price to pay for the happiness it could bring.  Nevertheless I did hesitate... long enough for Paul to send an email advertising the various household goods up for sale cos his assignment was finishing and it was time for him to shesh the 'desh.  (Shesh is Bangla for "finish" but has become an everyday part of speech in many different ways including as a verb.)  So I got it for the bargain price of about $34.  Yay!

I've never made bread by hand before.  It always seemed like something that was too hard.  But, as I'm discovering, it's really as easy as pie.  Easier, in fact!  I've found a good recipe that doesn't taste too yeasty.  I get wholemeal flour, which is so exciting as it's a bit of a hassle to find brown bread outside Dhaka (although it's recently become available in Chittagong).  So the whole process takes a couple of hours, but the individual steps aren't too time consuming and the end result is soooooooo worth it.

Having mastered plain brown bread, I've started experimenting a little.  I made some herb and garlic bread the other night (with herbs lovingly sent from Australia - thanks Pirca!).  Nadege (another AYAD) and her husband, Ash, came to visit so we made some date and coconut bread yesterday which went down a treat for breakfast today.  I've just now taken another plain brown loaf out of the oven, see:

I can't even begin to describe how exciting it is to eat the bread, especially fresh out of the oven.  It takes considerable will-power to leave some for later!  I've also been loving myself sick eating roast potatoes and pumpkin and a local variety of eggplant.  Overall, my happiness rating has shot off the scale...  Definitely a good investment.

Turtle mosque

Carly will kill me for taking this long to write about Friday's excursion on our last day together in Chittagong - she's a much more dedicated blogger than I am.  But she's officially ended her One Year in Bangers blog, leaving it up to me to give an account of our sight-seeing adventure.  I could have crashed and burned under the extreme pressure, but here it is...  Pretty punctual for me, really, only being 4 days after the event.  Slack as by Carly's standards though.  Anyway...

At one point, Tania had told me about going to visit this mosque that had turtles out the front.  It's always hard to picture what something like this is going to be like, especially in Bangladesh.  Tania didn't really have much idea of where it was though and doubted her ability to be able to get back there another time.

A couple of months later, I was actually reading the tourist info on a map of Chittagong that I have.  Surprise, surprise - there was a picture and little blurb about the Bayazid Bostami Dargah, which they described as having a tank with thousands of turtles.  Again, hard to picture what it was actually going to be.  From this description, we'd envisaged a glass tank with heaps of little domestic-type turtles in it.

So we jumped in a CNG, the driver amazingly understood where we wanted to go and we were on our way to a busy mosque late on Friday morning.  As we drove in, there were heaps of little stalls selling bags of bread cut up into little cubes, which puzzled me until later.

There was a pretty big pond out the front of the mosque, with heaps of people - both men and women - gathered on the steps.  Men usually use the pond to perform their "ablutions" before they pray, so it was a bit weird seeing women there.  Then we saw the first turtle...  It was HUGE!  At least 100 years old, in my marine-expert opinion.  And they were funny-looking.  They had snouts like a pig, so they could swim underwater and only have to stick up the tip of their snouts to breathe, rather than poke their whole head out.  They were slimy from living in a pretty stagnant pond of water for ages, and their skin was white with a bit of slime on it.  They had big claw-like nails but the weirdest thing was their necks...  Carly was spot-on with her description, saying they looked like foreskins.  Their heads kind of poked out and retracted back into their necks, with the skin indeed folding up on itself to look like a foreskin.  Creepy.

The bags of bread could be bought for 10tk, along with a long bamboo stick to poke the bread on the end (like cooking a marshmallow on a campfire) and feed to the turtles.  At one stage, there were about 6 or 7 turtles gathered at the steps to have a feed.  People were also feeding them bananas, but the turtles didn't seem too keen on those.  The little fish, however, swarmed to any food that was being thrown in.  The pond had an unbelievably dense population of these fish that were a bit smaller than a goldfish.  As far as we could see, there were thousands (even millions!) of these fish swimming in crazy patterns.  They were quick little buggers, quickly flitting over to any new source of food or other disturbance on the pond's surface to check it out.  I reckon this pond was a good symbolic representation of Bangladesh, actually - a few big fat turtles swimming around and eating up everything that the outsiders were giving, with this dense population of little fish left with the crumbs of the chunks of bread that were given.

