Well it has been five months to the day. I cannot believe how fast it has gone by, at first it felt like time was just creeping, but now it feels like it is slipping away. It seemed like I would be living with a family forever, like the time would never come when I would live alone. Well here it is, I will be moving out in a few weeks. Today I was looking at some pictures that I took on the way to Bangladesh, it seems like that was yesterday. My family is sad that I am leaving, and to be quite honest I am also a little sad to be leaving them. But it is not like I will never see them again, they made me guarantee that I will have lunch at there house at least two or three times a week. I told them to be careful because I might take them up on that offer, anyone who knows me well knows that I can eat someone out of their house. But not here, there are at least three women sitting around cooking all day long just waiting for someone like me to come along so they can make an attempt at filling me up. So anyways, for anyone who has actually kept up with the blog for the past five months I salute you, because you have way more patience than I do. And for anyone who just happened upon the blog, well, god bless you if you have the time to read all this mumbo jumbo that I now call my life. I will continue to post as long as there is Internet, which I don’t see going anywhere any time soon. Although I think it could be debatable as to whether this could be classified as “the” Internet, or just some sub-continental hoax involving phone lines. All right so back to what I originally sat down to write.
For the past few days it has been Eid. I really haven’t ever seen anything like this before; this Eid is called Eid Korbani, which means sacrifice. The people who can afford it buy a cow or goat and sacrifice it to Allah. Well my family got both a cow and a goat. They insisted that I take as many photos as possible as well as try and get some video footage. Well I got both and looking at the pictures and videos after made me feel a little queasy. I thought that I could stomach anything, but the sight of a cow and a goat having its throat slit was a little unsettling. Everyone was really happy and excited so I tried my best to look the same, ha, I am sure my face was a dead give away when the blood started squirting all over the Imam. The insisted that I take part by helping skin and gut the cow, the neighbor did the goat so I couldn’t do the easy one. Fortunately I did okay and didn’t look like an idiot. Well I am sure that I look like an idiot in all their religious festivals but I do my best. They made me go to the Eid gar Mat (the place where they all pray) and sit with them while they pray. It is not like going to church back home where you can kind of blend in, I stuck out like a sore thumb and all of them let me know by turning around and staring at me the whole time. Although I think that I gained a lot of respect in the community for going and participating. It was definitely the talk of the village for the rest of the day, the bideshi wearing a panjabi, that must have been quite a shock for most of them. I think that they appreciate that I am trying to take part in their religious activities, so it wasn’t so bad.
I went out to the village yesterday because I had a lunch invitation from my extended family, mainly an invitation from my poopy (aunt). So I thought I was living in a village atmosphere to begin with, ha, was I wrong. After we (my family and myself) walked for about Allah knows how far we arrived at a series of straw, bamboo and tin houses/huts/structures or whatever you want to call them. I have never seen anything quite like this before, or do I think I will ever see anything like this outside of Kurigram. Immediately upon arrival I was called upon to demonstrate that I in fact knew how to say a few words in Bangla, which was hit to say the least. That gathered quite a crowd of people about half my size, oh yeah; the doors on the huts came up to my chest. So I could see over all of the rooftops which I am sure freaked all of them out, I could tell by the look of amazement on their faces. At this point in my time in Bangladesh I have grown quite fond of freaking people out, I know that sounds a little sadistic but hey, it is fun. The first magic trick that I pulled out of my pocket was my camera, which I am very glad I brought. So of course I put them all inside my camera as they put it. My camera has the little digital screen that previews the pictures, so for a couple of the women it was the first time that they had seen a picture of themselves. I told them that they can personally thank John Henry, so John Henry if you are reading this you are now officially legendary in a small Bangladeshi village outside the middle of now where. When I say legendary I mean it, they told me about a foreign woman who passed through a place near the village fifteen years ago. Since you are the person who made it possible for these women to see themselves for the first time I am sure that your name will be remembered for quite a while. I am sure there will be a few children named after you, ha ha. So after eating more than I have ever eaten in my entire life I wandered through the village with my camera shooting some video. It is really nice to be able to document these experiences, not that I will ever forget them, but it is still nice to have something to remember them with. Hopefully I will be able to post a few of the pictures soon.
Switching gears……… it is getting pretty chilly here at the foot of the Himalayas. Let me tell you something, taking a bucket bath outside in fifty-degree weather is pretty shocking to say the least. They other morning I woke up and my host mother was standing at my door with a bucket of boiling water. I thought I was going to cry when I saw the steam rising from the bucket. Without getting to graphic let me just say it was the best I have felt in a long time. I drug it out as long as I possibly could; it looked like I was on fire with all the steam coming off my body. After the bucket bath I went back to my room and bundled up in my Kashmiri blankets/shawls and slept like a baby. It is amazing how the little things come to feel soooooo gooooood. I don’t think that I will ever take a hot shower for granted again. Even though I get one every two months or so when I go to Dhaka, it just isn’t the same as being in Kurigram and taking a hot bucket bath. Now if I could just get one of these beautiful Bangladeshi women to pour the water over me without me having the obligation of marrying her, I would be on cloud nine. But I think the chances of that are pretty slim, it would be easy to talk them into doing it, it is just that it would be much harder to talk the mob out of lynching me for desecrating one of their women. So I guess I will just scratch that thought.
