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.