Return to the motherland

As I watched the gorgeous landscape of Canada and northern Michigan pass by from the window of the plane on my last flight, I was not only giddy that I made it back, but also kept giggling because I thought of Sohel asking me about my "motherland" right before I left, hence the title of this post. He's in the middle of the back row in this picture of many of the people I will dearly miss from Bangladesh. Clearly I wrote the rest of this a week ago, but better late than never!

Back row (L-->R): Anis, Sohel, Salam; Front row (L-->R): Rabeya, Sufia, Me, Dr. Sabur

I’m on the way home now, sitting in the Bahrain airport. I just walked by a couple of guys in long white robes and the stereotypical head scarf with a sort of crown-rope to keep it in place (think Yasser Arafat). As I was passing them, a young girl (like 12) who was on my flight from Bangladesh said “These people are real?!” I couldn’t help smiling – I remember thinking the same thing when I was here the first time. Flying into this airport is interesting – there is a weird mix of varying degrees of conservative, traditional dress and extremely progressive dress (like skin tight jeans and shorts with skin tight diamond-studded shirts). In the café I’m sitting in right now the girl is also singing along to “I swear”, which just seems really out of place here. I am curious to know what Bahrain itself is actually like. I think the range of people in the airport might just be a product of Gulf Air operating so many flights linking Asia and Europe with stops here.

Anyway, my last days in Bangladesh were busy, but not really all that eventful. Yesterday I went to meet a man who I thought worked for a company called ACI that distributes a lot of pesticides in Bangladesh, but he turned out to work for the Bangladesh Fertilizer Association, which is more or less an extension of the government. I think I was the only one who didn’t know this going into the meeting. I really didn’t want to know about fertilizer, but asked a few questions anyway so as not to be rude. He referred me to another guy that works for Haychem, another pesticide company that works in Bangladesh. He also works closely with the government. They both painted a picture of a perfectly regulated agriculture system in which there couldn’t possibly be a black market. In fact, one of them incorrectly described a black market as just dishonest businessmen who would stockpile seasonally important products if there were a free market system for fertilizer and pesticides (there isn’t – the government allocates and distributes the major fertilizers and pesticides, although some micronutrient fertilizers are not controlled). So suffice it to say, I’m not sure how true their information was, and the pesticide expert also informed me that farmers use names of just a few pesticides to describe all of them (anything containing carbofuran, for example, is Furadan, even though there are several other products containing carbofuran).

I spent the rest of the last two days buying a few more gifts and packing all my stuff into a duffel bag and cardboard box. I hope the cardboard box stays in one piece all the way to Chicago! Shulma, Bilqis’s housekeeper/cook made me the most delicious chicken and pulao I’ve ever had for lunch, and later Sohel picked me up to go to the airport. I really like Sohel – he’s nice, and not in a creepy way, although sometimes in that sexist way that annoys the hell out of me but is perfectly ok in Bangladesh. His wife is pregnant with their first child, so he told me he would email me when he/she is born.

I’ve been very ready to get out of Bangladesh lately, but now that I’ve actually left it doesn’t seem real. I feel like I’m just going on a trip and I’ll be back in a few months or something. Maybe if I changed out of my salwaar kameez it would feel more real, but I just can’t put jeans back on yet – this is so much more comfortable! Well, I will be home in another 18 hours or so and I will see many of you then. It’s been a great trip, and I’m sure I could say more about it, but this will be all for the blog. I hope you enjoyed following me around Bangladesh, even if it was mostly just Dhaka. See you soon!

Ami ashi taka diboh

Yet another eventful day today - I went to New Market today completely focused on buying all the things I've been meaning to buy since early in the trip but haven't been able to go to New Market to buy at a lower than reasonable price! Therefore I neglected to take any pictures and realized that the only pictures I had of the place were on the phone that I lost...boo. Wahid went with me and helped me out with bargaining since it takes me five minutes to translate prices over 100 taka, and he was amazingly patient with my pickiness, especially buying a lungi. Where do these guys get the bright colored ones?