As far as teaching is concerned I am enjoying it, I am having a hard time assessing the levels of my students. They have this amazing English vocabulary, but they don’t have the ability to use it. Or at least when they do it comes out really weird. It seems the more I teach the more I realize I don’t know, it seems like teaching really defines your knowledge much better than any test. My students sure are putting me to the test right now, thank god I am pretty quick on my feet or else I would be up *&%$ creek without a paddle. Instead of teaching in a really formal manner I try to relate the material to their everyday lives, which is proving interesting to say the least. I have a feeling that I am learning more than they are sometimes, of course I will never admit that to them, or at least not yet. If I could just get the girls to take the burkas away from their face it would make me feel a lot more comfortable. It is really weird having these dark brown eyes staring at me from behind a piece of cloth; it is like something out of national geographic. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a national geographic magazine. I know there is no way they will remove the burkas nor am I going to make any effort to convince them otherwise. I tell them about how American women live but that just seems to arouse the perverted guys in my class if you know what I mean, so I try to keep that to a minimum.
As far as the woman thing goes I have been making some major breakthroughs at home (my host family), I am now allowed in the kitchen. I think that I am the first guy to ever go willingly into the kitchen for anything other than food. I really like sitting in the kitchen with my host mother and drinking tea (it is a bottom glass of milk tea). I tell her about the world and about other cultures, how other people in the world live. I took my pencil and paper in there (the kitchen) the other day and drew a few maps and related them to Bangladesh, and of course the different food that people eat. I think it is the first attempt that anyone has made to teach them anything besides cooking and housework. It kind of makes the men jealous which I think is funny, I tell them that I will be happy to teach them anything they want to know, but it will have to come to the kitchen to hear about it. I feel bad for my mother, she was married off at the age of 12, so she was deprived of any education that she might have had. It is amazing to see how eager she is to learn, so I really enjoy sitting with her, her sister and the servant (a fifteen year old girl) and drinking tea. I see that as teaching just as much as being in the classroom. They are not dumb women like some of the men claim; they just have never been given the opportunity to get an education. Not that I am giving them an education, it is just a breath of fresh air from the smoke filled kitchen. I do the same in the tea stalls outside the home, I go and sit with men and drink more tea. We talk about everything; I love poking at the difficult subjects. I love telling the old men that my Dadi (grandmother) has been to china and many other countries; they just stare at me and then laugh in disbelief. They give me a hard time about president Bush treats the world and I give them a hard time about the way that women are treated here. Then I ask them which is worse, treating people from other countries bad or treating your own family bad. Believe me, it can make for some pretty interesting conversations, but they are always in good spirits. It is great practice for my Bangla, but I still can’t understand the men who don’t have any teeth. That is my language goal; if I can understand the toothless old rural men I will consider myself a decent Bangla speaker. But I really don’t see that happening in the near future considering most Bengalis cant even understand them.
So anyways I guess I better be getting on before this blog gets out of control. This blog is dedicated to the now legendary John Henry and to anyone who has been reading through these increasingly lengthy blogs that are becoming stranger and stranger, kind of like my life and me.
I am the shada shoitan no more; I am now bhodmashiallap. That is my new rural nickname around here, or at least what the people who know me call me or give me hard time about. Take it from me, that one is not in the dictionary…. good luck figuring out what it means.
Bhodmashiallap signing off from some place west of “the west,” but not quite the Far East. See you long time in the tomorrow.

I took this picture from my back yard in Kurigram, i thought it was kind of cool. Let me tell you something, those lungis that those guys are wearing are soooooo comfortable. I wear one everyday, not in public but around the house. You better believe that i will be wearing one when I come home, they are great for lounging around.

I would like to thank Ben for posting the pictures. the first picture of me is a little old, it is from about three months ago while I was still living in Gazipur. The other various pictures of people are from different places in the country. the girl posing in the yellow dress was my host sister Ranu, she absolutely loved my camera. the other one of me in front of the Barbie poster is on my birthday. all the people in the building got together to celebrate and decorate the house and that was one of the various decorations. hopefully some of these pictures will put some of me life into perspective, well maybe not in perspective but at least it will give an idea of what it is like. hopefully I will be able to continue to post pictures in the future, I think that some times pictures are worth a thousand words. The picture with this blog is of Rumpa and Amitah my two favorite children, they live out in the village with the rest of my family.

