This is a song to say goodbye

This blog, no longer active, detailed my experiences as a volunteer working in International development in Bangladesh from October 2008 - October 2009. My new home on the web is Meeting in the Aisle. Come say hi!


Things I'm going to love missing

1. "I wanna' live forever..."

This last installment was going to start in a very different way. Any regular readers of my blog will know I’ve found the stare factor a bit much sometimes. I’ve been photographed on my way to work, filmed while sleeping on a bus, snapped as I stepped out to buy tomatoes and crossing the road and eating dinner and climbing onto rickshaws. Basically, from the minute I leave my front door, to the minute I return, I’m at serious risk of falling prey to the pedestrian paparazzi.

Not content with sneaking pics using mobile phones, people have surrounded me in vegetable patches, at the local market, as I’ve waited for a break in traffic or have been in CNGs. To cut a long story short, a moment’s peace is a rare thing for a bideshi (foreigner), and especially a female bideshi. Apparently, we’re the main attraction at the zoo, the kind of zoo where interaction is encouraged. Or Angelina Jolie, I guess, depending on which way you spin it.

Of course all this staring is to be expected (right?). It is not as if Bangladesh is a melting pot of multiculturalism. And bideshis wear weird clothes, eat strange food, have strange customs, behave inappropriately, talk in odd languages, and turn up in the strangest places. Under these conditions, how could you not stare, if you were a local? It’s only natural.

Natural or not, it can become extremely trying. When I’m hot and sweaty and stinky, or tired, or in a rush, or stuck in one of Dhaka’s notoriously hideous traffic jams, or going about the banalities of my everyday life, I’ve found out I’m not inclined to encourage idle chit chat with complete strangers who want my mobile number. 

I don’t want to be facebook friends either. Or teach you English. Or visit your family, marry you/your brother/your cousin/your friend. While I’m on topic, I also can’t do you any favours with Australia’s immigration department, or find you a job, or give you money. Or give you Ricky Ponting’s home address. 

When all is said and done, I am really looking forward to getting back my anonymity. While it has occasionally been lovely to feel a part of a community, albeit a weird one-sided one where everyone knows my name but I have no idea of theirs, I yearn for the days when a trip to the corner shop isn’t fraught with the prospect of my photo doing the rounds at ‘the pub’ (read tea stall). I mean, I can hear them now “Oi, you should have seen the Sheila I saw the other day! You wouldn’t believe it! She was walking around, cool as you like, completely alone AT SIX PM! And she SMILED RIGHT AT ME! I know she wanted me, you could just tell.” Hmm…Ok, so that might resemble more a conversation or two I’ve overheard in Australian pubs, but you get my drift.

I guess this all means I really do want to be just like everyone else. 

But the stare factor hasn’t made it to number one of things I’m going to love missing. As I glance over at my sister, currently bent over a bucket, there is something way more significant that needs to top this list. I hereby declare that I, Lyrian Fleming, am looking so very, very forward to not worrying if every meal prepared outside of my kitchen is going to leave me purging all the things I’ve ever eaten, and the things I have only ever dreamt of eating, out of my system. 

Salmonella, E coli, and all your buddies – our departure will come not a moment too soon. Bangla belly, I bid you an eager farewell, with just a small, modest request. Please go gentle on us, we’ve still got Delhi to deal with… 

Things I'm going to miss loving

1. The beehive of life

What better way to end the 'desh than by quickly tapping this out as I'm hunched over the fan, sweating at 6am, having stopped to hear the last morning call to prayer. I'm in a rush, bags packed, and have a flight to Kolkata in two hours. I have to go out onto the street and hail some form of transport, and squish me, my pack, and my sister into whatever it is that comes our way, but something will, because that's the way Bangladesh works. 

For all the open sewers, the creepy crawlies, the heat, the stench, the broken pavements, the failing electricity and all the other things which I haven't got the time to go into, Bangladesh has carved out a little piece of my heart. There's a hole in there somewhere that is being filled by a whole horde of people who have spotted the space and are now madly setting up shop. Sticking up tarps, tying ropes, securing foundations, painting everything in hypercolours, and probably installing a variety of horns which can be blasted at any given moment.

Not quite the tidy metaphor my English teachers would have liked, but you get my point.

So it is with a bit of a chuckle I am admitting to myself that the very thing that has driven me so crazy here, the sheer chaos of the place, is probably the thing I will miss the most. I know I will miss the cacophony, the crowds, and the crazy pace of life that goes hand in hand with over 150 million people living in a football field. One that's always just moments away from being flooded.

Amazing to admit, but it's true.

And I'm going to leave it here, because it's time to rush out the door. I've got a plane to catch that I don't want to miss. A big shout out to everyone who helped make my stay just that little bit easier with phone calls, packages, visits, letters, post cards, e mails, text messages and everything in between. Every little gesture helped immensely.

Allah Hafez x

Song for my sugar spun sister

For her first day in Dhaka, I whisked Kara off to the beautician where we promptly got pretty toes. It's all about easing her in gently...

Lullaby

Things I'm going to miss loving

4. Getting my gear on

Know what it’s like to dress up as a grape? An orange? A lime? What it’s like to wear your pyjamas to work every day? How it feels walking into a meeting with conservative VIPs in thongs? What it’s like to not have a fat day? I do, I do, I do!