After my shopping extravaganza we went to one of the parks we tried to go to when there was a holiday a few weeks ago when the park was closed. It is called Lalbagh Fort, which, according to the Lonely Planet book (Wahid couldn't really tell me what the place was about), was never finished because the daughter of the man who was building it at the time died. This was considered a bad omen for the fort, so they stopped construction of the fort's walls. They finished the three buildings inside, including the tomb of the daughter, Pari Bibi. One of the buildings is a kind of museum with paintings, inscriptions, and lots of guns and knives on display. It also has a beautiful view:

Outside the tomb of Pari Bibi

The museum building from the outside

We also revisited the park across from the Parliament building today, so I got a picture of the building that actually does the geometric holes in the wall justice. Yet again, the whimsical look reminds me of Harry Potter - I think this is what the Ministry of Magic would look like if it weren't underground:



I believe I mentioned that Ramadan started at sundown on Wednesday. Last night I went for a walk during Iftar, the meal at the evening prayer call when everyone breaks the fast. The events leading up to Iftar are a madhouse - in front of all the restaurants they have set up an Iftar take-out buffet and crowds of men swarm the tables in the hour or so before Iftar to grab their food and get home or back to their shop in time for the prayer call. Then once people have their food they sit and hover over it until the prayer call starts. After Iftar many of the men head to the mosque to pray - as I recall, Dr. Sabur told me they have to do 32 prostrations or something like that during prayers in Ramadan, but I may have misunderstood him.

Last night was kind of lonely walking around while everyone else was "in" on the whole Iftar process. I was hungry but I certainly hadn't been fasting - I had a small lunch of an omlette sandwich and banana since the usual places weren't open, and I snacked on some crackers when I got home. Today, though I decided not to eat between breakfast (which was at 10, not exactly dawn) and Iftar, which was fine because I didn't get hungry until the last hour or so. Not drinking anything was the bigger problem and I folded on that one - I bought a bottle of water at New Market since I hadn't had enough water before leaving. Anyway, on the way back to Banani, Wahid and I picked up some food at one of those Iftar buffets and had Iftar at my guesthouse, so I didn't feel like such an outsider tonight. I did feel like a bit of a cheat, but hey, I'm not Muslim anyway! It is interesting how many people I saw not fasting today. The restaurants and tea stands that stay open during the day (which is only about half) put up curtains so the non-fasters don't offend/tempt the fasters, but you can still see that people are inside, eating, drinking tea, or smoking, all of which violate the fast. Bilqis told me that about 30% of the people don't fast, but I don't know if that includes the Hindus (10-15%).

An interesting night in Banani

This has been an interesting night. On the way home my translator asked me if I was scared when I was on the boat on Friday...hmmm. Now both he and Bilqis have expressed some fear of boats since I've been here, which I find kind of silly from people living in a country full of rivers. Later tonight I ate dinner at Star Kabab and saw the biggest cockroach I've ever seen in my life - I honestly thought it was a mouse at first. My stomach contemplated revolt since the critter was roaming around the place where I just ate dinner, but it decided to stay calm in the end. Later still I had some deliciously overpriced gelato (it cost nearly as much as my dinner, but the frerro rochet flavor was amazing) and then went to the market to look for a stationary shop that was still open for a new planner. I didn't find such a shop so I bought some gum from a stand run by a cross eyed man and a young boy who asked if I was from Pakistan or Australia...but come to think of it he may have been talking about cricket. If he was I must have sounded pretty stupid saying "America" in response since most of us don't even know how to play cricket, myself included. Anyway, that was definitely the most interesting night I've had in Banani, so I thought I'd share.

I'm on a boat!

So many eventful days at the end of this trip! Where to begin? Why not the beginning?

As I mentioned last time, we conducted a focus group in a village just outside of Dhaka after I last wrote. I was getting concerned that I would have to make a big production out of riding on a boat while in a country that is 1/3 underwater during this time of year (wouldn't it be a shame to leave without riding in a boat at least once?), but the fates smiled upon me on the way to the focus group. Friday is the big market day in the area, so the market was blocking the road, and heaven forbid Bilqis and I walk 500 feet to the village, so we drove our car in to a CNG lot of sorts on the riverbank and hopped in a boat for a 5-10 minute ride down the river to the village. It was neat to be on one of the probably hundreds of varieties of boat in Bangladesh that you wouldn't normally see in the US, although not really that eventful on the way to the focus group. The focus group itself was very informative, although it had to be cut short a bit because of the market and the half hour delay in figuring out how to get a couple of overly privileged women past it. I had been to this village before, so many of the farmers recognized me. I remembered some of them, but this one man came up to me and started talking my ear off in Bangla and I didn't remember seeing him before. Apparently he saw me in his house last time I was there and wanted to say hi. On the way back from the focus group, it was around noon on a Friday, so people were starting to come out and play. There were tons of what we guessed were college students blasting music from gigantic speakers strapped to the roof of many boats going down the river. Apparently this place is a popular weekend hang out since it's so close to the city. There was one particularly interesting boatfull of student-looking young men that was driving alongside our boat with a guy in a hot pink fisherman's hat and a bright sky blue shirt dancing like there's no tomorrow on the roof. I couldn't help but laugh - he looked ridiculous! Unfortunately my camera takes forever to start up, so I only got a picture of the tail-end of their boat as they passed us.