GW: it depends on how conservative or radical you are. most people have one or maybe two wives in separate cities. but in some villages on male will father many children to different mothers. now I am working number six or seven, I have begun to lose count. I am just kidding for everyone out there who doesn't take my humor with a grain of salt.

I am glad to see more people are reading the blog, I will try to not to bore you out of your minds.

Well I made it through another month; time is really starting to fly. The past five months have gone by faster than I could have ever imagined. I think everyone can agree with the saying that time flies when you are having fun. The holidays were nice, but at the same time they were hard. It was hard being around people that I barely knew I am so accustomed to spending the holidays with people that I am close to. After this year I will definitely never take the holidays for granted again. I think it took a pretty big toll on everyone in the group, but now that they are over I think everyone will start to feel a little better.
There is an exodus of people leaving the country (Peace Corps Volunteers), we have already lost 30% of the people from my group. That is a pretty high number. This bombing stuff is really freaking people out; I think people are more worried about the problems on the horizon. For some strange reason I feel that I need to stick it out, I feel a little sense of pride for staying. It seems like someone new is leaving week, the more people that go the more people want to go. For me the more people that go the more I want to stay. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to be quite honest not much does make sense in this place. I feel that over the past months that I have made a commitment to be here.
I don’t know what I would do if I left, I think that I would miss this place. I have developed a love hate relationship with this country. I would miss the old men that I have tea with every afternoon, the little kids who run after me while I am riding my bike. I would miss the crazy man who follows me around in the market, the guys that I play soccer and cricket with. But most of all I would miss the adventure, to wake up to a place that is nothing like anything I will ever experience again, and then one morning wake up and call that place home. That right there is one of the most unique feelings one can experience. It is a feeling that cannot be bought, or had by any means other than the actual experience itself.
My language is starting to come around; I am able now to deal with people that used to drive me crazy. The language barrier was the hardest part of the past five months, but now I am completely immersed in the language. No one in my family speaks English; no one at work speaks English. The only person that I speak English with is Kelly and the people from my office. But I really don’t see them a whole lot, so I am forced to constantly speak Bangla. Believe me I am not complaining, I heard the other volunteers Bangla while I was in Dhaka and it made me feel good. I am almost on par with some of the people who have been here for fifteen months. I made a conscious effort to learn to read and write the language, which is really starting to pay off. I can know read the busses when they are coming, I can read the signs. I know that those are small things in the scheme of things, but they have helped me in so many ways. When people see me write my name in Bangla it draws a small crowd, and they love to correct me. This is okay as long as it is the right correction; believe me that can be a problem in a society that is hardly educated.
The whole thing with the president was pretty cool. We actually didn’t get to meet him because there was a massive security blanket surrounding him. They gave the VIP seats in the front, and they acknowledged us on several occasions. It was pretty funny, everyone that spoke at the convention had to say a few things to us about how we were safe. I wasn’t sure who I was more scared of, the terrorist or the four guys at the door holding sub-machine guns. There was one guy sitting in the back of a Toyota pickup truck holding a grenade launcher. Grenade launchers freak me out, I saw a guy with one of those trying to control a crowd outside the jail/police station in Kurigram. Needless to say there was some heavy security at the event. We were on national TV on a couple of stations. It was funny to have the cameras right in our faces as we were sitting there. When we arrived at the event there was a massive contingent of women wearing the traditional blue saris (when the president is at an event the women must wear blue saris). I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I walked through the gate behind the security. There had to have been at least one hundred women (my age) standing there waiting to greet us. I wish I could have gotten some pictures, but they wouldn’t let us take anything with us. Oh well, I had a good time none the less, even though I didn’t get any picture I will probably never forget it.
