It is once again time for the abridged and abbreviated “catch up” version of the blog. I won’t even begin to make excuses…
I woke up Tuesday morning to find a giant cockroach on the floor about two feet from my bed, and spent the better part of a half hour trying to flick it toward and out the door. I should’ve taken that as an omen. School began with an oral exam, during which I zoned out and repeated a question back to the teacher three times (instead of providing an answer to the question). Tired and not quite “with it,” I wondered why she kept asking me the same question… oops!
During the class break, everyone was back to complaining about the structure of the classes, etc., and I nearly lost my mind. Once again, I proposed that we provide constructive solutions instead of complaints, and once again they all looked at me like I was crazy. I grabbed the white board marker anyway, and said, “Don’t talk about what you don’t like, tell me what it is you want.” It went pretty well, and I ended up spending part of my afternoon writing up a neat, bulleted three page list for the teachers that included all of the agreed upon suggestions.
I skipped out on lunch, seizing the opportunity to have some quiet time (for the first time so far!). Two and a half weeks of being constantly surrounded by people is too much.
In the late afternoon, we had a lecture on Islam and Hinduism, given by the program director. The information provided was not new, and as a result was rather boring.
Tuesday evening was uneventful.
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Wednesday’s class was painful, as we attempted to read through a children’s book. Here’s my theory: Kids know how to talk before they learn to read… so shouldn’t languages be taught the same way?
After class, my day improved rapidly. First, I went to lunch with one of my roommates at a Vietnamese restaurant, which was pretty good. Then we went shopping for clothes… which is to say she went shopping and I people watched… I’m not terribly interested in shopping at home, and am equally uninterested here, especially when my options are simply different colored sacks with M.C. Hammer-style pants. On the way home, however, we stumbled upon a store called Westec’s, which featured a random assortment of western-style clothing. I was OVERJOYED to find a pair of jeans for about $10 USD. I bought them without hesitation, and with full knowledge that wearing jeans would probably raise my core temperature about five degrees. At this point, wearing anything with a zipper fly and a button seems as close to America as I could get.
I went home completely satisfied and remained so for the remainder of the evening, confident that the day couldn’t get any better. And then… as these things tend to go, it did get better. I watched Little Miss Sunshine, one of my all-time favorite movies, with one of my roommates. No matter how many times I see it, I still think it’s hilarious.
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Thursday’s class was better, incorporating many of the suggestions we had provided the teachers with in our write-up. After class, I met with my conversation partner, Farina. We went to an Italian place called “Bella Italia,” ate pizza, and talked about things that were of importance/interest to her, including corruption in Bangladesh (more rampant than you and I could even imagine) and women’s roles in society. Farina and her family truly seem both very ethical and comparatively liberal. She said that sometime she would have me over to meet her parents and brother… that will be cool. We got stuck in traffic on the way home (Dhaka traffic makes D.C. traffic seem like a Sunday drive), and consequentially, I missed a scheduled lecture on Bangladesh politics, given by a representative from the U.S. Embassy. Luckily, from my classmates reports, it doesn’t sound like I missed anything, as the man who gave the lecture was ill prepared and stumbled through an hour-long presentation.
Thursday night is the beginning of the weekend, and the members of my group, after three weeks of studying, were ready to have fun. About half of the group paid 2000 taka to get into a hotel party, which had a DJ and… you guessed it, alcohol. They reported having a good time – not getting home ‘til about 5:30 a.m. Who would’ve thought Bangladesh had a party scene?
