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).
