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