The rest of us went to dinner at an amazing restaurant called Dhoni. We had the most wonderful Bangladeshi and Indian food – the best food I’ve had since being here. While there, we got a call from Ali Akbar – a painter whom we’d met at Jamal Ahmed’s party last week – and he joined us. Ali Akbar (who has the kind of name that just needs to be said in full) is a Bangladeshi native who went to college in the States and never left. He currently lives and teaches in Dallas. He showed up with a bracelet made of jasmine for each of the six girls there, and later paid for dinner for everyone (the bill came to less than $30 for the seven of us). “You’re in Bangladesh,” he said by way of explanation, “This is what the Bengalis do.” We walked around as a group for awhile before stumbling upon a Hookah bar, where we proceeded to spend a couple of hours. We left when they closed down at midnight, and when we got home I watched the documentary “Wordplay” with a couple roommates. I mostly stayed up out of curiosity as to when the others would return from the party, but by 2:30 a.m. tiredness overcame curiosity.
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Friday I slept in until 11 a.m., and was still the first person awake in my apartment. Eventually, a few of us walked to Mango Café, where we had some lunch and attempted to study for Sunday’s exam. The afternoon went by quickly, and at 6:30, we were scheduled to attend a “reception” at the home of an Embassy representative. The other guests were Bengalis on their way to Seattle to spend 5 weeks in a home-stay environment learning about American culture. The whole occasion was completely awkward as the Bengalis seemed incredibly reluctant to talk to us. Hence, we stood around in a circle and talked to each other, and the Bengalis did the same. I’m not sure how to evaluate that, but it doesn’t seem to align with the reason for either group’s existence. Returning to the house, we found that it was spaggetti night… sort of. The pasta was spaghetti, but the sauce was composed not of tomatoes, but of ground beef with tamarind and cardamom. Still, it was pretty good. That night, the entire group gathered in my apartment and we played Bangla charades, which was pretty disastrous (and pretty funny) given our limited vocabularies.
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Saturday we went to a Hindu temple, where one of our teachers, Shanta, performed the Hindu rituals and invited us to join her if we wanted. I participated in a couple of rituals… one of which was lighting some incense to make an offering to the goddess of wind (smoke/wind you get the idea). Anyway, I was holding the incense in my hand and moving them toward the flames when Shanta grabbed my wrist and jerked it back. “Noreen! Right hand!” she exclaimed. I’m still used to being able to use both of my hands no matter what I am doing, so I had been completely unaware of the fact that I was essentially offering a sacrifice with my “toilet hand” (as the left hand is considered to be reserved for toilet duty in much of South Asia). I was definitely embarrassed, but Shanta wasn’t upset, realizing I was completely unconscious of my actions and what they implied.
After leaving the temple, we stopped by the National Language Martyrs Memorial near Dhaka University. http://search.com.bd/banglapedia/HT/L_0063.htm In essence, what happened at this location in 1952 was similar to the student protests in Tiananmen Square, but rather than demonstrating for free speech, students were demonstrating to have Bangla, rather than just Urdu, remain a national language, as was being denied by West Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947 (during which time Bangladesh was called East Pakistan). We weren’t given any explanation during the visit, so I only know what I had previously read about the occasion.
The trip home took over an hour. Traffic was terrible, and the driver of our van was worse. I felt incredibly carsick, and couldn’t wait to get out… By the time we got home, I felt horrible (as did most of the people in my van) and chose to lie down for awhile. I ended up napping for a few hours, then got up to study for a couple of hours. After some idle chatter with the roommates, I went to bed.
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I bombed the Sunday morning test (40 out of 100) despite the fact that I had studied for at least 5 hours over the weekend. Oh well.
After class, I went back to Dhoni with one of my roommates, and we had an excellent lunch. We tried to find an NGO to volunteer with while we are here, but our directory must be pretty outdated, because we tried three different places and none of them were still located where the directory listed them. By the time we returned, it was time for our afternoon lecture.
The lecture was given by Shamshur Chowdry, recently retired Ambassador to the United States, more widely known for his prominent role during the Liberation War. He told an amazing story of his involvement before the war, his assignment by Zia to be the one who continually re-read the Declaration of Independence over a radio broadcast after Zia had initially read it. Chowdry had the original Declaration of Independence in his pocket when he was wounded and captured by the Pakistani army only a couple of weeks later. (The document did not survive the war.) He told of his 8 months as a POW, of the various ways he was tortured, of the option he was given (and refused) to sign a statement incriminating two individuals of conspiracy in exchange for his freedom, and of his subsequent transfer to solitary confinement awaiting the death penalty. He survived only because India invaded and the Pakistanis granted independence. It was definitely an amazing talk, and I’m glad we had the opportunity to hear a firsthand account of the war from Chowdry.