The turtles weren't too greedy - they came to the steps, ate their fill and then swam off again before others would come over to get a feed.  I reckon we would have seen about 20 or 30 different turtles, with no idea how many more were in there.  There was also a guy (presumably an employee of the mosque - although potentially he just does this for fun) swimming around in the disgusting water of the pond, grabbing the turtles and bringing them over to the steps.  Ew.  Lots of people were touching the turtles and Carly even braved a quick run of the hand over one's shell.  I wasn't so keen and kept my distance!

I'm embarrassingly un-knowledgeable about Muslim practices, but I think the "ablutions" involves washing out every orifice of the body before praying.  So there was one guy performing his ablutions next to us (and a turtle in the water), putting the water in his mouth to wash it before spitting it out.  I don't want to pass judgement on any practices that I don't understand... but (here I go)... ew.  Seriously.

BTW - no photos, sorry.  Carly and I decided we couldn't be bothered bringing our cameras cos that would mean bringing bags and it was too hot for that sort of shit, especially when there was every chance it would be crap.  But this was one of the few things that has pleasantly exceeded my expectations in Bangladesh and we were spewing we didn't have our cameras.  But I'll definitely take more visitors there in the future, so watch this space for photos.

Trusty servant Patsy

On our way back from an embarrassingly delicious Pizza Hut dinner in Chittagong, Carly and I stopped in at a shop to get a few things.  Keen to show off my newly-acquired skill of coconut shredding and/or desiccating, I bought a fresh coconut to eat when we got home.  Having seen Shagorika (the neighbour) cutting open a coconut with a scary-looking machete-type knife, I doubted we'd have anything at the house that would do the trick.  So I asked the guys at the shop if they could cut it open for me - another example of a bideshi woman speaking a bit of Bangla and smiling sweetly to get a favour.

As we left the shop, Carly commented that it was like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur and his trusty servant Patsy rock up trotting along and clapping coconut halves together.  So we had a good little giggle trotting along the road, clapping our coconuts together and singing about "brave Sir Robin".  I really wanted to call Berna (my sister) to ask her to guess what I was doing but it was a bit late in Adelaide for her to find something like that funny.

Carly thought the sight of me squatting on the floor using the coconut desiccator we borrowed from the landlord was too good a photo opportunity to pass up...  Sadly, you can't really get a good idea of what I'm doing from the photo, but you can see why my knees are going to be stuffed after a year of squatting to cook at floor level.

So this is how they make the stuff you buy in packets!

I had nasta (snack) with Momu's parents the other day after work (I'm loving having Buddhist neighbours during Ramadan!).  Momu's mother, Shagorika, made a sweet noodle dish which had a milky sauce and delicious shredded coconut in it.  When I asked what the ingredients were, Shagorika showed me a big jar with some coconut she'd prepared which was absolutely delicious!  I asked her if she could show me how to do it, if I bought a coconut.  They love this sort of stuff, so of course she was more than happy to teach me.

A few days later, I organised a coconut and went over for my lesson.  She was amazing the way she used a huge murderous-looking knife to cut open the coconut into perfect halves by making little cuts all the way around.  She then showed me how to use a utensil that looked like a citrus zester, but with bigger holes.  A coconut shredder.

She was insistent that she'd shred the whole coconut, cos I had a bit of a go and was pretty slow being the first time I'd done it and all.  I asked the cook, Moriam, if she had another shredder I could use at the same time to have a go at the other half.  She looked at Shagorika's implement with interest, then went off and got her own version, which was set up like the floor knives they use here but with a circular saw-type blade horizontally on the end.  Shagorika had no idea what this thing was, so Moriam quickly showed her.  It cut the coconut into smaller flakes.  A coconut desiccator!  You know - to make desiccated coconut.  Shagorika was a bit skeptical of this, saying that it produced "less beautiful" coconut for what we were making.

Anyway, so we finished making our preserved coconut (with shitloads of oil and sugar - in typical Bangladeshi style, they are wizards at making healthy foods unhealthy) which was GREAT and I've been enjoying with my porridge in the morning, along with some dates which are available everywhere at the moment cos they are a traditional Iftar (breaking of the fast during Ramadan) food.

I might think too deeply about insignificant things such as this, but I was quite chuffed that I'd learnt the difference between how shredded and desiccated coconut are made by hand.  I'd never thought about it before when using these straight from the packet!  And having done it myself since, I'll have a renewed appreciation (or possibly scorn) for the supermarket variety when I get back to Oz.  It's really not as nice when you don't do it by hand from a fresh-off-the-tree coconut.