The boat

In the boat
Brick kiln, as seen from the boat

After the focus group, I met up with Loida for lunch at Cafe Mango, a restaurant in Gulshan that she visits regularly, but I had yet to experience. It was a cute little place on the second floor of this little alley of somewhat more Western shops - including a hookah lounge with a couple of snakes under a glass panel in front of the door. Lunch was refreshing since we both did a lot of ranting about the cultural difficulties of working in Bangladesh, like not really fitting into the strict social hierarchy, dealing with not fitting the typical female stereotypes, and how much we can't stand certain people we work with (but that would happen anywhere).

Continuing my extremely long and full Friday, I met up with Wahid and we went to the National Botanical Gardens in Mirpur. I wish I had gone earlier so I could go again. I loved it! Certain parts of the gardens reminded me of home, especially because it was surprisingly hilly. I discovered this one legume tree that has really gorgeous red-orange flowers, long green seed pods, and ridiculous multiple compound leaves that I think is really beautiful. Difficult to photograph, though...I think the best way to describe the place is with pictures, so here we go:

Sweet flowers on the legume tree

Eucalyptus

Wahid and I at the Botanical Gardens

Though green, not a plant - this is a CNG, our transport to and from the Gardens.

My next big adventure was on Sunday. As I think I mentioned before, Bilqis bought me a sari a few weeks ago, but I didn't know how to put it on. Well, I'm still not really sure how it works, but I brought my sari to the office on Sunday and Rabeya and Sufia helped me get it on. Now I understand why so many women have switched over to salwaar kameez! If you're as clueless as I was, the way a sari works is you wear a petticoat underneath (basically a long cotton skirt with a drawstring and the little shirt on top) and tie the drawstring extremely tight so you can tuck the sari into the skirt. My kidneys felt a little bruised after wearing the thing for just a few hours, but it was fun to get all dressed up. Sufia bought me a pair of clay earrings and a necklace that supposedly matched my neon-sign-pink sari, so I felt fully Bangladeshi and fully ridiculous, as you can probably tell in the picture. I must have been driving the boys crazy, as Bilqis later pointed out, and judging by the looks on my co-workers' faces. I mean, a pasty white girl with blond hair in a sari rather than a baggy samauri-looking pant suit draws some attention. Anyway, Sufia and I went to the National Museum so that I would have an occasion to wear the sari in the first place. I wish I had bought heels rather than the dirt cheap sandals I bought to wear with the sari (I didn't think clunky Tevas of a different pink would be flattering) because it would have been much easier to walk!

Sari at the office

The museum trip itself was really interesting. Like any museum, it was swarming with school groups, and if you know me at all you know how much I love children...very little. Although even the adults were staring so much I wondered if I had become part of the museum's collection, the children are much bolder and like to stand about six inches away and stare. Really they were pretty well behaved. I was quite surprised when one of the older boys said "Hey, what's up?" to me - I don't think anyone has understood that question when I've used it so far so it was really surprising to hear someone actually say it. Anyway, the museum is huge! It starts off with the geology of Bangladesh, which I find pretty boring, then the biology, which is awesome, then transitions into more cultural displays with a room that more or less describes ethnobotany in Bangladesh (how people use plants to satisfy their needs, wants, etc.), so I also got pretty excited about that. There are displays for the different tribes in the Chittagong hill tracts, tons of Buddhist and Hindu artifacts dating back to the 7th century, a wild upholstered umbrella with pearls and precious metals stitched on to it, and some ridiculous wooden works. Then on the second floor they have a bunch of fancy old weapons and some more fancy decor, Bangladeshi art by the national painter (whose name escapes me), modern Bangladeshi art (which, not surprisingly, prominently features paintings of crowds), and a very nice exhibit detailing the Liberation War. Unfortunately we didn't have a ton of time to spend in the Liberation War exhibit because we spent too much time looking at things in the beginning - I would have like to read more of the displays since I only have a vague understanding of what went on during the war and it seems to have played a key role in forming the national identity. The third floor has a few exhibits of art and cultural stuff from the rest of the world, including a room full of paintings of famous old white men, and one white woman. I didn't spend much time looking, but I don't recall seeing any important South Asian figures, like Gandhi or Mother Teresa, or even non-white figures, like Nelson Mandela or MLK. Interesting choice of portraits...The museum doesn't allow picture taking, and in fact you have to check your purse at the door, so I only have pictures from the outside.

