Notes from February 18, 2012

Our apartment building at 13 Park Road, Baridhara

It’s been a busy two weeks here at sea level in Dhaka…this past week saw the IB kids perform their senior exhibition plays, Abby had some news, and Millie and I have put in another hard two weeks of school…and it has been celebrity week at the American International School in Dhaka. 

The IB seniors produced three plays Wednesday evening for the largest crowd anyone could remember for such a production and this time, for the first time in years, there was very little in the way of profanity.  These performances are written, directed and produced by Gail’s seniors as part of their International Baccalaureate diploma.  They also have to produce a journal or reflection essay that is scored by an external authority in these matters…one of the student pieces was about various princesses, mostly from Disney, who managed to off their “prince charming” after finding out that life was not quite so ‘happily ever after’.

The second was a curious piece where two sisters die of the effects of extreme poverty, and then.... Greek gods walk onto stage.  It was written and directed by a really nice Korean boy who only began speaking English a couple years ago.  He played an English bishop in See How They Run, Gail’s fall production.  His family is very proud of him and they bring lots of Korean friends to the audience, although he is sure his mother understands very little. 

The third was a melodrama/tragedy with lots of teenage angst and 13 scene changes.  Lots of bad things happen to the main character (played by the author), but, since there was no dog or pick-up truck, Gail says it doesn’t quite count as a country western song. 

The really good thing all this is that Gail’s production year is over, and she has a couple trips left to go—Hong Kong in April and Bhutan next week.  I’m staying in Dhaka: boy, am I jealous or what?  The Bhutan trip is the AISD “Discovery Week” tour of various monasteries and cultural sites, not to be confused with the more rigorous trekking trip in Bhutan other students are taking.  Millie is going on this one, too, with her friend, Katie.  Katie’s mom has a birthday the day after mine (Abby’s Gotcha Day), so we’re having the party this Thursday before they leave.  Did I mention our weekend is Friday-Saturday?  

Speaking of Abby, in the last two weeks we have had some interesting emails from our Truman State University student/smarty-pants 3.85 GPA French Horn major.  Apparently, the #1 ranked state university in the Midwest is not quite good enough—she is thinking maybe she should trade up to Northwestern in a year or so…. 

And her French horn professor at TSU thinks she needs to move up to a really good horn.  What's more, you don’t trade these things in; you start a colony.  To really pursue the horn major, she’s signed up for an international horn festival in that bastion of snooty horn-playing, Denton Texas, in May, and we just bought her a ticket to Phoenix for spring break, so she can see her grandmother and maybe get a lesson with John Ericson at Arizona State University. 

Go ahead and Google him….Mr. Ericson’ horn playing has been nominated for Grammy’s and he works at a summer camp at Interlochen for aspiring French horn players. 

All in all, it looks like we’ll be working forever. 

But enough about us…we had celebrities here in Dhaka this week, and I am not just talking about the U. S. Assistant Secretary of State, who I did not get to meet.  Our school hosted Jack Gantos, a children’s book author who just won a Newberry Award; he was famous before, but now he is really famous.  He was here for a week and gave workshops to kids, teachers and parents.  It all worked with our elementary school writing initiative and verified what our kids are doing everyday—all good.

And the grandmother of a family of AISD kids—Martha Alter Chen—was in town at the same time.  Dr. Chen is a Woodstock School (where we were last year) Distinguished Alumna for her groundbreaking research and social work in India and Bangladesh.  Google her, too; she is a Harvard professor as well as a true heroine of the Sub-Continent.  Her ancestors were among the original missionary families who founded Woodstock.  Her son works at the World Bank office here, and her grandchildren are practically perfect in every way. 

And Jerry Bob says I need to add more pictures, so these from our street in our neighborhood in the diplomatic enclave, Baridhara.

Ladies walking on Park Road, Baridhara

Using one's head to carry concrete

Traffic 

Notes of September 2011

September 3, 2011 

It’s been a short week of school here on the Delta.  We had three days of school, then a four-day weekend for Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan.  Most people try to go home to their ancestral villages or towns.  That means that most of the 20 million or so residents of Dhaka have left town.  It is almost a ghost town this weekend, with almost everything closed.  Not that this kept us from trying to shop for stuff and having Mr. Baroi on the job taking us around the virtually empty city. 