Well said, sister

Last night, I was helping Mina (the cook's 16-year-old daughter) with her English homework.  (This was even though I didn't understand the homework, as the instructions could only be described as shithouse.)  She showed me a short essay she'd written about the dowry system.  I hope she hadn't copied it from anywhere, cos I thought the opening was great with an uncharacteristic display of passion.  Enjoy...

The dowry system is one of the most hateful practices of our country.  I could never agree with the dowry system.  It is a shame on Bangladesh.

And so it continued talking about the reasons why Mina thought it was such a "hateful" practice.  Pretty sobering subject matter, considering that Mina's father died about 7 years ago and her mother is now widowed with four children and barely 2 taka to rub together.  An arranged marriage is pretty much the only option for someone like Mina to help improve her family's situation, although she's not really a desirable wife as her family won't be able to come up with a good dowry.  Mina told me that she doesn't want to have to pay a dowry to her future husband.  She was pretty resigned to the fact that she would enter into an arranged marriage but reasonably happy that she would at least have some choice over when she would get married, as she wants to finish college and hopefully go to university first.

It really puts my own "problems" into perspective talking to Bangladeshis about stuff like this.  Makes me feel like a bloody princess for complaining that I can't meet anyone nice!

Crazy brain

I've been getting a few emails lately from various Aussie friends in the UK on working holidays.  (As an aside, it makes me wonder at times why I chose Bangladesh for my quarter-life crisis.)  A few have commented about getting a particular line from The Waifs' song London Still stuck in their heads, whilst taking the Tube over to Camden to wander around.  (I don't know how many have bought some funky records with that old Motown sound, though.)

After writing the title for my previous blog post, I've had another Waifs song in my head - Crazy Train.  With a bit of creative word substitution, it's almost made today's experience of getting text messages, missed calls* and actual calls from various admirers** I've picked up along the way somewhat enjoyable.  I wish I was a good enough harmonica player to recreate my own groovy instrumental interludes to my poor singing of Crazy Brain.  I did have a little attempt, cos I brought my harmonica with me, but it was really unsatisfactory cos I'm shit at playing harmonica.  (Having your name in the instrument's name doesn't automatically mean you'll be good at it.  One actually needs to dedicate some time to learning and practising.)

So, all Waifs fans out there, maybe have a crack at seeing me in your kitchen and picturing me now as I toast to my small town and drink the happy hour (or dance around in my floral orange mu-mu and drink the oral rehydration salts)...

Oh crazy brain, rolling down that crazy BRAC***

* Missed calls are a peculiarly Bangladeshi phenomenon (this is a statement made from my extensive international experience, of course - particularly given that this is the first overseas trip where I've had a mobile!).  Basic gist is someone calls you but only lets the phone ring once before they hang up.  I'm yet to work out what the purpose is.  Maybe it's like when you first got your driver's license and honked the horn whenever you drove past a friend's house?  The 21st century way of saying, "I don't actually want to talk to you but I just want you to know that I'm thinking of you."  Which is all well and good, but a bit strange when the caller is someone whose number you don't have.  Or maybe, given that most people here aren't too flush for cash, they're hoping that you'll call back.  Again, well and good, but rests on the (usually misguided) assumption that you want to talk to them.  I think someone should propose an AYAD assignment for "text message education officer", to educate people about the wonders of the SMS.  If someone sent me a text saying "I want to talk to you about X but have no credit. Can you call me back?" I'd be much more likely to talk to them.  And text messages are so much cheaper than calling!

** "Admirer" is my attempt to be slightly more positive about my "stalkers".  Maybe I'm being a bit dramatic - there haven't been any gifts of toenail clippings or anything seriously film-script-inspiringly stalker-like.  Continuing to call after up to 15 calls have not been answered is a bit abnormal though, in my book.

*** BRAC is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, the world's largest NGO (in terms of employees - over 100,000!) - and found in Bangladesh!  It is testament to the NGO "industry" here.  So yeah, totally unrelated to the "crazy brain" thing, except that it's Bangladeshi.  Pretty dubious association, but it made me have a little giggle to myself at my ingenious context-specific rhyming word substitution.

POSTSCRIPT: I just ignored 2 calls from my supervisor. It's 11:39pm, dude!  I'm bloody sleeping!  (Well, clearly I'm not given that I'm awake and typing this - but re-reading the above ramblings confirms that I definitely should be asleep.  Right after I hit "publish post" and expose my over-tired, diarrhoeatic thoughts to the world.  Or my small number of loyal readers, anyway.)

