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....