Sufia and I outside the museum

Since then I have finished my data entry and cleaning (sort of) as of 5 pm today! Now I just have a few more measurements and regulations to gather in the next week and I will have successfully completed everything that absolutely must happen here for the project to continue! WooHOO!!! While it's been a fun trip, I'm ready to get back to my "motherland", as Sohel calls it, and see everyone again - only 8 days to go!

Data, meetings, and more data

Not much has been happening over the last few days - I've just been glued to the computer, entering data, cleaning data, analyzing data...kind of boring really. On the side however, I've been arranging meetings with a couple the large development organizations to talk about opportunities for EPRC to collaborate on some of the big livelihood programs that USAID recently gave funding through CARE and ACDI/VOCA. Bilqis and I met with some people heading up the second phase of Strengthening Households' Ability to Respond to Development Opportunities (SHOUHARDO-II) at CARE Bangladesh. They have an uncommonly nice office on the 9th-15th floors of a building in central Dhaka, which I must say has an awesome view. It still left me thinking, was the expense for this office and it's remote controlled everything conference room, generator-supplied security system, etc. really necessary? Couldn't some of that gone to their programs? Even so, I know CARE has a reputation for being one of the more responsible agencies when it comes to allocating their money, and I appreciated the entirely female security staff stationed outside the doors. Our meeting was somewhat informative, but because they are still in the initial stages of rolling out SHOUHARDO-II, they wouldn't/couldn't give us many concrete plans about their projects, so I came out of the meeting unsure of how successful it was for us. Today we met with ACDI/VOCA representatives at our office, and I felt that was a much more successful meeting. Their program, PROSHAR (can't remember exactly what it stands for but the goal is similar to SHOUHARDO), is also in the initial stages, but as they have not yet selected implementing partners, they were much more open to finding ways to collaborate with EPRC. It also sounds like they will be doing a lot of hiring in the near future (to my knowledge, they haven't had any other programs in Bangladesh, at least in the last several years), which may be of benefit to me if I decide to come back to work here rather than joining Peace Corps right away.

Tomorrow we'll be conducting a focus group in the area I visited a while ago just outside of Dhaka. I hope people will still be willing to come on a Friday morning! (Friday is the holy day, kind of like Sunday in the US.) Then I have plans to go to a play or something tomorrow night, and in between I might try to fit in some more data entry. Yesterday I was home sick all day, so I lost some precious time and need to make up for it. Sorry I don't have any pictures or anything all that exciting to share - hopefully I'll squeeze a few more interesting days before I leave in two weeks! Ramadan is coming up starting August 11th, so that promises to be an interesting experience - I'm interested to see what people do when they can't sit around and drink tea during the day...and how I'll be able to find food during the daylight hours.

Of Spiders and Protests

Whew it has been a long time! There is a lot to catch up on, but in a way it's been pretty quiet lately.

So right after I last wrote I took off for Jessore and Khulna (Satkhira, to be precise) for some field work. I only ended up sitting in on one interview for my project while we were there, but I did get to go to some focus groups for a project about embankments and women's empowerment, a school visit and a teacher training for a school-based water, sanitation, and hygiene project, and several other site visits for follow-up on other projects, mostly related to water. Jessore and Khulna are in the southwest region of Bangladesh, but because the area is on slightly higher ground, they are able to farm for most of the year. They still have major arsenic and salinity problems, though, and many of EPRC's projects are focused on making water with safe levels of arsenic and salinity more available for villages in the area.

Insect trap in a kitchen garden

Site visit - This village had both a pond sand filter (which the people are standing on) and a deep tube well installed right next to each other by different NGOs, neither of which were properly maintained.

Focus group on women and embankments - the group was larger later on.

School visit

Other than working, we also had a little fun while we were out. Bilqis, Sufia, and I did some shopping one afternoon and I picked up some nice handicrafts from an NGO's shop. We actually stayed in that NGO's guesthouse, too. At the guesthouse, a giant spider that honestly made me think of Aragog from Harry Potter, was sitting on the wall. I was ok while it stood still and I could keep an eye on it, but I couldn't sleep with that in my room, so unfortunately it met it's end under a shoe I threw at it from the bed. Two days later an identical spider showed up and hid from the broom in the air conditioner. I shared a room with Bilqis that night and then traded rooms with Sufia, who wasn't so freaked out by big, hairy spiders. I also did some slightly adventurous eating while in Jessore - we had quail (roasted whole, only missing the beak and feet), and dishes with small fish, also whole. The idea of eating a whole fish freaked me out at first, but they're satisfyingly crunchy and I've been craving them ever since. The best thing about the trip by far was the scenery, but unfortunately I saw most of it from a moving vehicle, so my pictures didn't turn out so great.

Aragog I next to a four foot fluorescent light bulb. (Aragog II, the Spider Who Lived, not pictured)

Waiting for the train back to Dhaka

Severely flooded area - you could barely see any land for a long time, except where the train tracks are raised.

People actually working on a farm (not something I was able to see on the ground because it was late in the day and no one would continue working if they could stare at me instead)

It's strange how returning to Dhaka feels like coming home, even though I've only been here about 2 months. When we first got back to Dhaka I spent a few days staying with Bilqis and her husband at their apartment. It was a very different experience from staying in the guesthouse, of course, but it is nice to be back in my own place now. While I was staying there, we visited the new flat that they are moving into, and we spent last Friday shopping for furniture. We did go to Bashundhara city (the big fancy shopping mall) to return a sari for Bilqis, and she ended up buying me one as well. She hasn't shown me how to wear it yet, so we'll see how that turns out.

Furniture shopping across from Bashundhara City

Since then life hasn't been terribly interesting. There have been a few more uprisings in the area, one on Tuesday when the students protests a new VAT on their tuition, and one today when the garment workers all over the city protested the new minimum wage. Both protests turned violent, and the student protests were within a few blocks of my guesthouse, but they had moved to another location by the time I was going home from work. I'm not sure if the garment workers on Airport Rd. were part of the protest today, but I certainly wasn't going to head over there to find out.

Today was a bit more interesting than usual for other reasons, too. It was a very busy day for a Friday, and I managed to pack in a facial, shopping, and lunch with Loida and Dawn for Dawn's last day in Bangladesh, buy a postcard, attempt to exchange a shirt, get my salwaars mended and then met up with Wahid later and did some serious walking around Lake Park. We saw one young white girl running there in a t shirt with the sleeves cut out and shorts above the knees, which is extremely revealing for Bangladesh, although I wouldn't have noticed in the US. I'm not really sure how you can live here and completely reject the unspoken dress code, as much as I would also like to get some exercise in something other than a salwaar kameez. I did see a Bangladeshi girl at the park running in a salwaar kameez and I was quite proud of her - running is also almost unheard of unless you're trying to catch a bus, or miss getting hit by a bus.

Surprisingly this hasn't been my usual novel, considering how long I've put off writing this blog, but here are some bonus pictures of the neighborhood to make up for it.

Far Pavilion Guesthouse (where I live)

A rickshaw that I did not subsequently ride. This was very puzzling for the driver.

The American International University in Bangladesh, a major player in the student protests, two blocks from my guesthouse

Om mani padme hum

Other than the fourth of July festivities, last week was pretty uneventful and a little boring...until taking off for Nepal. Nepal was awesome, and I really wish we had more than 2 and a half days to explore it! It is much more tourist-oriented, especially in Thamel, Kathmandu where we stayed, and that evokes a whole different grab-bag of feelings about being a foreigner than being in Dhaka where foreigners are few and far between. The nice thing about it was that people didn't stare, although we did get some remarks the first night about our salwaar kameez (or salwaar kurta in Nepali). Instead, we found it difficult not to stare at our numerous pale-skinned counterparts - I guess Bangladeshi culture is wearing off on us! (To clarify, "we" are Loida, Abbey, and I from Emory, and Katie and Sarah from UVA, all of whom work at ICDDR,B except me.)