The first day of the weekend, Wednesday, we went to the Pink Palace, a mansion built in the late 19^th century by the local prince.  It is now a museum with a limited supply of artifacts and pieces from the glory days, such as they were. 

Apparently, this was the day to see and be seen since everyone still in the city was out, in the best new clothes, riding the bicycle rickshaws.  The Palace and the nearby ferry terminal were the only places with crowds.  We attracted the most attention ourselves at the Pink Palace, being the only white people (and Millie being the only Chinese person) walking through the museum.  Crowds of boys and girls followed us and took pictures of us like we were rock stars; one guy even recorded us on his telephone as we walked down a flight of stairs.  It would have been a little creepy, but we were there during a brief period of bright sunshine in between monsoon showers, so it was mostly just weird. 

The Pink Palace is in “old Dhaka” and the area is mostly shabby and dilapidated.  Actually Dhaka is all pretty third world, but some areas are nicer than others.  For instance the Parliament building is a new, recently designed building that sits on a man-made hill in the center of a huge expanse of grassland, circled by trees, in the middle of the city.  It could look like the Mall in Washington, but the area is completely secured, guarded and empty.  Except for the cattle grazing on the grass.

Yesterday, we went to the splashiest shopping mall in town, but it was all closed as well, except for the cinema.  Like India, you must pass through a security scan to get in; this keeps out the beggars.  We attracted attention there, too. 

During these holiday mornings, Millie and I have walked down to school, so she could shoot some baskets with her basketball coach.  He ran her through some drills and she got a good workout.  He pointed out that she never complained and was easy to coach.  She has some work to do to improve her fundamentals, but the season is 10 weeks long here, compared to Woodstock’s four weeks, so maybe she’ll get to play some. 

Gail’s foot is still bothering her, but she went to see one of our neighbors, Dr. Jones, who lives upstairs and teaches P.E. at AISD.  He has a doctorate in sports med.  He told her to ice it 15 minutes three times a day, and is looking into an orthopedic doctor for her.  

I have been keeping busy with school and assorted duties that involves.  Our school has a culture of meetings—we have lots.  (In Hazelwood, my last St. Louis district, we had a culture of three-ring binders: Got a problem? Get a binder.) The most fun meeting this week was a school board meeting/happy hour across the street last Sunday.  The school board member/hostess is the wife of a Chevron exec.  They have a way nicer place than any of the teachers, and have furnished it with lots of cool things from Thailand, among other places. 

We now have a place booked in Phuket for the first week of October (the flight to Bangkok and back is booked, as well).  When we get back from that break, the elementary principal, the PYP coordinator and I have to attend a three-day workshop in Hong Kong.  (Darn the luck!) And Gail will be a chaperone for a student trip to Bhutan in February.  Millie will not be going to India with the swim team (she’s thrilled—says she’s already been to India. Of course, she’s also been to Thailand, too.)

And we still don’t have either shipment, but we are making slow progress on painting and furnishing. 

September 18, 2011

Another week has passed here at the American International School in Dhaka.  And what a busy week it has been!  Millie had her first swim meet, we received our first delivery of things shipped, our first driver resigned, Millie and I attended Mass for the first time in a long time, and our whole apartment has been painted. 

Last things first:  Millie and the AISD team swam at the International School in Dhaka (ISD) yesterday. Although there were others invited, ours was the only team, so it was like the nice folks at ISD had a swim meet for the AISD kids.  Millie was third in every event and swam every stroke except butterfly.  Fortunately, it rained almost the entire time, which kept the temperature down—ISD has a covered grandstand for their outdoor pool, we only got a little wet and the swimmers were already wet.  She swims again next weekend at the AISD invitational.  And, yes, swimming backstroke in rain does get water into your mouth. 

The painters came last Sunday and started with Abby’s room—a bright blue (the only room to make Facebook) and Millie’s room—a purple. Our room is taupe.  The next day they painted the office bright yellow and the foyer a blue gray slate.  Tuesday they did not paint because our cook had told them he could not be present.  But they came back Wednesday and finished the dining room and living room in Tuscan gold. 

