and some Sundarbans pics from Beckley

here's a mud pick from Jimmy :)

Sundarban: Mangrove Forest and Bengal Tiger Home

(Hello! Here is some reflection on our crazy travel last week.)

We spent the first half of the week on a boat trip through the Sundarban forest. Here are some experiences that i jotted down:

-boarding sampan boat at a sketchy pier, in darkness on the first night
-"country boat" rides, spotting kingfishers, meter-long lizards, thousands of mudskippers
-Indian Ocean swimming, relaxed on a hot sunny day
-hike in the silt mud, up to my knees, wearing too-big boots and getting stuck and off-balance the whole time, through the dense tiger mangrove forest. stepping on hundreds of crabs. fearing the tiger. armed guards - was this a good idea?
-simple food: dahl(yellow lentils) and rice, fried potatoes, cucumber and tomato salad, fried fish, apples and bananas
-making a mud spa on a mud beach
-smooth gray, silty mud. more mud
-tiger growling in the woods, estimated 2 km away. me making tiger noises, a lot, from the roof of the boat
-family travel, with grandmas and babies on the boat - this was nice
-armed guards came with us
-we saw no tigers, though we heard one
-a national park; no one lives in the whole huge area
-returned feeling VERY relaxed after 4 days of sun and wind and water

(I'm not too excited about these pictures. Most were taken from a boat. If we went on shore, I usually left the camera behind for fear of the quick-sand-like mud everywhere.)

B&Ws, Indian Ocean!

a Middle School movie

hi everybody! home safe from holiday (more about that adventure very soon)...
and school picked right back up -
this video has been my special project with the 8th graders this week; they'll present it tomorrow at a Middle School "recognition assembly." the movie is a reflection on our overnight retreat from about 6 weeks ago. isn't it awesome? i am a ridiculously proud teacher.

Calendar Project, for Charity

Before leaving for a week, I want to share this with you guys -

I've compiled my favorite photos and made them into a calendar. With the help of an online service, the calendar is available for sale. 1/3 of the price of each calendar will go into a savings account that I'll donate to the Families for Children Orphanage here in Dhaka. The calendar can be purchased with a credit card online, and can be shipped to anywhere in the world. It's one small initiative that I hope can make a little money to help - a little money goes a long way in Bangladesh.

Here is the website where you can see and purchase the calendar. The quality is quite good! It could make a good Christmas present, or you could frame the pics!

http://my.qoop.com/store/3082846775316147/3871692738100

here, also is a link to the FFC orphanage website:

thanks so much for your support with this already. Please do share the link, the word, etc
-Sara

October in the Desh!

hello :) i hope everyone's doing great. thank you for all the notes you send - i miss you a lot! and i'm really counting down for december and the chance to come home.
but today is a good day in Dhaka - for lots of reasons

I voted!

"U.N.Day" today at school, a very looked-forward to day of the school year. The kids wear their national dress and have a parade of nations... wow is it cute. I get all choked up, I can't help it, like while watching the 2 Peruvian middle schooler brothers (these guys are the best!) in their starched collared shirts and suit pants and shining leather shoes their flag around in front of everyone - all th parents come. The kids are SO proud. It's amazing how many nations were represented by our students' own nationalities... or they filled in by carrying flags of places they'd lived before. We had all 192 nations covered. Did you know the United Nations focus for 2008 is sanitation? Which, writing from Bangladesh, seems like a crucial thing to focus on. A U.N. speaker is speaking to the high school and 8th grade this afternoon about water sanitation initiatives here. Great day, great school.

Great school is giving us a week-long vacation, starting today! And the 3 interns have signed on the line and paid our money, and we're going to have a crazy adventure. I posted the map above so you guys could see where we're headed. First we're going for 4 days on a boat tour of the Sundarbans, or the world's biggest mangrove forest - where the Bengal tiger lives! We're doing this with some other teachers, and people have done it before - we hear it's a great thing to do. We fly to Khulna (SW of Dhaka) tonight and the trip begins.
The 2nd half of the week, we 3 are exploring on our own a bit, leaving from Dhaka with our car and a school driver who we've come to know well: Kalam. We're going to drive down to Chittagong, hoping to see the famous ship-breaking port there. Maybe we'll get down to Cox's Bazar, which is actually the longest uninterrupted beach in the world. It is a Bangladeshi vacation spot - which would be very interesting and probably very strange for us. Women definitely swim in their salwar-kameez and not in Western bathing suits. We have booked one night's stay in an eco-hotel in the Bandarban hill-tracts area. This Chittigong division promises to be very different; it is a Bhuddist culture, and the minority ethnicity plus the proximity to Bhurma make it a politically volatile place. No worries, the embassy has cleared our journey and we are assured that tourism to the area is increasing all the time.
We'll be back to Dhaka to stay on October 25th (I'll have my cell phone with me the whole time).

such an interesting follow-up

this article was published on Monday, as part of CNN's Planet in Peril series. it talks about Dhaka, garment factories, child labor, corruption, class divide...