Our short trip began with a two-hour delay of our flight from Dhaka on Biman Bangladesh airlines. Our tickets said we would leave at 2:45, but then we got to the airport and the schedule said 3:30. So, having tons of time on our hands we enjoyed the free snacks at "Spices" for Biman customers and eventually went to the gate and witnessed the strangest boarding call we had ever seen. We were sitting at the gate waiting, and then five minutes before our scheduled takeoff everyone in the room magically got up and boarded the plane. There was no announcement, no sign, everyone just got up and got in line. We sat on the runway forever in a smelly sauna of a plane waiting for some luggage issue and eventually took off. The return plane trip was equally eventful as we were felt up no less than 4 times in the Kathmandu airport (by security women) and had our bags thoroughly searched by a very unfriendly woman who confiscated Loida's spices because she "might throw them in someone's face". The actual flight was less eventful, and the Bangladeshi's seem not to care what or who is coming into their country as you can just walk out of the airport without going through so much as a metal detector.

While in Nepal, we spent the first full day in Kathmandu exploring the temples and spending copious rupees on entrance fees. It was really cool to see all the Buddhist prayer wheels, prayer flags, Tibetan (I think) monks praying, and receiving the blessing of a monk after taking that class in Tibetan Buddhism at Michigan, but the novelty wore off by the end of the day. We also saw some Hindu temples, but as I know nothing about Hinduism, it was kind of lost on me. I also felt weird about taking pictures of all these sacred sites and entering temples of gods I didn't even know existed. But the Nepalis do it too, and temples seem to be the place to hang out with everyone lounging around on them, although climbing on an elephant statue in Patan City to take a picture may have been a little out of the ordinary. At one of the temples there was an apartment building that allowed visitors to go up on the roof for free to get a good view of the temple, and the rest of the city. I'm sure it would have been even more amazing if it weren't the rainy season and you could see the mountains, but it was still a great view. The highlight of the day, though, was definitely the monkeys and their babies - so funny! One monkey had a juice box at one of the temples and looked like he would attack anyone who came within a 5 foot radius. And maybe he would have - my co-worker Sufia told me today that she did get attacked by a monkey at the Monkey Temple when she was there!

Monks praying

Master Buddhist artist at work

Elephant some of us later climbed on

Monkey with a juice box
Monkey with a view at the monkey templeA buddha and a photo of the Dalai Lama at the Monkey TemplePrayer wheels - om mani padme hum

The second full day we got a guide and driver (we also had the driver the previous day) from our guesthouse and went on a short tour of the Kathmandu Valley. Ironically I saw rice paddies on the outskirts of Kathmandu and I have yet to see one in Bangladesh. It was pouring when we left, and none of us were in the mood to walk around and see more temples in the rain (our "residents of Bangladesh" trick of the day before didn't get us the South Asian resident discount this time), so we skipped the first stop and went to a different Hindu temple. By that time the rain let up a bit so we walked through the temple and the guide told us a couple of stories behind the statues in the place, only one of which we really understood. Then we went for a short trek, maybe an hour and a half or so, along the side of the mountain. The views were spectacular, despite the clouds and lack of mountains, and we saw plenty of goat herding and mushroom hunting. A pack of dogs met up with us about halfway through and stuck with us all the way to the end, which was pretty cool. At the end of the hike, we met our driver and went to Nagarkot, a kind of resort spot in the mountains. It was another gorgeous view and we saw a snowy mountain peak in a break in the clouds. On a clear day, you could supposedly see Mt. Everest from the top of the hotel where we ate lunch. We made one more stop at a tower before heading back and passing out for a few hours before the World Cup final. I don't think any of us made it through the whole game - I was falling asleep in the bar where we watched the first half, but made it through regulation time before calling it a night. Viva Espana!

Rice paddies outside Kathmandu

Trekking

Goat herd on the trek

The road and one of the dogs that followed us - this was about the time they started accumulating

Some views from the trek

The last day we did some frenzied shopping to use up our rupees and get some decent gifts and things before returning to the land of practical items and gaudy jewelry. For a hippie such as myself, it was a shopping paradise, but I somehow still had $16 worth of rupees left at the end of it...

Well tomorrow evening it's off to Jessore and Khulna for some fieldwork. All I know is we're taking a train to Jessore, staying there two days, going by bus to a city in Khulna district that I can't pronounce for two more days, and then taking the train back to Dhaka next Wednesday. While it is sure to be a whirlwind trip, I hope there will be a little time for sightseeing before it's over. At the very least I will finally see some rice paddies in Bangladesh!