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.
