Eid holidays

photo credit

 Tomorrow I'm heading to Beijing and Mongolia! I know, Mongolia, really!

This weekend is the end of Ramadan, which is celebrated with the Eid ul-Fitre festival, which means public holidays for me! And as mostly everything in the 'desh shuts down for the week, it was a good excuse to have a refreshing break outside the country. Annnnnd, I got really cheap tickets Dhaka-Beijing, so why not?

Since I'm in the area (well, a 30 hour train ride away kind of area) I thought I'd also do some Mongolian exploring! Ok, I'll be honest, the picture above was the deciding factor - isn't it the cutest!

And to top it off, when I return in two weeks my lovely Stateside friends will be back in Chittagong. It's been a looong monsoon season with less than a handful of other foreigners staying around for it. So adventuring and new friends back in town, yes please!

Ramadan

It's currently three weeks into Ramadan here in the 'desh. And quite surprisingly for a month of fasting - it's seems to me to be all about the feasting! During the day most people are tired and hungry, meaning nothing much seems to gets done for a month work wise. But come sunset (around 6:30pm) the whole country stops for Ifta, the breaking of the fast. Like seriously the whole country stops, last week I was in the airport at Ifta time and I had to wait for the security man to chop up his cucumber on the baggage belt and eat his rice before I could go through to the gate. But nobody else seemed to mind. This is Ramadan.

So to ensure every food outlet in the country doesn't go out of business for the month, there is special food for Ifta, which is sold out the front of most food place across the country. The Ifta food can be characterised under two headings: Deep fried or Sickly sweet. So needless to say my hips are loving me this August. 

And even though I'm not missing my meals during the day, obviously I can't say no when my work or landlord give me special boxes of Ifta treats, I am here to experience the culture after all.

Ifta is a social time too, so it's been fun to be invited to share the meal with friends in their homes.

But there is another part of Ramadan that isn't so sweet, there is a huge increase in the number of beggars. One of the 5 pillars of Islam is to give alms (money) to the poor, and it seems Ramadan is the time when many people give their alms. I thought I was overwhelmed by the beggars when I first arrived, but at the moment it's that times 10. It's overwhelming, especially as I attract quite a bit of extra attention, so being out and about on the streets at the moment seems even more exhausting.

But I'm learning to take the sweet with the not so sweet, because as everyone keeps telling me here: This is Bangladesh. 

The other side of the tracks

How could you not want the best and brightest future for this little munchkin? I met this happy, inquisitive and cheeky little man in a one room corrugated iron 'house' in a slum next to a railway in Chittagong.  He totally stole my heart!

My colleague Dr Pearl and I were meeting with a group of women from the slum area as part of our preliminary community assessment for possible WV development with their community. In the meeting we asked the women about their education, family, economic opportunities, health care, sanitation, challenges and hopes for the future. What stuck with me most was that 90% of the kids in this slum don't go past Grade 2 schooling. And the education is not at a proper government school, but two hours per day from a lady in the area who can read and write. At around 8-10 years old, most of the girls are home helping their mothers, and the boys in this community are working; collecting rubbish, cutting wood, assisting in the local dorcan (shop). Government education is free and there is an allowance for school books and pens, but there isn't a school in this slum and the parents don't want the kids to travel, and they say they need the income from their sons working.  Opportunity on this side of the tracks is in short supply.

At the end of the group session, the mothers who attended were required to sign their name to an attendance sheet. It was then that I understood that depriving kids of education is depriving them of not just opportunity but also of future dignity - over half the women in this group had to give a charcoal ash thumb print, because they did not know how to write their own name.

I'm praying that the cheeky munchkin in the first pics will make it adulthood with opportunity and dignity in tact.