Latest installment in "Crazy Texts"

Maybe this was a bit mean, but as soon as I received some crazy text messages this morning, I forwarded them on to Carly.  Consequently, she posted them on her blog first, because they really were bloody funny.  Check it out here.

I think they were from a guy that I bought phone credit from ONCE.  That means my encounter with him lasted a maximum of 5 minutes.  That might put it all into context a bit better.

New skill for the list

Sari-tying. Not fast, still a bit of room for improvement... but definitely getting there. I even did most of this one on myself!

Sight-seeing at the crossroads

My plans for Monday's sight-seeing in Singapore:

• Chinese Garden
• Botanic Gardens
• Spotlight shop to buy wool and knitting needles

Where I ended up going on Monday's sight-seeing day in Singapore:

• Spotlight
• Carrefour

I should have known that Carrefour would overwhelm me.  It is a French hypermarket - like a cross between the most enormous Coles and Target you can imagine.  The one I went to in Toulouse had 50 cash registers.  I'm not exaggerating - they were numbered.  To put this into perspective, however, my host mother said she liked this particular store as it was "cozy".  Perhaps not the word I would have used to describe it.

Anyway, so I walked in thinking I would like to get some nice cheese to bring back to the 'desh.  There were two whole aisles of cheese, plus a service section where they'd cut you a piece from a huge block.  I was walking around in a state of shock, not knowing where to even start to look.  After being in Bangladesh for 5 months, it all felt so ridiculous and exorbitant.  A concerned English woman with a baby in a pram approached me.  Obviously my appearance (somewhere between looking incredibly stoned or incredibly tired) had worried her.

Her: Are you alright?

Me: Yes - it's just that I've been in Bangladesh for 5 months and all this cheese is overwhelming. I get excited when I find cheddar over there!

Her: Oh right. I suppose it is a good range. But even in Singapore it's almost impossible to find shaved ham.

Me (desperately trying to keep a straight face): Oh. Really. That's... Yes. Well. Good luck with it then.

Oh the hardship!  How does she do it?  How can anyone possibly survive in a country with no shaved ham?  I can tell you, it nearly brought tears to my eyes to think of this woman - and her poor family! - trying to make do with sliced ham.

Suffering from a severe case of sensory overload, I had to leave (after making a selection of 6 different cheeses) and go home for a little rest.

Making friendship

I just got a phone call.  At 10pm, which is really only acceptable when you're calling someone you know will be up at that time.  Call was from an unknown number.  The tricky thing with those is - I've ignored some in the past and it's ended up being someone from Australia calling, cos that shows up as a local number.  So I'm now trying to give the benefit of the doubt.  Although I should have twigged that the time difference from here to Oz made it unlikely to be anyone calling late at night from there.

Me: Hello?

Caller: Hello.  Is this Monica?

Me (nervously): Yeeeeees.

Caller: sldfkjsdfo jsofjas fkjsfos dfoidsjfl ksdjf [torrent of Bangla]

Me: Bujhi na [I don't understand].

Caller: Your friend gave me your number.

Me (pissed off): Which friend?

Caller: My name is X.

Me: No, not your name - my friend who gave you the number.

Caller (slowly, like talking to a child): My name is Xxxxxxxxxxx.

Me: What do you want?

Caller: I go to Y university in Chittagong.  I want to make friendship with you.

Me: Ummmm...

Caller: Tomorrow 5pm I meet with you.

Me: I not go Chittagong 2 weeks [this is actually true - also true is how appalling my English is these days, the only way to get across the main point is to remove any superfluous words].

Caller: Ok! Then tomorrow 5pm I meet you.

Me: No, this is not possible.

Caller: Ok, well this is my number.

Me: Ok.

Caller: So soon I will call you.  I want to make friendship with you.

Me: Well, we'll see about that.  Bye now.  [Hang up, then immediately save number in phone as "don't answer".]

This is what happens in a country with no pubs and no normal interaction between males and females.  How are you supposed to meet people?  Resort to calling random numbers in case you happen upon someone who is equally lonely and willing to "make friendship" with the loser at the other end.  And I want to know which fucker gave out my phone number - no concept of privacy here.

Add this to the calls I've been getting at 2am from another unknown number the last few days.  No wonder I'm so bloody tired and grumpy.

Bring on another weekend where my phone won't work!  I forgot to add that to the list of awesome things about Nepal - not having to worry about getting calls from random strangers and not-so-strangers who call at all hours.

Note to self: Ask Bangla teacher next class how to say, "Sorry, but my friendship quota is full.  Good bye and don't ever call me again."  Also ask how to say "fuck off" in Bangla for desperate occasions.