This all worked out well.  The shipment was delivered Tuesday morning, and painters would have been in the way.  I stayed home to oversee the delivery of the stuff.  Everything from India had been boxed up into two big plywood crates—59 cardboard boxes in all.  Six guys carried it all up the two flights of stairs and placed it all in our living room.  This part took less than an hour.   The next hour and half was spent unloading each box, at least to the point of determining whether anything was broken.  As it turns out two framed pieces for my office—a 19^th century map of India and an art class project by one of my 5^th graders—had their glass broken, but that was the extent of the damage.  We are told we can get these repaired locally for three or four dollars.

Thursday afternoon our driver told us that he was resigning immediately to take a job with Chevron, who will pay him about twice what we pay him.  He’s a nice guy with a family, so we don’t begrudge him.  The school has just laid off a driver that they didn’t need, so we’ll have somebody new by tomorrow (Sunday). 

We went to our first dress-up evening out last night.  The British High Commission women’s club holds a ‘Casino Night’ where they set up roulette and blackjack tables as a fundraiser for their charitable efforts.  We used our driver one last night to take us the six blocks and back.  Millie went to a school dance, so she got to dress up, too.  I would share that too, but Millie doesn’t have much to say. 

We were all invited to Mass at our neighbor’s apartment last week.  Gail was a little under the weather and stayed home, but since Mr. Gabriel had prepared his best chicken curry for the Pot Luck dinner, Millie and I represented the family.  There were 10 in attendance.  It was more like the original church we think—more talk from the congregation and less from the priest.  Father Tim is from Springfield Illinois and went to more Cardinals games before his first communion than Millie and I have ever. 

This week Gail is invited to the American Women’s Club, and I have an invitation to a reception at the U.S. embassy.  And we have a couple parties already scheduled.  Busy, busy, busy.  And we need to teach Mr. Gabriel how to make chocolate chip oatmeal cookies for the swim team. 

And about two hours ago we felt the earthquake from Sikkim province, straight north of here in India, between Nepal and Bhutan.  

Take care,

Notes of October 2011

November 2, 2011

The Cards won the series, the AIS Dhaka Halloween party was a big success, Millie’s basketball career in Bangladesh has begun, and the monsoon here on the Delta may finally have come to end. 

We are fine for the most part, although Gail has been experiencing some asthma problems.  Her first AIS Dhaka play, See How They Run, is in rehearsal daily and the theater is pretty dusty.  She has seen the local English doctor and has medications.  She seems to be getting better. 

October began with our Fall Break week.  We took advantage of the 9 days off to go to Thailand.  Millie found an electronic drum set and successfully lobbied us into buying it for her.  We then carried all 75 pounds of pads, controls, pipes and kick pads from Bangkok to Phuket and then back to Bangkok and Bangladesh.   We had a nice beach hotel in Phuket but only rainy days, so we didn’t do much but lay around. 

We were back for a week before I went to Hong Kong for an IB conference.  We had perfect weather for a perfectly boring three-day conference.  Next time I’ll play hooky and sight see. 

The school Halloween party is a real monster—days of preparation for a two hours kids’ party that draws about a thousand people.  I did the dunking tank in Gail’s place.   Costume parties here are “the way of our people” (as Samoans would say).  Parents were all dressed up, as were the teachers.  The night before, some of the teachers had an “80’s” theme party—everybody dressed for that, too. 

There is not much to do here, so dressing up for parties is a big deal.  While I was in HK, Gail went to the school’s Glitter Ball.  Groups sat together as tables in a hotel ballroom and came dressed in goofy themes—hers was Master Chef Dhaka.  Once again, an inordinate amount of planning and forethought goes into such events.  Each table group keeps their theme a secret and some have performances. 

We hosted a non-dress-up party for Gail’s birthday: a happy hour catered in part by the American Club.  We had about 70 people here at its peak.  Gail had made pitchers of lemon-drop and cosmopolitan martinis, so almost everyone had a good time.   The real key ingredient to these things is the presence of excellent domestic assistance.  Our cook stayed for the whole time and cleaned up afterword.  Such events in STL used to take us the weekend to recover.  Woodstock was a little better, but our cook there didn’t like to clean up anything. 

Millie had her first BB games Saturday—a one day tournament in which they played three games in about five hours.  They won only one, but played harder each time.  Millie has made the traveling team and will go to Bombay the first weekend in December. 

