Getting There in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh there are a few main forms of transportation.  Of course, the main one is the rickshaw.  If you need to go very far, though, there's boats, busses and trains.  For our trip to Srimangal, we opted for the four and a half hour train ride.  Here's what our station looked like at 6:45 in the morning.

When we arrive anywhere in this country, we tend to draw a crowd.  How much of it is our skin color and how much of it is the "cute baby," as I'm constantly called we will never be sure.  In the picture below, taken at the Srimangal train station, you can see a typical crowd including everything from the burqa-ed woman on the left to the naked child on the right.

Of course, my favorite part of these crowds is the new friends I can make.

Bowman Gets Out of Dhaka

Last Friday I got to leave Dhaka.  Zach and I decided to go to Srimangal and to let our parents come, too.  We had lots of fun getting out of Dhaka on a four-hour train and then spending two and a half days seeing some of Sylhet's attractions.  We traveled around in this jeep most of the time, although we did have a couple rickshaw and bike rides that you'll see later.

The main attraction of Sylhet is its tea estates.  The British people brought tea to the area around the 1850s and there have been tea gardens here ever since, although now at least half of them are owned by Bengalis.  On Friday afternoon, we stopped for seven-layer tea.  While it did look pretty cool, it didn't taste nearly as good as the white tea we ordered at the same shop.  Mom hasn't found an exact recipe yet, but she does know that to make the white tea, you actually use green tea, ginger and lemon.  Yum!

Besides drinking tea, we spent much of our time walking through vast tea estates.  Apparently tea plants actually grow to the size of trees, but they're trimmed to elbow-level for ease of picking.  It sounds like that's the only thing that is done for the ease of the tea-pickers, who must pick 24 kilograms of tea a day just to make 48 Taka (which is about $0.70).  I was pretty upset when I heard that's all these hard-working women make.  Is there anything we can do about it?  Does Mom need to stop drinking tea?

One of the most fun things we did in Srimangal was rent bikes and find this little beach area for a picnic. I'm loving sand these days.  In fact, I'm loving it so much that I mixed it up with my sandwich and carrots and ate it all together that afternoon.

After lunch, it was time to hop back on the bikes.  Check out the orange one Mom got to ride.  Apparently it was so nice that the shop owner didn't even want to unwrap it.  He told her to use it with all the plastic still attached.  I guess that saves a cleaning job later.

After a morning of hiking through Lawachara National Rainforest Park, Mom and I tried some fresh coconut milk.  While refreshing, it's not nearly as sweet as I was hoping for.  

All-in-all, it was a relaxing trip out of this city of thirteen-million.  The morning jogs and walks through the rice paddies outside of our hotel were the best part.  For a few moments, I didn't even see any other people, which hasn't happened to me much in the past eight months in Bangladesh.  

Samaritan Kaliyanikanda Primary School

Hi, everyone!  I just wanted to check in and tell you how much fun I've been having lately.  For one thing, I've discovered swinging.

More importantly, though, last weekend Mom and I got to visit a village about four hours north of Dhaka right next to the Indian border.  We went because this good-looking family

including the Bangla language teacher for Dad's school wanted to share a part of their hearts with us.  They have worked hard over the past months to get a school that was closed for many years up and running in the husband's home village.  While the school was closed, many of the kids in the area just didn't get to go to school at all.  Now that they've overseen the replacing of part of the roof and renovation of the bathrooms, and taken care of providing books and teachers, the school is up and running again.  

Don't they look happy for the opportunity to learn to read, write and add in Bangla, Garo and English, as well as to learn about Jesus love for them?  Right now it's open to kindergardeners through third graders six days a week

I hope to go and walk through the rice fields and sing Bangla songs with them again someday.  Until then, will you keep the kids from Samaritan Kaliyanikanda Primary School in your prayers?  They're hoping to raise enough funds to keep adding grades each year so they have every chance at success in life.

Girja

Our friend holds me on another day while he shares that his "body is sick, but spirit is well!"

A couple of weekends ago I got to go to Bangla church (girja).  As I finished up my run with Mom and Dad, one of our friends who works as a guard for our building flagged us down.  He said his church was having a special service and gave us forty minutes for naps, snacks and showers.  Then, he came with his brother, niece and a CNG to get us.  

His church was meeting for the week in one room of an apartment that they use as an outreach center.  We sat on the floor and met all forty-five or so of the attendees as they came in.  Many were university students, one was the mother of our friend and five of the other men, and others were kids like me.  It was really a treat to sing along what I could pick up of the Bangla worship (led by one man with a guitar) and listen to the sermon (translated into English) and see the passion with which my friend and all of our new friends praised Jesus.  They have much harder lives than I think I ever will, and in spite of, or because of, that seem to appreciate all they have as His followers with such joy.  

Plus, we all got to laugh across cultures as one man introduced himself to my dad saying, "I'm Simon," and Dad responded with, "and I'm Peter."  Bangla, Kenyan and American people all laughed at the humor we can get from a shared New Testament context.

More Like Dad Every Day

Dad's favorite food is pizza.

I tried it for the first time last weekend.  (Don't worry, health conscious readers, Mom made whole wheat crust and homemade sauce and I had the veggie one, not Dad's piece with salami on it.)

Zach helped me figure out what to do with it.