The other day I missed my normal bus to Kurigram on my way back from Dhaka. The guys at the bus station desk are really nice, they know me pretty well because I travel to and from Dhaka on the same bus every time. They said that there was only one more bus going to Kurigram that day, and I could not stay another day in Dhaka. So I told them to just give me a ticket for the 10 o’clock bus, they told me I might want to just stay in Dhaka for another day, that it would not be in my best interest to take the 10 o’clock bus. Being hard headed like I am I told them it was no big deal, that I could handle any of the buses. Wrong move, I should have stayed in Dhaka. That was the craziest bus ride I have ever taken in my life. When the bus pulled up it looked like the mobile home that Randy Quaid drove in National Lampoons Christmas Vacation, it had death mobile written all over. They gave me the seat behind the driver, so I had a front row ticket to my roller coaster ride. As I was sitting there behind the Pan (beethi nut combined with calcium carbonate and some other stuff that I have never seen before) chewing bus driver looking through the spider web of a windshield, I began to think that it was quite possible that we wouldn’t make it to our destination. The bus driver was jacked up on Pan and god knows what else, there was a guy hanging out the door of the bus screaming at the people to get out of the way because the bus wasn’t stopping for animals or people. The baby and her mother next to me were sick and throwing up out the window across my lap, I would have moved if there was room, but the bus was packed like a sardine can. On the roof there were about fifty people free loading, along with a few people hanging from the ladder on the back. None of the meters worked on the dash, except for the tape player that was blaring Hindi music. The roads we took……… I don’t think that I need to elaborate, just use your imagination, if there was an express bus to hell this was it and it is on that highway (to hell). On the way we had to stop for three tanks that were blocking the road. That was the first time that I have ever seen a tank in real life, much less on that was manned and moving. There were a couple of trucks of men wearing all black fatigues and black headbands that hung down to their waist. They were holding AK-47s and sub machine guns, their captain got on the bus and said that they were conducting military “drills.” But since we were there and all he might as well go ahead and search the bus, some drills huh. So anyways after about a half hour dealing with them we were back on our way we made our way back to the main road so we could avoid more military “drills.” We stopped at this restaurant along the road, of course everyone on the bus wanted to by my lunch so they could watch me eat with my hand. Even though it should have been me buying everyone on the bus lunch, I accepted the offer as not to dishonor anyone’s gesture. I felt like a lion at the zoo during feeding time, everyone wanted to see the bideshi eat. Oh well, it was a free lunch and some really good Bangla practice so I really can’t complain about that. All in all the bus ride took over eight hours as well as every bit of my patience and wear with all. But that is just it; I wouldn’t trade these kinds of experiences for any thing. Experiences like this are priceless to me, but I will admit sometimes they are pretty trying at the time.
The other night I was standing out in the middle of a rice paddy talking to my mom on the phone. I go out there because that is where I get the best reception. It was a pitch-black night with all the stars out and no moon. When I turned my little flash light on there was a layer of fog on the ground covering my feet, so as you can imagine it was a little creepy. While I was standing there talking I heard a couple of men approach in the darkness, they stopped about twenty feet away and started to talk about me. I couldn’t understand everything that they were saying but I heard my name a couple of times. I knew that I wasn’t in too much danger because I knew everyone in my para (neighborhood/village) and I knew that they would help me if I called for it. They men started shining their flash light on me, I couldn’t see them because of the light, then they called me over to where they were after I hung up the phone. When I got over there one of the men pulled out police identification and said that I should come with him. This is where I wish I could speak really good Bangla because I misinterpreted what he said. I thought he meant I was in trouble and it made me really nervous, although I hadn’t done anything to get myself in trouble. So I went with him back toward my house, which made me think that we were going to my house. He went by my house and then he turned down an alley with a dim glow and a faint noise coming from end of the alley. Believe me I didn’t want to go down the alley, but in the end I reluctantly agreed to follow him. As we got closer to the end I could make out voices singing and the light was beginning to flicker. When I got to the end it opened up into a large circle people standing in the middle of this slum, they were all singing in some language that I couldn’t understand. In the middle of the circle there was an old woman sitting on a wood plank bed wrapped in blankets. Then about ten people emerged from the circle dressed in traditional clothes and one of them was playing a violin type instrument, they began to dance in circles around the old woman while singing a song. I asked the guy who had brought to this place what in the world it was. As it turns out, it was an ancient Hindu song and dance used to heal people with paralysis. The old woman in the middle was paralyzed on the left side of her body, so they were doing a seven-day song and dance to heal her. I seriously doubt that she will be healed but it was pretty cool to see. The best part is that I went back to my house and got my camera, so I got some really neat video footage as well as some good pictures. I had never seen anything like that before; I think things like that are more common in Kurigram because it is so rural and so close to India. After seeing that it made me feel really good that they invited me to see it. They said that they had never shown a foreigner that before, but to be honest I don’t think that many foreigners would have ventured down that dark alley. I was just lucky that they had good intentions. I feel like my para is beginning to accept me as part of their community, and believe me that is a good feeling because it is not easy to do. The Peace Corps always told me that it is really hard for us to accept the new culture (Bengali), but I beg to differ. I think that it is harder for the locals to accept me as a foreigner/stranger, because I am so much different than they are. So gaining their acceptance is a really good feeling and makes it worth being here. Now if I can just avoid those damn terrorists I should be okay, the people in my para said that they wouldn’t let anything happen to me no matter how bad the terrorism situation becomes. I guess we will see about that in the coming days/months. They said that they wouldn’t let any strangers come around the neighborhood, so I guess that I am not the stranger here anymore.
Well I guess this blog is getting a little out of hand as far as length is concerned. I could really go on and on, but I will refrain from boring the heck out of whoever takes the time to look at this. So anyways I hope all is well back in the good old US of A, I hope that our god forsaken president doesn’t run our beloved country any farther into the ground before I get back. Well that is all from this side of the world.
The stranger no more signing off,
Shada shoitan