Now that the weather is better, I was able to get my new bike put together.  One of the other new teachers brought the tools and even a stand to do this.  Of course, I couldn’t go over to Nick’s house for this until we—Millie and me—had won game 6.  Really, who would have expected this from the Cards?  To come from this far back, to get in on the last day, beat the best team in baseball in their own park, then the best home team in theirs, then win two in a row against a team that hadn’t lost two in row in three months.  Millie told me to stay home and watch game 7 before I came to her BB tournament so that I could text her updates.  We are ready to order our WS hats and shirts. 

Abby is doing well at Truman State and was the first freshman to have a recital.  We saw her friend’s video of it on Facebook—not much sound quality and, of course, the microphone pole was directly in front of her.  She said they make professional recordings of these things, so we expect to get a good copy when she meets us in Bangkok in December.  We hope to travel with her through Vietnam and Cambodia during our three weeks at Christmas, but we don’t have solid plans yet. 

That’s about all our news right now.  I’ll try to get back in the habit of weekly reports. And we have a long Eid weekend, so maybe I'll get some pictures up on Facebook.

Notes of November 2011

Notes November 21, 2011

The big news this week on the Delta is that the American International School Dhaka girls’ basketball team, led by Millicent Wood, their star sophomore point guard, won their own Dhaka Invitational tournament.  The team, playing 6 games in three days, won the championship by beating a team that had beat them the day before.   Millie outplayed their point guard all over the floor, after getting beat consistently the day before.  My Uncle Lawrence would have been proud. 

Since kids come here to get the IB diploma and parents extend their tours so their kids can stay at AISD, they should keep the core of the team together throughout Millie’s time.  The girls travel to Bombay in two weeks for the conference tournament. 

I wrote earlier about getting Millie a visa to India. We don't actually have it yet.  This has been the hardest part of the season.  First, you have to get into their website to get an appointment for beginning the process.  About half the time, the computer says it’s not a trusted site and wants to direct you away.  Once you have entered the five or so pages of information, you get to the ‘select appointment’ page only to find that there are no appointments available to choose.  So you have to do it all over again.  If you do all this at around 6:00 AM, you may get an appointment. 

Once you have an appointment, the athletic director can take the assorted papers, photos and passport (and $75) to the Indian High Commission for the visa.  Millie’s papers are there now, so we’ll see what happens.  We should know this week.

Gail is currently in Hong Kong (no visa needed for her, but a couple kids had problems) with several AISD drama students at an IB theater workshop with a number of schools.  All the kids and teachers are staying in the HK YMCA, so she’s doing a lot of supervision.  She has called daily, and seems to be having a good enough time.  Millie and I are managing, although not eating our vegetables like we should.

This weekend AISD held its annual October-Fest (apparently always held in November).  Some of our guys (and one of the ladies) brew their own beer, so the party includes a tasting contest.  The party is held on top of an apartment building near ours, so I went by bicycle rickshaw (50 Takka, less than a dollar), my first time in one of these vehicles.  They are a little carriage pulled by a guy on a bicycle, and there are thousands of them here, all brightly decorated.  They are not particularly comfortable, but I arrived safe and sound and slightly sooner than if I had walked.

In other news, we have ordered a four pieces of wicker furniture to be built.  We should have a couch, loveseat, fainting couch and ottoman by the end of the month, and our apartment will be complete then.  These we can ship home and use in the basement when we return to STL. 

We Skyped with Abby Thursday, on her birthday.  And we sent her a cake decorated with princess stuff (Millie’s idea), including a tiara that she wore at a concert she played in that night.  She gets a week for Thanksgiving, so we bought her a ticket to fly to Phoenix to see Gail’s mom. 

And we called my mom.  Most of you know she and Abby share a birthday.  She seems to be happy and content with her place in Columbia.  We sent her some things she could share at the nursing home.

This week AISD celebrates UN day with a parade of nations, dances, songs and brief speeches.  I just found out that Millie will carry a banner for China. 

Take care and Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Notes...Just past Ground Hog Day 2012 edition

This is actually a mosque we passed on the road coming home from Srimangal.  See the previous post for the story.

February 3; Groundhog Day +1.  Groundhog Day is my parents' wedding anniversary--if Dad were still alive, it would have been #61.  Yesterday was also the 80th birthday of Dwyatt Gantt, the co-founder and director of Children's Hope International, the adoption agency that helped us get Abby and Millie.  We met Dwyatt and and the other co-founder, Melody Zhang Lee, in Nanjing, February 25, 1993, the day before we got Abby.


Here in Bangladesh, if we had groundhogs, one of them would have seen his shadow, probably through a cloud of mosquitos.  I think this means six more weeks of dust.

Another week has passed in sunny Dhaka, with a few new wrinkles to report.  Gail got to see a couple theater productions, Millie (and us) are busy with a band festival, and I have successfully resumed an exercise routine.

One of the theater productions Gail saw was a London troop's performance of Romeo and Juliet at the other international school in town, The International School of Dhaka.  It was a bilingual hybrid of the forbidden love story found in many cultures; both Gail and Jen, the ISD drama teacher, were real impressed.  The other one was a couple guys who travel around Asia doing theater.  They came to AISD and taught in both the middle and high school drama classes, and gave a local performance as well.  They were not as impressive, but it can't all be Shakespeare.  And audience behavior in a theater performance is a public skill still being learned here in Dhaka, I am told.

The American International School Dhaka is currently hosting a band festival--a conference event attended by three other schools: the American School of Bombay, the American School of Chennai, and the American International School of Muscat (Oman).  The conference is larger, but the Lincoln School in Kathmandu, the Overseas School of Colombo, and the Pakistani schools did not send bands.  The kids that were here performed solos and ensemble pieces and a combined jazz band played three numbers in a concert last night.  Millie played drums with the jazz band for "Georgia on My Mind".  The combined symphonic band performs tonight, and everyone goes home tomorrow.

We have been hosting the HS principal from Muscat.  (AISD families take in visiting students and coaches for these events--we had soccer players from Bombay in December.)  From what Mr. File has told us about Muscat, it is a great place to live, except for the summer heat.  There are beaches and mountains as well as the desert, all accessible and available to foreigners, and within easy driving distance. Driving or biking is also much easier than here on the sub-continent. And this year there was snow on the 12,000 ft. mountains near the city.

The pain in my knees has subsided, and the school's community education program has started up, so I am going to three exercise classes per week.  Water aerobics is taught by a 3rd grade, rather than a 4th grade, teacher as previously reported.  She is a youngster in her 50s and pushes me and the others around for an hour in the AISD heated pool (one of two in Bangladesh).  Her co-coach is our art teacher, who is closer to my age.

I am the only guy in the class, which is also true of the "total body workout" class.  Both are pretty much low-impact on my knees, but the latter is pretty strenuous.  The "workout" class is taught by a 100 lb Asian lady who is always smiling and never speaks, except to count off the reps.  Our next door neighbor, a lady from the Phillipines, is also in the class.

Gail and I are taking a really low impact yoga class on Fridays.  Yesterday we exercised our face muscles and tongues and then relaxed.  It would be pretty easy except for sitting cross-legged on the floor for an hour.

Gail is taking French cooking which, she tells me, also requires athletic shoes as well as a good knife and an apron.  Last week she learned the correct procedure for cutting up a chicken.  Since neither of us have had to actually cook anything beyond lighting charcoal and making coffee since we got here, I am not sure when or where she will employ this skill.  She did learn how to make "coq au vin", which means we will never discard wine again.

Next week we'll let you know how we celebrated Millie's "Gotchya Day" (February 5, 1996).

Notes...January 2012 edition

Gail, Millie and Sabrina at Srimangal

We have had a houseguest, had an adventure out of Dhaka, and I am getting too much exercise.  Other than that, it’s just another month in Asia’s most crowded city.  We are all hard at work at school. 

Gail is getting her IB kids working on their productions.  Since one of our gym teachers has fled to Canada to be with his wife when she gives birth to their first child, I got to run the Fun and Games Day for the Kindergarten, 1^st and 2^nd graders.  And Millie is starting her second semester at AISD, working in a little school snack store, the Breezeway Café, and developing a social life. 