Children of the Black Dust

writing and photographs by Shehzad Noorani.

garment factory answers

Answers to our questions:
- Workers work 8 hours a day, six days a week.
- The average worker earns $25 (1,750 Taka) per month.
- Many popular brands like GAP encourage no child labor policies; the factory we visited employed no one under 18 years old. That kind of policy is not always so popular here...

durga puja festival + another festival and a field trip!

hey guys, i have so many things to write about today! the weeks are full of strange things as usual, very good things this last week. to begin i'll go all the way back to last sunday...

the start of a week-long festival: the Durga Puja, when Bengali Hindus celebrate their divine mother goddess Durga. for the celebration, a big park in our part of Dhaka was cleared (goats and cows removed!) and a pavilion was erected there, lights strung, and fabrics draped. people came to the park every night last week for music and folk dancing and the chance to pay tribute to the image of Durga. at the end of the week the big, ornate Durga statue was taken on a truck to the mouth of the Ganges and dumped into the river to continue her journey. the first night of the festival Jimmy, Beckley, and I went to check out the scene. It was a pretty clean scene - and everything and everyone was dressed in bright Hindu orange which made me so happy.






there was another festival this weekend, of a whole different sort. a big annual party hosted by the Australian Embassy. Australians are crazy people, so nice and so loose! for me they are the most like Americans of all the nationalities, but wilder than Americans and loving a good time. anyway, this party is famous among the Dhaka expats for being raucous and Australian. It's called the Glitter Ball. People go in groups, choose a theme, and dress in costume. Lots of groups perform skits and try hard to be the dirtiest (and thus the winner of the skit competition). For weeks a group of teachers has been planning for this; we went as 'Under the Sea', no skit. I was a sea turtle - very tame but a sweet green outfit. This was the best costume party I've ever heard of! One whole group of 20 men went as Dumb and Dumber in blue and orange ruffled polyester suits. One group of women went topless during their skit... I think that most of the money that we spent on Glitter Ball tickets went to the floating hospital charity, a clinic on a boat that floats up river to serve the villages all through the country. There is a charity behind everything that happend here, it seems. It was nice to see people having a really good time, dancing til their costumes melted off. The party was held at the fanciest, newest hotel in Dhaka - a Radisson! here are a few pictures, guaranteed to look very different from my usual:








and finally, the latest news is that I have done no harm to any 7th grader yet even after being stuck on a school bus with 20 of them for 3 hours yesterday, and I think I'm learning to have fun with them. Yesterday the middle school had a "flex day" or school-wide day for field trips. We took the 7th grade to visit garment factories. I saw jeans and T-shirts being made for Old Navy and Mossimo (a Target brand) - it was really interesting for us all. The factory conditions surprised us... they were bright and clean, workers wore masks and bright uniforms, they had a big lunch room and a medical clinic and a child care center on site. no one wore shoes, we noticed, in spite of hot irons and sharp needles everywhere - this was a criticism. strangely no one asked how much workers earned or how many hours they worked - I was so occupied with chaperoning that I didn't ask many extra questions, and when we loaded up for our bus trip home we all realized that we didn't know: we're working on getting that info. on the whole, though, i came away feeling like a garment factory job could be a good job for a middle class person in bangladesh... many people would be really glad for a job of any kind, and this one seemed safe and reasonably comfortable. In the main sewing room, an assembly line-up of about 20 people could produce finished garments, from cut fabric through the ironing stage, at an average rate of 3 garments per minute.

a little walk in bashundara neighborhood

hi everyone! we had a great long weekend last wednesday-saturday. it felt like the first opportunity to really rest since we got off the plane. on friday afternoon the intern crew took a stroll in a suburb of Dhaka called Bashundara...
Bashundara is an example of a new Bangladesh trend: making new land for a big population by packing in silt that has been dredged from the bottom of the Ganges and packing it in along the shorelines. Bashundara neighborhood sits on sandy land that wasn't there even 5 years ago... it had all been river. It's a vast, marshy place with scattered concrete shells of many big, half-built apartment buildings. We discovered that this is a popular place for couples to come and have a walk in semi-privacy and quiet. The ice cream rickshaws that roam throughout make the neighborhood feel a little like a trip to the beach.
People we saw out wandering seemed cheery with the holiday season, and spiffy in new clothes. This was a great thing to do.

whether to cover

hi everyone :) here is a neat article i saw today about Muslim women and the question of wearing full cover or not. I've noticed here in Bangladesh that people often do as this Muslim reporter does - they guage the severity of the religious culture by watching the fluctuation in number of women who fully cover. we hear that full cover has become more popular in recent years here in bangladesh... but it is definitely still a vast minority of women. most women here wear colorful salwar kameez and saris. i'm a big fan of both of these latter two options, and i'm waiting for the day when i get to try a sari - they are more for special occasions. maybe when i chaperon the middle school dance.... oh no.

link:
'Even other Muslims turn and look at me'
Muslim journalist Zaiba Malik had never worn the niqab. But with everyone from Jack Straw to Tessa Jowell weighing in with their views on the veil, she decided to put one on for the day. She was shocked by how it made her feel - and how strongly strangers reacted to it

Eid Mubarak!

hello! today is a BIG holiday in Bangladesh and in all Islam - it is Eid. More specifically, today is Eid ul Fitr, which is the first day of a new month on the lunar calendar, and the end of a month's worth of Ramadan sun-up-to-sun-down fasting (the purpose of Islamic fasting is for experiencing the suffering of the poor, and emphathizing). Eid seems to have an aura much like Christmas! Presents! new clothes and food and money are given by everyone, to everyone. Muslims also take this time to give alms to the poor: the mosques have been full of poor people this week, receiving food and money. Following tradition, we 3 roommates gave Eid money to the guards and housekeepers in our apartment building - this was an interesting cultural thing for us! And happily we got 2 days off of school in honor of the holiday, a much needed break. Yesterday, the day before Eid, we drove all around downtown Dhaka and saw things we hadn't had a chance to explore yet. Thank goodness that many, many people go home to villages to celebrate Eid and so the traffic wasn't its usual standstill - we got to see a lot. Including the biggest shopping mall in South Asia: Bashundara City. It was busy like Christmas Eve shopping is busy...
Here are some Eid Mubarak or 'Blessed Eid' pictures :)
thank you, guys, for all the support you give me. next time i'm going to try to do a series of photos of more difficult things that we saw yesterday on our day out, but here are happy things: