Notes from March 10

Well, it has been a busy week here in the Delta—and I am about a week behind getting this published.

In late February, Gail and Millie went to Bhutan with 20+ AISD high school students, and I went to Bogra, a city in northwest Bangladesh, with our fifth graders.   Bhutan was beautiful and interesting, and Bogra was, well, not Dhaka, but still part of the poorest, most corrupt country in Asia.

I’ll start with the Bogra trip.  We left AISD at 6:00 AM in four buses with 48 students, 5 teachers , four drivers and me.  Traveling through the city that early, before the crowd of buses, tuck-tucks, taxis, various bicycle drawn wagons and human-pulled carts, all racing for their own little wedge of right of way, should be the easiest way to get out of town quickly.  It still took us an hour to go 30 or so kilometers. 

I, as the administrator/white guy in charge, was to call the school’s security officer every 30 minutes or so as we passed through each municipality, but then he had arranged a police escort for us.  So, here we were careening down the road, four buses led by a pick-up truck with rifle-toting guards, flying past trucks and carts, etc., through the countryside.

The Jamuna River Bridge

After about 90 kilometers and 3 hours, we made it to the Jamuna Resort where we stopped for breakfast and to let the kids run around. It’s right next to the Jamuna (upstream it's the Brahmaputra) River and just before the Jamuna Bridge, the 8^th longest bridge in the world and a significant piece of engineering, since the land there is almost entirely made of Himalayan silt and sand. 

The river is one of several that flows through Bangladesh and much of the neighboring Indian province of East Bengal, making this whole part of the sub-continent pretty much an estuary, with the yearly monsoons perpetually shifting sandbars.  Powerful families claim these, since no deeds or titles exist for a sandbar.  They put poor people to work growing two crops of rice before the next monsoon comes and moves the sandbar.  The local peasantry gets about 100 takka a day for their labor--$1.25.   And there are plenty of workers to choose from.  The Rural Development Agency, the end point of our field trip, provides a number of services—agricultural assistance, medical services, and educational support—to two million people in the Jamuna River area alone.  

The work of the Agency is as an agricultural college—animal husbandry (still milking cows by hand), fish hatchery, raised bed crops, rice production, even a bio gas production facility that produces electricity through their generators.  And they have an elementary school—fifty kids in a classroom and it’s the number one school in the province. 

Meanwhile, Gail and Millie were enjoying the bucolic life of the eastern Himalaya; Gail says it is like where we lived last year in India, but with better roads, like Colorado.  They flew into Paro, the only city in Bhutan with an international airport, and were told that, from the plane, they could see Mt. Everest in the distance.  Millie found this doubtful, since all mountains look the same to her.

Dancing in the Dusk

Bhutan limits the number of tourists every year and everyone must take a guided tour.  This tour included a temple in Paro before a bus ride to the capital city of Thimpu, where they visited another temple, some markets and received the lecture on Gross National Happiness, the Bhutanese alternative to GNP.  They also got to see various dancers and performers, and hit a few more markets and temples. 

Keeping Warm

The highlight of the trip came the next day with a trip up and over the ridge (3150 meters) to Chimi Lhakhang, the Temple of Fertility, built in the 15^th century by the “Divine Madman”, Lama Drukpa Kuenley.  From what I have read elsewhere, the guy found Buddhist peace and tranquility through fornication.  The walls are decorated with penises and the temple has lots—stone, ivory and wood.  The monks touched all the kids and teachers on the forehead with each kind as they exited the temple.  Houses in the area are similarly decorated—drawings, statuettes, etc.   Our guidance counselor thought of doing this for his house in Connecticut just to see the neighbors’ reaction.

Tiger's Nest Monastery

The group also visited an elementary school and other temples at Punakha.  You can find the name of the town on Google Maps, but it’s hard to find the actual town.  Gail was having some asthma trouble due to the flowering of the flowering of the local mustard crop, so she didn’t get to take the tour that day to Taktsang Lhakhang, the Tiger’s Nest monastery, which clings to a cliff about a four-hour hike up the hill from the town.  Millie gasped all the way to the top.  

School 

Gail, however, was able to shop—got a couple more masks for our walls (got 9 now), and a woven belt, typical of Bhutanese, for me for my morning stretching, as well as a bronze engraved “singing bowl”.  The bowl can be made to produce a constant tone when struck and rubbed by a wooden mallet.  It resides next to the Indian elephant poker on our alter of Asian souvenirs.

Abby is also on a trip, to Phoenix to visit her grandmother.  I’ll have more to report on that trip, and our recent cultural experiences in my next installment.