A quick dinner, some homework, and a couple of phone calls brought the evening to a close. Ryan & Kyle – Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you, but it sounded like you were having a lot of fun playing outside. I love you both very much!!!
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I’m writing this while it is still Monday, but can already tell you that my day was uninteresting. I went to class, grabbed a quick lunch, then came home to an empty apartment and wrote this blog entry. Everyone else is on a field trip to the Liberation War Museum, and since I already went, I got permission to skip it today. I’ve got a bit of homework to do before reading “A Golden Age,” which is a novel about the Bangladesh Liberation War.
If you made it to the end of this incredibly long post, I congratulate you. I’ll post some pictures later tonight, once my computer battery gets a bit of charge.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The Foriegn Ministry
After class on Monday, we loaded into two large vans for a trip to the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry, which is the equivalent of our State Dept. After our experience at the U.S. Embassy, we all had dismal predictions of waiting outside the Foreign Ministry, only to eventually be turned away.
Fortunately, this was not the case. We were greeted eagerly upon our arrival and ushered into a room in which well worn sofas lined the walls. The building was musty, the way you’d expect a haunted house to smell, and the air conditioning wasn’t working. We sat politely on the couches while a man explained to us that we were going to meet some people who were at the Ministry for a “special training,” and that we would have the opportunity to speak to them about why we chose to study Bangla.
The people, as it turns out, were the equivalent of our foreign service officers, each of whom had between two and nine years of experience. We filed into the room where their training session was being held, and they stood as we entered. They were all seated around folding tables arranged in a “u” shape, and we sat on chairs around the circumference of the room. They were as unsure of why we were there as we were ourselves, that much was evident. The man who had greeted us at the entrance asked each of us to introduce ourselves, where we were going to school, what we were majoring in, and why we were interested in learning Bangla. It seems like we went through that information 20 times in the first two days of the program (getting to know each other), and the information rolled off of our tounges. Then the room was silent. The man asked the Ministry employees to introduce themselves and their disciplines, and they did so – then the room fell silent again. We were encouraged to open a dialogue, and a couple of students ventured to do so by asking questions about where the Ministry employees had previously been posted. Their questions were met with dry, succinct answers. Then it was their turn to ask questions of us. They asked how we plan to use Bangla in the future. One woman (who received a Fulbright to study patterns of language development in Bangladesh) began to explain what she planned to research. A man promptly cut her off, saying, “I understand, I understand… but what about YOU?” he asked, gesturing to one of only three men in our group. It was a textbook case of how women are treated here (in general). Men scarcely talk to women, only to each other. There are many shops – particularly tea shops - where women cannot even enter. While educated women are treated with slightly more respect, there is clearly not gender equality by any means. The awkward silence that fell after the man cut her off was unbreakable, and we were dismissed, then led into yet another room.
In this room, we sat around a large wooden conference table in rickety chairs. A man, whom I understood to be the equivalent of an SES, came in to greet us, and we were served tea while we spoke to him. “So,” he said, “I have heard that people think Bangladesh is a backwards country and that we are behind the times. Now that you are here, what do you think?” There was only one right answer to the question, and someone bravely began to elaborate on how forward thinking Bangladesh is. I, however, looked around the dimly lit room. It was clearly the receiving area for guests, and yet the wallpaper revealed streaks where the ceiling had leaked, and the china cabinet proudly displayed a tarnished silver tea set. I thought of our “luxury” apartments, with the electricity that works only occasionally and the plumbing that works even less often. I thought of the “ambulance” we had seen on the way to the Ministry – a man whose leg was soaked in blood crammed into the back of a van with five other people, only two of whom were attending to him – the siren wailing weakly against the strains of traffic while the vehicle moved at a snails pace for the twenty minutes we were beside it on the road. I was immediately glad that I hadn’t been the one called upon to give my opinion on Bangladesh’s progress in the 21st century.