Sweet relief - good food and anonymity

I just got back from 3 days in Kathmandu.

There is so much that could be said, but on this occasion I choose to express myself through food.  Not using food as an analogy, that is (although I do love a good food analogy).  But by listing all the food I ate in Kathmandu.  It will probably not look too exciting to anyone else, but after 5 months of shobji and dal bhat it was like manna from heaven.  The trip also involved a bit of sight-seeing, but mainly as a different venue at which to eat and/or drink.

What I ate and drank:

• beer +++
• momos - vegetable, buffalo and chicken fillings
• toasted muesli
• dried coconut, sultana and cashew mix
• masala (spiced) tea +++
• buffalo spring rolls
• pizza with bacon among other delicious toppings
• fresh mint lemonade
• Mediterranean platter - with the best tzatziki I've ever eaten
• fattoush (a Middle Eastern style) salad, with pomegranate seeds
• penne with mushrooms, tomato, parsley and fresh parmesan
• fried cheese
• wine
• Newari-style food, home-cooked by Rajeshwor's (May's boyfriend) mum
• rice wine, home-made by Rajeshwor's mum
• rice beer +++, home-made by Rajeshwor's mum

I felt like a cow that's been fed too much and can't support its own body weight. Which was a welcome feeling, after dropping kilos at a slightly alarming rate since arriving. It was such a novelty having a full stomach. There were times I also wanted to undo the button on my pants to give the belly more room. It was amazing.

Also amazing:

• the weather (not humid)
• the city (full of character that Dhaka is decidedly devoid of)
• the people (not staring at you!)
• sitting somewhere for hours, looking out the window after a delicious meal and realising that all my needs & desires had been fulfilled

When can I go back???

Spotted!

Today I was waiting for my bus from Sitakunda to Dhaka. Being a more conservative rural area, there are a higher number of women sporting burqas and various amounts of head covering. I'm assuming that some of my readers might be as ignorant as I was about Islamic fashion. The burqa refers to the full-length coat that women wear on the streets. The head-scarf plus face covers etc is a hijab.

So all Muslim women are supposed to wear a burqa after marriage. Even the funkier young women at my work wear them, with only one exception. From what I can gather, the hijab is optional. I'm not sure if it depends on the woman or her husband or her upbringing or how strictly she follows the faith whether she wears it. It seems to be more older women who wear it, although I've been surprised to see well-educated young women emerge from under the black fabric as well.

Many times now I've had a burqa and hijab-clad woman come in, sit down, start telling me about her pain and expect me to know who's hiding in there. Also, it's hard enough understanding the gist of what people are saying in the first place, without the added challenge of hearing muffled words through the veil and not being able to lip-read.

So back to me, sitting in the bus station in the Shit. Amid all the black tents walking past, I notice one with a red and blue checked orna. This leads me to another digression - as I think I've previously described, the purpose of the orna is to cover the boobs and thus maintain a girl's modesty. They are generally hated among the AYAD girls, although we have compiled a list of 101 other uses we've discovered for them. When out in public, the women I work with wear the burqa and put the orna over their head. Some - but not all - of the black hijab wearers will also sling the orna over their outfit somewhere. I'm somewhat puzzled by the need for burqa plus hijab plus orna. Maybe that's the ultimate modesty? Or the orna adds a bit of colour to the otherwise all-black outfit?

But again, I'd like to bring the reader's thoughts back to me, sitting in the bus station in the Shit, having just spotted an orna I recognised on a black-clad woman.  It's Moriam, the cook!  I yell out to her, she stops and we have a little chat.

It's only after she walks away that I begin to feel some disbelief and amazement at the fact that I recognised someone whose body was totally covered except for the eyes - and from a distance, too! Surely that's a sign that I'm adjusting to life in an Islamic country?

Guava

I ate my first ripe guava today.

The Bangladeshis quite like to start picking their fruits early and eat them in their sour state with salt and a bit of juice from a crushed green chilli.  They then ditch the salt and chilli once they've got more mature (and, hence, sweet) fruit.  This is what happened with the mangoes, which I couldn't quite get a taste for as a savoury item.  It also felt like a criminal waste to be eating them early, instead of just being a bit more patient and letting them get nice and juicy and sweet.