Our house guest was Sabrina, a dorm parent at Woodstock, where we taught last year.  She is a Canadian social worker who worked with trafficked children in Bombay before coming to Woodstock.  Gail and Sabrina traveled together last year to Rishikesh and bought hippie clothes.  And Sabrina dressed half a dozen Woodstock seniors in their graduation saris at our house the morning of Commencement.  This year Sabrina has spent the six-week Woodstock winter vacation in Thailand and Taiwan before coming here. 

Gail was able to take a day off work and take Sabrina sightseeing and shopping around the city.  And they took Millie to dinner at a local Thai restaurant. 

Sabrina was with us on our first Bangladesh out-of-town trip, to Srimangal, a tea town in the “hills” 175 kilometers (or three hours) northeast of Dhaka.  The white-knuckle drive, dodging the tuck-tucks, bicycles, farm tractors hauling mud and/or bricks and assorted careening buses brought us through the rice paddies into the tea area.  After a couple wrong turns we found a place to stay and have dinner.  The next day we toured the area.

I thought tea grew on trees, but no.  Tea grows on little (two feet tall) shrubs and most of those we saw had just been harvested, so they were even smaller than usual.  We eventually got to see some un-harvested shrubs and actually taste some seven-layer tea.  

You may have seen this—the tea is comes in a glass and you can clearly see the various layers.  You don’t actually taste seven layers.  It was mostly sweet and vaguely cinnamon flavored, but it was okay and none of us got sick. 

Seven Layer Tea

We also got to tour a marshes wildlife sanctuary area, sponsored in part by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) outside the town and check out the assortment of herons, ducks and hawks.  The marshland was similar to the marshland/wildlife places in the states, almost completely without people (uncommon in Bangladesh) but with an observation tower to watch the birds and canoes to get out on the water.  The difference was the eight year-old boy guiding a herd of water buffalo, and the goats and cattle and rice paddies.

Agriculture here appears to be almost feudal.  One person or family owns big areas of farmland with a host of indentured servants, who live in mud huts, doing the actual work in the fields.  The work is pretty manual; we saw only two pieces of mechanized equipment, a couple machines pulled sleds sliding through the water.  Everywhere else, we saw people bent over, working the fields of rice, divided into small squares, that seem to go on forever.  And we passed a rice mill, where the raw grain is spread out on a concrete floor and swept by women.

There was one area that was dry—it is the dry season, after all.  According to our driver, India stops the flow of water here this time of year and this area cannot be farmed.  All in all, the land does look pretty fertile, with black, gray mud and there are no rocks—just ages of Himalaya erosion and animal manure.  Last year, we got to go to Haridwar in India.  It’s a holy city where the Ganges rages out of the Himalaya and onto the plains of northern India.  The water there is gray, too, almost the same color as some of the soil we saw here. 

 In other news, I continue to age, although not particularly gracefully lately.  I had been working out at our school gym, but decided to move up to running around our athletic field.  (I used to run, when Reagan was President.)  This lasted about four days until my knees were so damaged that I had to see our local doctor. 

Really, if I were a horse someone would have shot me.  The English doctor gave me some new meds, told me to lose some weight, give up running and take up water aerobics, which, as it turns out, is taught as a community ed class at our pool by one of our 4^th grade teachers.

Between the medicine and the warm packs (two cups of rice in an athletic sock, tie up the end and throw it in the microwave for a couple minutes), I am on the mend.  I rode the bike to the American Club and did 30 minutes on one of their elliptical machines yesterday.  I’ll get to the gym again today and start the H2O class tomorrow.  

Millie has a service-learning project today at school.  The ABC school was started by an AISD teacher 25 or so years to serve street children.  Some of our teachers teach and some of our high school kids complete their service commitment by assisting in various ways. 

Everyone in the HS at AISD in involved in one project or another.  Gail is the faculty advisor for students who support the Acid Survivors group (almost all women, some children) who have had acid thrown in their faces because of some social conflict, conflicts over land and frequently insufficient dowry.  Another group of kids worked at a housing site yesterday for Habitat of Humanity. 

The elementary kids do service things as well.  The fifth grade recently completed a Unit of Inquiry project where they had to start a viable business.  They had a “mall” and sold stuff—mostly brownies and cookies, although one kid started a florist shop and delivered flowers around school.  The money went to a fund that supports the education of the children of our local employees. 

 More next week....