At last, the agonizing and awkward meeting was over, and we climbed back into our vans. It was a strange occasion, especially when contrasted with our visit to the U.S. Embassy. After all, the Bangladeshis had taken the time to meet with us, and a relatively high-ranking official had sat with us for tea. Their hospitality, though forced, was still a step up from the American performance.
After doing some homework and eating dinner, I invited another American I had met to come over for a movie. She is a University of Chicago student here for six weeks, studying the contrast in dietary habits between university students and their parents. Why she is doing that research here is a mystery to me, and I didn’t press for more details. It was obvious when I met her on the street the other day, though, that she nervous about being somewhere so foreign without any language skills at all. In fact, she’s probably wondering why she’s here too. I showed her our cockroaches, which disgusted her thoroughly, before attempting to watch a poorly pirated movie. In the end, we gave up on the movie and watched the BBC news. About 15 minutes after Jenny left, she called. I answered “Hello?” and was greeted with “You suck.” This caught me off guard for a minute, until she said, “Guess what I saw?” It registered quickly… Jenny had found her very own cockroaches. “Welcome to Bangladesh,” I quipped.
Fortunately, this was not the case. We were greeted eagerly upon our arrival and ushered into a room in which well worn sofas lined the walls. The building was musty, the way you’d expect a haunted house to smell, and the air conditioning wasn’t working. We sat politely on the couches while a man explained to us that we were going to meet some people who were at the Ministry for a “special training,” and that we would have the opportunity to speak to them about why we chose to study Bangla.
The people, as it turns out, were the equivalent of our foreign service officers, each of whom had between two and nine years of experience. We filed into the room where their training session was being held, and they stood as we entered. They were all seated around folding tables arranged in a “u” shape, and we sat on chairs around the circumference of the room. They were as unsure of why we were there as we were ourselves, that much was evident. The man who had greeted us at the entrance asked each of us to introduce ourselves, where we were going to school, what we were majoring in, and why we were interested in learning Bangla. It seems like we went through that information 20 times in the first two days of the program (getting to know each other), and the information rolled off of our tounges. Then the room was silent. The man asked the Ministry employees to introduce themselves and their disciplines, and they did so – then the room fell silent again. We were encouraged to open a dialogue, and a couple of students ventured to do so by asking questions about where the Ministry employees had previously been posted. Their questions were met with dry, succinct answers. Then it was their turn to ask questions of us. They asked how we plan to use Bangla in the future. One woman (who received a Fulbright to study patterns of language development in Bangladesh) began to explain what she planned to research. A man promptly cut her off, saying, “I understand, I understand… but what about YOU?” he asked, gesturing to one of only three men in our group. It was a textbook case of how women are treated here (in general). Men scarcely talk to women, only to each other. There are many shops – particularly tea shops - where women cannot even enter. While educated women are treated with slightly more respect, there is clearly not gender equality by any means. The awkward silence that fell after the man cut her off was unbreakable, and we were dismissed, then led into yet another room.
In this room, we sat around a large wooden conference table in rickety chairs. A man, whom I understood to be the equivalent of an SES, came in to greet us, and we were served tea while we spoke to him. “So,” he said, “I have heard that people think Bangladesh is a backwards country and that we are behind the times. Now that you are here, what do you think?” There was only one right answer to the question, and someone bravely began to elaborate on how forward thinking Bangladesh is. I, however, looked around the dimly lit room. It was clearly the receiving area for guests, and yet the wallpaper revealed streaks where the ceiling had leaked, and the china cabinet proudly displayed a tarnished silver tea set. I thought of our “luxury” apartments, with the electricity that works only occasionally and the plumbing that works even less often. I thought of the “ambulance” we had seen on the way to the Ministry – a man whose leg was soaked in blood crammed into the back of a van with five other people, only two of whom were attending to him – the siren wailing weakly against the strains of traffic while the vehicle moved at a snails pace for the twenty minutes we were beside it on the road. I was immediately glad that I hadn’t been the one called upon to give my opinion on Bangladesh’s progress in the 21st century.