Anyway, guavas are actually really nice with salt (I skip the chilli).  You can buy them from street stalls peeled, cut into a flower shape (like the old flower carrot at the Chinese restaurant), shoved on the end of a stick like a toffee apple and sprinkled with salt and chilli powder.  They have flesh that looks like a cucumber, but firmer (see example on the right in above picture).  A nice bitter taste that becomes more enjoyable with each bite.  At 5tk a pop, that's a pretty good value snack.  I've been hopping into lots of guavas, especially during quiet times at the therapy centre when the therapy assistant will climb the nearby tree barefoot to get a few guavas to munch on until the next patient comes.

Today, we got served guavas as a snack during a meeting.  I was puzzled.  Skin on.  No salt.  No chilli.  No stick.  No fancy work with a knife to make them look pretty.  I asked one of my colleagues if it was okay to eat the skin.  "Skin - many vitamins," she declared, before biting into hers.  I did the same, to find that the flesh was really soft, sweet and had taken on a pinkish tinge (see example on left, above - much lighter pink though).  Delicious!  I've always been intrigued by apple and guava juice, having never seen or eaten a fresh guava in my life.  Those early guavas had confused me somewhat cos they weren't sweet or pink like the pictures on juice cartons.  But these in-season guavas are another tick in the column of things to love about Bangladesh.  Doesn't quite balance out the psycho phone stalkers from yesterday's post though.

(I can't believe I just wrote that much about bloody guavas.  I bet whoever is reading this can't believe they just bloody read it all either.)

I wish I was making this up...

... but my imagination's not that good.

WARNING: the following post contains material that may be offensive to some readers.  I am having a bit of a rant about lovesick Bangladeshi males being unable to take a hint and f$@% off.  This includes sharing some of the ridiculous text messages I have received for comedic value.  The lowest form of comedy, really, to pick on others.  But enough is enough.  And they are quite funny.

So despite many warnings (the fire-and-brimstone talk from Baz Dog, our in-country manager, about how Bangladeshis have visions of Bollywood-style weddings raining Australian passports when they see a bideshi woman... lots of Bangla songs being about how some guy is going to kill himself because a girl doesn't know he exists... learning that "love suicides" are quite common in Bangladesh when a guy has been rejected) I should have already been alerted to the dire state of romantic relations in Bangladesh.  I hadn't really taken much of this stuff seriously, thinking that it would never happen to me.

But this was not taking into account that I am an unmarried woman living in regional Bangladesh.  The concept of a woman being financially independent and not needing to marry is totally foreign.  I have short hair, I ride a bike, I talk back to the males around me, I have a university education, I have my own money to spend how I like, I have travelled overseas...  Basically the opposite of every other woman in town.  While I wouldn't describe myself as having been whacked with the ugly stick, I'm no Angelina Jolie either.  So all of this male attention is somewhat puzzling, and definitely not something I am used to.

Missed calls and prank calls are a fact of life in Bangladesh.  People try calling random numbers hoping to "make friendship" with the person who answers.  It's the same with Facebook.  People will invite friends of friends, even if they don't know who they are.  For them, it truly is "social networking"... a way of expanding their social circle.  Now, there are 150 million people in this country.  So of course there are going to be some nut jobs.  There are far more lovely people than crazy ones.  But it seems that I have met a disproportionately high number of people from the first group (i.e. the nut jobs) who send numerous text messages with what could be considered suggestive content.  More than just "hi, how are you".

I should have kept a track on these, cos they are quite hilarious.  But in my exasperation, I wasn't thinking of that.  I just wanted to purge my phone of these intrusions on my privacy.  So this isn't the most "suggestive" example, but it is a classic.  Last week I received the following text message:

Hi,MONOGA.How are you?Tnk u r fine.I am [name removed - see, I'm not TOTALLY mean] from ctg.BNG.Monoga u dont know me but i know u.monoga i like u very much at da first sightof.if u free then call

(followed a few seconds later by part 2)

Me.Plz.I m waiting for ur calling.

Weird - but slightly amusing.  A declaration of love at first sight!

Then, after getting numerous calls that I didn't answer from a relative of one of my patients, a guy who would be in his early 20s, I got the following text:

How r u SHOSHI? If i may to meet u after the noon? If u r free & in Shitakund. ok! Ops! Ofcours thinking what SHOSHI means. Will tell u later. Bye!

Now - I didn't know what shoshi meant.  Shosha means cucumber, but I suspect that's not really a term of endearment here.  So after a quick text to Carly, to ask her colleague what "shoshi" means, I sent the following reply:

I am sorry if I have not been clear. I wish to maintain strictly professional relationships with all clients and their families. This means no phone calls or meetings that are not related to my work as a therapist. This may sound rude but it is for the benefit of everyone.

