Adventures in Bangladesh: 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.