At last, the agonizing and awkward meeting was over, and we climbed back into our vans. It was a strange occasion, especially when contrasted with our visit to the U.S. Embassy. After all, the Bangladeshis had taken the time to meet with us, and a relatively high-ranking official had sat with us for tea. Their hospitality, though forced, was still a step up from the American performance.
After doing some homework and eating dinner, I invited another American I had met to come over for a movie. She is a University of Chicago student here for six weeks, studying the contrast in dietary habits between university students and their parents. Why she is doing that research here is a mystery to me, and I didn’t press for more details. It was obvious when I met her on the street the other day, though, that she nervous about being somewhere so foreign without any language skills at all. In fact, she’s probably wondering why she’s here too. I showed her our cockroaches, which disgusted her thoroughly, before attempting to watch a poorly pirated movie. In the end, we gave up on the movie and watched the BBC news. About 15 minutes after Jenny left, she called. I answered “Hello?” and was greeted with “You suck.” This caught me off guard for a minute, until she said, “Guess what I saw?” It registered quickly… Jenny had found her very own cockroaches. “Welcome to Bangladesh,” I quipped.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Catching Up!
I’ve definitely fallen behind on the blogging. I originally hoped to post every day, at least until the days got too routine to do so, but it takes up a lot more time than I expected, and classes and homework assignments are getting longer every day. I’m not abandoning the goal of posting every day, but I am going to catch up by providing a summary of the last several days below.
Thursday, June 21:
Truly not much to say. I went to class until 1 p.m., and felt sick (dizzy/lightheaded) the entire time. It sounds like dehydration, but I don’t know how that’s possible because I drink SO MUCH water. I came home, slept ‘til 5 p.m., did some homework, ate some plain rice for dinner, did a little more homework, and went to bed.
Friday, June 22:
I did homework and studied for about three hours, then met up with Farina, my “native” conversation partner. She took me to the Liberation Museum, which is all about the 1971 Liberation War. Museum seems to be a loose term here, as it was more like a house with newspaper clippings tacked all over the walls. The newspaper clippings were not even in chronological order, which was kind of confusing. Farina’s father was a freedom fighter, though, as I had mentioned before, so I knew it was important to her to take me there. When I came home, I had about an hour to relax and get ready for a party at Jamal Ahmed’s house/studio. Jamal Ahmed is a fairly wealthy, fairly well known painter in Bangladesh, and was educated in Dallas, TX. He is also the guy who pulled the bottle of wine out of his pants at our program director’s party last week. His wife prepared a HUGE meal with a variety of different Bangladeshi dishes, and it was all excellent. He also had some musicians singing Bengali folk songs (which later digressed to a few random verses of Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Beatles). Our teachers were also at the party, and, not entirely surprisingly, I like them a whole lot more outside of the authoritarian setting of the classroom.
Saturday, June 23:
After a late night, I slept until 11 a.m.! Upon waking, I began to realize how much studying would be required for Sunday’s test, and felt sort of doomed from the start. I joined up with several other people for a trip to “Coffee World,” a very sterile (comfortingly so) bookstore coffee shop. We all ordered waffles and coffee (yum!), then got down to studying. We were there for six hours, and even then I didn’t know even half of the vocabulary that was fair game for the test. We came home for dinner, then returned to studying late into the night.