Direct, but not mean.  I thought.  But of course I was forgetting that nobody understands the concept of "professional relationship" here.  In Australia, people understood when you refused to give out any information about yourself.  But here... it opened the floodgates of emotion, and I received the following texts:

I like this kind mentality.But u misunderstood.I really admire u.U seem to be angele to me, who is doing a great for our disabled children.Dont make it official [HUH?!?]

Those whome i like much i give them a name. I told u Shoshi. It means moon. Ok! I'll never call u again. Forgive me.

Then this morning:

It's really rude&hurt me hard.I couldnt set my mind in study couldnt sleep. It's really harmful for my exam. Pls let me know that u forgiven me.

Im sorry. But i sent u text. Dint call u. Pls don send a sms again saying "sorry if i am not clear NO TEXT" At least allow me send u text pls

God!  I think getting He's Just Not That Into You translated into Bangla is an urgent priority for this country.  Screw sex education... they need basic education on how to recognise when someone is politely rejecting their advances.  I don't want to be rude.  I want to be culturally sensitive, create a good image of foreigners etc etc... but it seems that subtlety doesn't work.

Or should I stop whingeing?  I used to complain that nobody was interested in me!  Should I be flattered by all this attention?

Forget squat toilets, eating with my right hand, wearing the salwar kameez, learning Bangla, the confronting sight of poverty everywhere you look, the seeming hopelessness of the entire system in Bangladesh without knowing where to start to tackle the problems... the most difficult thing I'm facing here is all the bloody unwanted attention from the crazy men!

And the winner is... umbrella!

Now I know the suspense has been killing all (four) of my readers...

But first, some background info.  Due to a high rate of illiteracy in Bangladesh, some bright spark came up with the very ingenious system of attaching a symbol to each electoral candidate.  So when illiterate Mohammad Average goes to vote, even if he can't read the candidates' names he knows who to vote for by looking for their symbol.  This was crucial information I was missing when I wrote the previous entry (below) about the elephant parade up the main street.

So who won the mayoral election for the Sitakunda municipality?  Shafiul Alam, alias Nayek Shafi, a.k.a. the umbrella.

I sent a quick message to Harriet in Sylhet (where they were also holding elections) to enquire about the victor in her city corporation, as we'd had a close encounter with the bird candidate and her hordes of supporters the week before and I was interested to see if she'd got up.  But no... Sylhet's winner was Badaruddin Kamran, a.k.a. the pineapple!

Quick trip to Sylhet

After a week of work that was frustrating for various reasons, I made a last-minute decision to visit Harriet, one of the other AYADs who is living in Sylhet.  I rang Haz Bag on Thursday morning after an encounter with one of my colleagues that left me with steam pouring out my ears.  The idea of visiting her occurred to me once her phone was ringing.  I knew May was also going to visit her on the weekend, so hanging out with the two of them would be just what the doctor ordered.  The 3 or so rings it took Harriet to answer was all the thinking time I needed.  "I've had a shit week, I'm coming to visit."

Now, if anybody reading this isn't already familiar with the geography of Bangladesh, Sylhet is not the most logical choice for a day trip.  If you look at a map with markers on all the places where there are AYADs, Sylhet is pretty much the furthest away I could go.  But, in a way that can only be described as crazy Bangladeshi logic, it works out really well to go for the day as long as one doesn't mind some overnight travel.  The bus trip up was not so great but luckily Harriet was good at keeping me on the go the whole day, so I didn't have time

 to stop and feel tired.

The only photo I took of my time in Sylhet was when I first arrived, at 7am on the Friday morning.  This little fella was asleep on the ground in what looked like a most uncomfortable position.

About 30 seconds after this photo was taken, some smart-arse man walked past and poked the kid with his umbrella.  Which was highly uncalled-for, in my humble opinion.

I did actually get up to far more interesting things in Sylhet than not-so-sneakily taking photos of street kids... numerous cups of cha, eating out, walking along the river, trespassing in a tea garden, purchasing a train ticket back to Chittagong (which was far more complicated than it needed to be).

So after spending a nice relaxing day with Haz Bag and Maysie Moo, I got on the overnight train back to the Shit - sharing a cabin with a lovely lady and her teenage son, who thankfully let me get straight to sleep instead of quizzing me about my name, country and marital status.  The trip was fan-bloody-tastic.  Lying down, I fell asleep about half an hour after we pulled out of Sylhet station, and woke up about 10km from Chittagong feeling refreshed and ready to go straight back to work.  I've decided I never want to catch the long-distance buses in Bangladesh ever again!

