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.

Miss Bridget

Sometimes I get home from work here and I have to pinch myself, "did that really happen?"

Like the day that I was escorted like a movie star through a muddy village community in the rain to be shown a toilet. 

And you know, since I was in town, why not shuffle the teacher aside and thrust the Australian girl in front of the grade 10 class to give an impromptu lecture? Of course. 

Oh, and did I mention cute children? ;) 

Those days. They're kind of great.

'Tis the season

I like fruit. 


Growing up, Dad had to put a two-piece-per-day per child cap on our daily fruit intake, to stop all the fruit being eaten as soon as the shopping bags hit the kitchen bench! One of my clearest childhood memories is trying a mango for the first time, and the days after where I tried to convince Dad that surely Burnie was tropical enough to start a mango orchard?!? My parents often remind me of when we lived in Boat Harbor and as soon as we pulled into the driveway after school I’d run to the back fence and check out the status of the nectarine tree – and munch away until I was forced inside! Hayley could probably also vouch for my fruit love, as when we were in Ireland I had the knack for honing my radar in on every blackberry bush in sight! Yes, I do like fruit. 

But since being in Bangladesh, I've been overwhelmed by the Bangladeshi attitude to fruit. Bengali's don't just like, no, no - they love it! Ha. Entire conversations are had (regularly) on the topic!
"Bridget this is called mango, have you had this before?" "Bangladesh have the best mangoes in the world, very sweet!". Guavas have just come out here, and the office is buzzing! 

work mates going crazy for the guavas!

The world of cold stores and refrigerated transportation hasn't hit the 'desh quite yet, so fruit seasons truly just last for the time the fruit are ripe on the trees! The locals get excited - they only have three weeks to gobble up all the Lychees available, then they have to last a whole year until they're out again!

Lychees!

Even if you can manage to avoid the constant office conversations about fruit (which, believe me, you can't!) you can tell which fruit is the new 'it' fruit for the season because there are about a thousand fruit sellers on every corner, and they only sell that one fruit! The end of May was lychees, then came the famous mangoes, and now guava! There are certainly no two-piece-oer-day rules here! The locals (and me!) buy whatever the 'it' fruit is by the bag load. Seasons aren't talked about by their proper name, but by the fruit produced! So currently it's not monsoon season, it's the end of mango season, heading into guava season!

Mangoes. Green on the outside, but deliciously sweet on the inside!

'Tis the fruit season! and while I'm mourning the passing of the mango season, with Guavas at 20 Taka (AUD 0.25c) per dozen, I'm turning Bangladeshi and welcoming guava season!

The quiet life

Chittagong life can be busy and noisy and smelly. It can be really great to, but sometimes the busy, noisy, smelly end of the scale can weigh down good vibe side, and you know it's time to escape. Escapes may be tripping to the capital, or Kolkata, but this time I craved the countryside!

So toward the jungle and up the river I headed! ...with my housemates and amar bondhobi (girl friend!) from Dhaka! A night away was so refreshing! Green and green and quiet and water and book reading and card games and quiet and leisurely walks without hoards of people! 

Here are some pics from my night away staying at a friends place in a Hospital village compound on a beautiful river. Ahhhhhhhhhhh, deep breath. Nice. 

Yeah, we were pretty snap happy this weekend. But aren't you glad! ;)

Leprosy Hospital

Today I visited a leprosy hospital. I'm being honest when I tell you I thought leprosy was a dark ages disease that was sure eradicated but for a few cases. Um no. There are at ;east five leprosy specific hospitals just in Bangladesh! And what I thought I knew about leprosy (highly contagious, limbs fall off) turns out to be old myths and totally not true! Wikipedia can give you the details, but it's a viral infection that if detected early enough, it can be treated. But unfortunately, early detection here isn't common.

And patients with leprosy? They like visitors.

Today was the first day of Ramadan here in Bangladesh, so the hospital was pretty empty as many patients had gone home to their families for the month. But the patients that were there were warm, accepting and patient as the bideshi visitors practiced our minimal Bangla!