Sunday, June 24:
As I walked into the classroom, the teacher was neatly printing (in English) “Welcome to Hell” on the whiteboard. Nothing like a little pre-exam encouragement! The test was a 20 question nightmare. The first 10 questions listed English words for our conversion to Bangla. Sounds easy, right? Not when you had 150 vocab words to learn… the odds of remembering the Bangla word, then writing it correctly in Bangla were pretty slim. I left one blank, as I could only remember the first letter of the Bangla word, and took my best stab at the others. The last 10 questions showed Bangla conjuncts (such as the combined letter for b + d), and asked us to write out the letters that composed the conjunct. I knew a few, guessed at a few, and left the rest blank. It’s been a few years, but I can confidently say that I still don’t like tests!
Sunday night we hung out with some Bangladeshi guys in their 20’s whom we had met at Jamal Ahmed’s party. There are never girls to hang out with because they all have either curfews or husbands. We watched “Borat” together, and after the guys had left we nervously wondered whether they had been offended by the jokes made in the movie (particularly those about all Muslims being terrorists).
I apologize that this post has lacked the detail of my previous postings - but sometimes, you just need to economize!
Thursday, June 21:
Truly not much to say. I went to class until 1 p.m., and felt sick (dizzy/lightheaded) the entire time. It sounds like dehydration, but I don’t know how that’s possible because I drink SO MUCH water. I came home, slept ‘til 5 p.m., did some homework, ate some plain rice for dinner, did a little more homework, and went to bed.
Friday, June 22:
I did homework and studied for about three hours, then met up with Farina, my “native” conversation partner. She took me to the Liberation Museum, which is all about the 1971 Liberation War. Museum seems to be a loose term here, as it was more like a house with newspaper clippings tacked all over the walls. The newspaper clippings were not even in chronological order, which was kind of confusing. Farina’s father was a freedom fighter, though, as I had mentioned before, so I knew it was important to her to take me there. When I came home, I had about an hour to relax and get ready for a party at Jamal Ahmed’s house/studio. Jamal Ahmed is a fairly wealthy, fairly well known painter in Bangladesh, and was educated in Dallas, TX. He is also the guy who pulled the bottle of wine out of his pants at our program director’s party last week. His wife prepared a HUGE meal with a variety of different Bangladeshi dishes, and it was all excellent. He also had some musicians singing Bengali folk songs (which later digressed to a few random verses of Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Beatles). Our teachers were also at the party, and, not entirely surprisingly, I like them a whole lot more outside of the authoritarian setting of the classroom.
Saturday, June 23:
After a late night, I slept until 11 a.m.! Upon waking, I began to realize how much studying would be required for Sunday’s test, and felt sort of doomed from the start. I joined up with several other people for a trip to “Coffee World,” a very sterile (comfortingly so) bookstore coffee shop. We all ordered waffles and coffee (yum!), then got down to studying. We were there for six hours, and even then I didn’t know even half of the vocabulary that was fair game for the test. We came home for dinner, then returned to studying late into the night.
Sunday, June 24:
As I walked into the classroom, the teacher was neatly printing (in English) “Welcome to Hell” on the whiteboard. Nothing like a little pre-exam encouragement! The test was a 20 question nightmare. The first 10 questions listed English words for our conversion to Bangla. Sounds easy, right? Not when you had 150 vocab words to learn… the odds of remembering the Bangla word, then writing it correctly in Bangla were pretty slim. I left one blank, as I could only remember the first letter of the Bangla word, and took my best stab at the others. The last 10 questions showed Bangla conjuncts (such as the combined letter for b + d), and asked us to write out the letters that composed the conjunct. I knew a few, guessed at a few, and left the rest blank. It’s been a few years, but I can confidently say that I still don’t like tests!
Sunday night we hung out with some Bangladeshi guys in their 20’s whom we had met at Jamal Ahmed’s party. There are never girls to hang out with because they all have either curfews or husbands. We watched “Borat” together, and after the guys had left we nervously wondered whether they had been offended by the jokes made in the movie (particularly those about all Muslims being terrorists).
I apologize that this post has lacked the detail of my previous postings - but sometimes, you just need to economize!