I Hope I'm as Good a Husband as Dad Someday

When Mom tries new recipes like this whole wheat bread, he leaves encouraging notes like this:

And when I make big (yes, BIG) messes on their bed because Mom lets me play diaperless after my bath, he calmly changes the sheets while she dunks me right back in that bath.

Finger Foods

Thanks so much for letting me feed myself, Mom!  I'll eat oatmeal any day if we can do it like this.  Hey, while I've got your attention, could I ask you to take off this onsie that you put on me about 45 minutes ago?  It's kind of sticky.

Rolling Blackouts, or Why I Sometimes Ditch You on Skype

This is the street just two blocks down from my building.  Mine has just as many criss-crossed, jumble-bundled power lines.  I thought this was normal until Mom told me it's not what power lines look like at home.  She told me they are like this here because whenever a new apartment is finished, a new line is simply added on to the old ones and tied or cut in wherever it can fit.  

I worried that this might be dangerous or cause some confusion, but she said not to fear.  There are many bamboo ladders available to fix said wires.  She pointed out the one below while we were walking today.

I realized the men I've seen climbing around on those are not just playing on a giant jungle gym, but actually working to correct electricity problems.  They like to just lean their ladders right on the wires they're trying to untangle.  Sounds fun to me!

Of course, sometimes there are electricity problems that these men can't fix, or that are actually power outages.  In order to understand my Bangladeshi life, you need to understand these power outages.

Fact number one: It's getting hotter here.  

Fact number two: The heat makes people use more electricity.  They need their air conditioners and fans a whole lot more in these dry summer and the coming monsoon months.  

Fact number three: Dhaka does not have enough electricity for all thirteen million people who live here.  

So, people in Dhaka are using more electricity than is available.  Power companies use planned rolling blackouts to avoid accidental blackouts for the whole city.  That means different parts of the city do not have electricity at different parts of the day.  Our building loses power about six times a day right now, for about an hour at a time.  Back in October, it was about twice that much.

Of course, foreigners and other people with money live in apartment buildings that have backup generators.  Our park even has a backup generator.  We're not sure what for.

You can usually tell how much money people have by what their generators run.  If you are rich, your generator runs everything in your house, even the air conditioning units.  If you are pretty rich, your generator might take a little longer to turn on, but still runs most things.  Our generator runs four fans and four lights in our house.  If you don't have money, you probably don't have a generator.  Just imagine all of the people trying to sleep on these 80 and 90 degree nights with not even the whisper of a fan in a building so close to the next one that there is no hope for a breeze.  

Now you know a little about two reasons our modem might stop working.  A line might have been tangled with some bouganvilla, or Dhaka might be saving energy for someone else.  Either way, I'm thankful for the fan in my room and the chance to have air conditioning part of the day.  Please pray for the people who don't have either!

How To: Date Night in Dhaka

So, your Mom and Dad would like to go on a date, huh?  The third since you were born almost eleven months ago, right?  Let me give you some tips.

Step 1: Get Dad to give you your bath so Mom can finally brush her hair for the day.  Splash a lot so he has to think about changing his shirt.

Step 2: After a long and drawn-out bedtime process during which you act exceptionally awake, allow them to leave and think they have some time to enjoy themselves.  In fact, allow them to take a fifteen-minute rickshaw, walk another ten minutes to a restaurant called Bamboo Shoot, order and get food while you sleep through the one-hour power outage in your building.

Step 3: Wake up when the back-up generator for your building turns off.  It's OK, the greatest babysitter around, Uncle Ben, will come and hold you, but Mom and Dad will still have to hop a couple of rickshaws and tell the drives to "tara-tari jan" so they can get back to you soon.

Step 4: When they return with most of their food in take-out boxes, look very alert and grumpy and refuse to go back to bed.  This will start to make them grumpy, too, so you can all be grumpy together.

Step 5: Eventually, they'll have to give in.  You know that fancy Swiss ice cream Dad made sure was in the freezer for the end of their date?  Well, they'll have to eat it quickly and then give you the empty box and spoon to play with.  Hooray!  Date Night Success.

Welcome Home, Dad!

Dad got home at 6 yesterday morning, and I was really excited to see him!  I woke up right away and used him as a jungle gym while he tried to fall asleep.  Finally, Mom had to take me for a run to give Dad a couple hours of rest.  (He needed that because their journey from Darjeeling, India, across the border at Chagra-Banda and then all the way to Dhaka took twenty-four hours!)

Mom wonders if any of you pastor types can come up with a good analogy here about how these prayers end up in heaps while prayers offered to a living God reach the heights and survive the elements.

Later in the day, Dad showed us pictures of the thirty-kilometer trek he coordinated for sixteen of his students and three of his colleagues.  It was fun to see because it intersected the trek we did in October, but now many more flowers are out and it wasn't so rainy.  

Dad was really proud of how well his students hiked and encouraged one another.  He felt a little badly about the fact that when some local kids joined them for a game of 500 in one of the villages they hiked through, the kid ended up with a bloody nose, but other than that there were no injuries or problems.  

I spent most of the afternoon helping Dad unpack and inspecting the tea he brought back.  Did you know that Darjeeling has over 80 tea plantations and three tea harvesting seasons?

Just Me and Mom for Seven Days

Dad is doing this

(trekking)

here

(outside of Darjeeling, India)

 on a trip he coordinated for the Year 10 and 11 (ninth and tenth grade) students from his school so it is just me and momma at home.  Boy, am I having fun convincing her to let me share her bed every night.  Shhh...don't tell Dad.