Local elections, Bangladeshi-style

There are local elections for the Sitakund Upazilla coming up in October. The propaganda campaigns have begun... The town is covered with the typical posters like you'd see in Australia before an election (except in black and white, on paper rather than corrugated plastic card but still featuring photos taken a minimum of 5 years ago).

There are also lots of papier mache fish and other shapes decorating the streets.

Today, I also saw a papier mache elephant with some kind of effigy in a saluting pose being processed down the main street with lots of people following it. I'm not sure which candidate's minions created this masterpiece, but if I was allowed to vote - I'd vote for this guy.

Go to sleep... Over-tired ramblings

Instead of getting to bed at a reasonable hour, I am up late writing and listening to Christmas carols.  Yes... in July.  I should probably warn all my fellow volunteers here to get the hell out of Bangladesh at Christmas time or risk being forced to sing all 5 verses of Good King Wenceslas (come on, it's a story song - it just doesn't make sense without all 5 verses!) and being given home-made carol books complete with spelling mistakes from Henley Catholic parish ("oofspring of the Virgin's womb", "Oh conme all ye faithful" etc) for my own amusement.

Carly came to visit on Friday.  After giving her instructions on how to take a local bus from Chittagong to Sitakunda, she managed to make it here in one piece.  For some inexplicable reason, the bus didn't drop her off at the usual spot.  Hence I was riding around in a CNG for about 20 minutes trying to find her.  At one point while passing the village where Moriam (the cook at work) lives, people started waving me over telling me my friend was there.  I asked, "Bideshi friend?"  Yes, yes!  Turns out this "bideshi" was in fact Moriam's 11-year-old daughter Sheuli, who is remarkably Bangladeshi-looking for a bideshi.  So Sheuli agreed to jump in the CNG with me, even though I was unable to tell her where we were going or what we were doing.  Surprisingly, this time was not because of the language barrier but because I really did have no bloody idea where Carly could be.

After I managed to locate her, we had a lovely day.  Carly has already written a good account so I can't be arsed doing it again but will instead attempt to put in a link to her blog here.  (If it's underlined and a different colour, it means I succeeded.  If not, go to http://oneyearinbangers.blogspot.com and try your luck at finding it.)  I feel her account of our train adventure home was somewhat lacking in detail, however, but again I can't be arsed right now.  Save that for another rainy day.

This morning I woke early and hopped into a CNG with my new bike!  (The exclamation mark was hardly warranted there, but whenever I talk about my new bike I just get so excited and a full stop didn't seem to convey this excitement effectively enough.)  I ended up making the whole journey in the CNG, which cost 10 times as much as the bus fare but in keeping with the general theme of this post, I couldn't be arsed getting out of the CNG, arguing with the bus people over (a) the fare and (b) the logistics of getting my bike on and off the roof of the bus.

The bike has seriously improved my street cred rating with the 10- to 15-year-old boys in Sitakunda.  Well (that's a bit of a sweeping generalisation), with Rohman (Moriam's 13-year-old son) and the little boy who lives across the lane (as opposed to the beneficiary of Baa Baa Black Sheep's 3rd bag full of wool, the little boy who lives DOWN the lane) whose name I can never remember.

Rohman always says hello and is very polite to me, but has thus far not displayed the same amount of interest or affection as his sisters or mother.  But today, he was all smiles and proudly told me he was able to ride a bike (a surprisingly rare skill here).  He took me to the rickshaw repair shop to get the tyres pumped up, ran after me when I took it for a test ride and nearly fell over with excitement when I asked him if he wanted to have a go.  This reaction confirmed that Rohman will be the person who inherits my bike after I leave.  I'm so tempted to buy a bike for him now though, (a) cos I know he'll love it and (b) cos it means I'll have someone with a bit of local knowledge who doesn't give me the creeps or the shits to go cycling with.

The little boy who lives across the lane normally runs away from me when I say hello, so for him to approach me and ask about the bike was really brave.  He also nearly fell over when I said he could have a go on the bike.  He again narrowly escaped falling over, this time when he was riding the bike which is really far too big for him.  Unable to reach the ground, he had to mount and dismount next to some steps which probably looked more hairy than it actually was.  I didn't want to be responsible for any injuries in the bike's first 24 hours in Sitakunda!

I've been quite jealous since seeing a Bangladeshi woman on a motorbike in town the other day, so I think the bike might just restore me to "coolest woman in Sitakunda" status.