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Birthday In Bangladesh
Wednesday was my birthday, and I had a strange feeling all day, sort of wistfulness for a classic, American birthday – hanging out with friends & family, having cake, being embarrassed while people sang to me, etc. This is only strange because I haven’t had that sort of “classic” birthday in years, and have never cared much at all about my birthday.Class was routine and not at all exciting. I had only done one out of three chapter’s worth of homework, and found my eyelids heavy as we learned new letters.
After class we went to the U.S. Embassy for a security briefing. If you’ll recall, we had endeavored to do this once before, and were turned away after 45 minutes of waiting outside. This time was more successful in terms of getting into the building, however, the briefing itself left much to be desired. We were not exactly welcomed at the embassy, but rather herded through the hallways (while I tried my best to peek in every doorway so that I could figure out exactly what it is that they do in embassies) to a conference room (only slightly larger than the one SPI4 uses at DISA). We were met by the Regional Security Officer (RSO), whom, for the sake of how pitiful his briefing was, I’ll not refer to by name. He was a young guy, in his early 30’s who has been at the Bangladesh Embassy for just under two years. To put it mildly, his briefing was not only culturally insensitive on a general level, but downright offensive coming from someone who is supposed to be a diplomatic representative of the U.S. His transgressions were too numerous to recite here, but for starters, he had a very clear delineation between “us” and “them,” which he reminded us of throughout the briefing. I’ll try to quote you some of the high points:
“I’ll give you a brief rundown of the political status,” he said, pulling up a PowerPoint slide with photographs of the leaders of the two main political parties, “Here we have tweedle-dee, and to the right, tweedle-dum.”
“It’s nice being the police in a police state.”
“I haven’t had to do much work since the military started running the show.”
“Sometimes ‘they’ get all riled up after going to the mosque, and, since they have nothing better to do, ‘they’ start demonstrating in the streets.”
He continued to tell us more about localized, common crimes, and continuously cited that we should not use rickshaws as a transportation method because they are “dangerous.” (I should mention now that one-fourth of the Dhaka workforce is rickshaw oriented – whether it be actually driving rickshaws, or repairing them. Rickshaws are the primary means of transport for the average person, especially for us, because we are not literate enough to even attempt using public busses.)
“I drive a Ford Explorer,” he began, seemingly proud of his gas-guzzling monstrosity, “And let me tell you – many a rickshaw have tried to go head to head with me and I win every time.” He then proceeded to tell us, with a degree of pride, how he had once sideswiped a rickshaw, overturning it and throwing both the driver and passenger into the street. He elaborated then how “they” (Bangladeshis) proceeded to throw bricks through the windows of his car.
Why are rickshaws dangerous? Because of people like him.Why do people around the world dislike Americans? Because of people like him.
When the briefing was over, we all filed silently out of the building and back onto our bus, at which point everyone, including our program director, exploded in disbelief over what we had just heard. People started railing against “government employees” who are “all so insipid.” Quietly, and rather unlike me to be so quiet, I pointed out that they were being equally discriminatory with their stereotyping. “Oh that’s right,” someone said, “She’s one of them.” “Yes,” I said, “I’m one of them, and you should know that there are lots of us who are perfectly nice, intelligent people.” No one said anything for a long moment, which I was not sure how to interpret, but then one of my roommates said, “Alright, since it’s your birthday we’ll cut you some slack.”
I did some homework before going out with four others for a b-day dinner. We walked an incredibly long time to get to a Thai restaurant, but it was very good and well worth it.
Returning home, I found several birthday wishes and two excellent “gifts” awaiting me in my email. My friends and co-workers (you are both to me) had made a video of themselves singing “Happy Birthday” and e-mailed it to me. They had also constructed a “Dateline DISA Birthday Edition,” which I loved (there couldn’t have been a better way to make a b-day card for me!). I just want to tell you guys how much that video meant to me – I have never enjoyed hearing that song so much in my entire life. Thank you.
Giving myself a birthday gift, I decided not to finish my homework and went to bed :-)
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