hello family and friends,
boy am i feeling lonely for you all right this instant. it's a saturday afternoon and the end of the weekend for us. like usual, the weekend has revolved around school activities like photography club and running club, and this weekend AISD is hosting a regional volleyball tournament with other international schools from around south asia (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Nepal) - that competition is keeping the campus buzzing. the different international schools, interestingly, all have student populations that look remarkably similar: a mix of all Asia, some Africans, with a few white faces scattered through. they are a pretty competent and confident group.
i have seen two eye-opening things just recently, close by in the general area of our neighborhood. first this: when i was running with the kids last saturday we ran passed a group of 3 midget men, the shortest adults i have ever seen... the size of toddlers but walking and dressed as adults. they were doing something like a vaudeville act, dressed alike in overalls and singing circus songs in harmony, going door-to-door and getting donations. they had a decent crowd of people listening when we ran by. imagine the double-take that happened as we realized what was going on. a funny thing is that cnn covered some pictures of the world's smallest man last week which i saw, and i am absolutely certain that these guys were smaller! they seemed healthy and happy at first glance.
i don't know which sighting is the stranger one for me. today i was riding in our car down a busy road with lots of people on the sidewalks and a stark naked man, tall and seeming in full control of his mental capacities, carrying baskets of stuff on his head, walked slowly down the middle of the sidewalk. buck-naked and in no hurry. no further comment here!
truthfully, bangladesh continues to be deeply disturbing to me. it seems a story similar to that of many african countries steeped in corruption: in the 30 years of its existence no government has been self-less enough to take care of a suffering human population. that is what i see, at least. and we see the incidents of human suffering constantly, as well as many random fatal accidents caused by carelessness and lack of infrastructure. the roads are too dangerous to drive on; highway accidents are deadly and many. there is one decent hospital in the whole country (our own insurance encourages us to fly out of here for broken bones. the hospital doesn't do procedures more serious than appendectomy). there is no preventative medicine.
the sewers that line every road are uncovered: we live in a maze of raw sewage ditches. the water pollution is horrible, because this is a city of 13 million people and there is no water treatment. vegetables are grown with this water, fish are taken from the lakes and ponds that it empties into. and people get terribly ill from the water all the time. i have never had to think much about water treatment before, but i think a lot about it now. one teacher friend says, dhaka would be a hard place to live if sewage is the sort of thing that bothers you.
bangladesh has me thinking about the environment more than really i ever have... i worry that this is what an over-populated world could feel like just decades from now. i have begun to think that average people living in dhaka have never experienced clean nature - they live in a filthy world and don't know otherwise. how sad it would be if the world came to this. furthermore, i find you can't be here and not think about population control. this is what the densest place on earth feels like - and it is projected that dhaka will almost double its population in one more generation. it is enough to make me think seriously about worldwide one-child policies.
on a brighter note, i spent thursday night at the very special grand opening of a new "spa" beauty salon staffed by orphanage girls. our school has a connection to this orphanage; a Canadian organization Families for Children runs the orphanage, and our middle school fosters service-learning relationships between their kids and ours, as well as gives money. I took just a few pictures of what felt like a very successful night; the atmosphere was clean and hopeful. You'll notice in the pictures one Canadian woman who had this original vision of creating a "spa" location for the purpose of training the orphanage girls in marketable skills. She got a grant from her government to make it happen, and i hope you can see from just a quick glimpse-in how beloved she is in this orphanage community for all her commitment to the kids.
finally, Proshika was a nice place to visit. the organization is like a co-op, with centers throughout bangladesh: people live together and participate in businesses that sustain their collective livelihood. where we were, the Proshika group was running a retreat center that felt very very much like the 4H place we go to for family reunions. they get business from schools and universities and companies. they also were doing small-scale farming, the processing of honey gathered in the Sunderbans, raising orchids, and the weaving of silk fabric (not making clothes, just making fabric - very cool to see). I think that several hundred people were living and supporting themselves in a healthy way at that particular Proshika site. the kids mostly did group problem-solving games and told ghost stories and other middle school retreat-type stuff. i'm not sure how deeply they understood the workings of the place itself... and as for me! between one AISD event and the next I am slowly becoming a master facilitator of group cooperation and leadership training scenarios - ! what fun! next family reunion, babies, watch out :)