For a whole year I’ve been spared the strict rules and regulations that are the dress codes of living in a cosmopolitan city like Sydney. The good bits about this are multiple. I haven’t been caught lying in bed thinking, ‘nothing’s ironed!’, or ‘how dressed up should I be?’, or ‘am I having a fat day or a thin day?’ I haven’t had to worry about matching my shoes to my outfits, about wearing makeup, or doing my hair, or about whether my daytime dress will carry me through to evening. All this while having an office job would have seemed like some far out feminist-breakout utopia to me a few years ago.

That is the wonder of the salwar kameez.


I'll play the grape in today's fruit cocktail

Sure, there are days when I don’t feel like featuring as one of the colours of the rainbow. When I feel tired and frumpy and sexless and the last thing I want to put on is the equivalent of a potato-sack-does-gay-mardi-gras. I worry about what my waist line is doing, and curse the ever expanding capabilities of the draw string. Most of all I miss wearing dresses and skirts and feeling feminine. But, on reflection, the positives of such liberation far outweigh the negatives.

Seriously, I haven’t had to ‘suck in’ for twelve months. What an opportunity! (PS, if anyone knows a good pilates instructor, I’ll be on the look out in March…)

When all is said and done, I know I’m going to really miss the freedom of dressing ‘deshi style. Being the kind of girl who isn’t known for my love of washing and ironing, or shopping, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life lamenting the piles of dirty, unwearable, unfashionable, out of date, and downright unsuitable outfits I have had to choose from. To be given a year reprieve from this was more than a girl like me could ever ask for. Not only has it been okay for me to be all crumpled and mismatched – it has been expected! Here there are no colour rules. It’s as simple as Long top/pants/scarf, every single day. The brighter the better!

All this talk has made me ask myself just how I’m going to feel once I get back into the camp of consumerism, where I will have to check size tags and relegate lime back to the fruit aisle (where it rightly belongs, I might add). Bring it on, I say. A year off is proving to be just about enough. I mean, I’m not even sure if I have legs at this point. Those two ghastly white things I catch quick glimpses of every now and then can’t actually belong to me…

Things I'm going to love missing

4. This means WAR

“Telapoka” is one of those words which sounds so much better than what it means. Go on, say it aloud. Tel-a-pok-a. It’s cute, got good rhythm, punchy, all sharp because of the ‘t’ and the ‘k,’ and snappy thanks to the short ‘a’ sounds. Next to ‘tik tik’ (the word for gecko), it could be my favourite Bangla word. It’s such a shame it is the word for something I have come to loathe so very much over the past 12 months. A real shame. But cockroaches, while you’ve never been loved exactly, the time has come for you all to DIE!

Cockroaches in the kitchen. Cockroaches crawling out of the plug holes in the bathroom. Cockroaches crawling on my toothbrush, over my clean plates in the cupboard, or flying across the room in the middle of the night? GROSS!

In fact, I am not at all going to miss the general encroachment into my life of pests in general. I’ve had serious rat issues too. First huge rats in my kitchen, eating through plastic containers to get to flour, running off with onions, leaving trails of shit (and fear) in their wake. Then rats in my office at work. Rats so big they tore huge pieces out of my curtain to nest with. So strong they ripped chunks of wood off the inside of my desk draws. So annoying they turned my notebooks and paperwork into shredded paper, and left trails of destruction over everything I dared touch. Not content with doing all this at night, the bastards ran over my feet or were found in the middle of the day chewing on my pen. Brazen bastards.



Exhibit 1: Rodent destruction in the workplace

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the spiders. Being somewhat of an arachnophobe, I once would have thought these hairy creatures would always feature at number one of my dreaded creepy crawlies, so only making number three is a big step forward. But I still don’t like them. I don’t like them so much that I spent over an hour stuck on the squat toilet in my home, trapped by the hairy huntsman parked between me and the door. What to do? What to do? The arrival of monsoon sent more of the beastly things inside, and turning every corner in my place became an exercise in testing my somewhat frayed nerves.

How did I cope? Let’s just say I would make a terrible Buddhist, because I did what many before me have done and went on the offensive. The weaponry in my arsenal ranged from surface poisons to aerosol sprays. I built barriers out of water bottles, sticky tape and metal grates. I gave up desk drawers to the cause and moved my things higher, out into the open, into the light, or in extreme cases into the fridge. I only crossed the territory from one room to the other armed with cans of bug spray, ready to go onto the attack. And I killed. I squashed, I squirted, I smashed and I sprayed the buggers into submission.

While I have had a few wins and regained some territory, the war is never ending. Until now, that is, because “I’m leaving on a jet plane….” Ahhhhh. How’s the serenity?

Border Song

Things I’m going to love not missing

3. Living in a petri dish of putrification

The sheer stench of humanity has caught me unawares in Bangladesh. Of course I expected some stinkiness. I’ve traveled through countries with worrisome approaches to sewage before, let alone markets, food and all the other sources of smell. But true to style, Bangladesh takes the smelliness factor to a whole new level.

Considering the conditions in the ‘desh, some smell is to be expected. When you throw in the heat, the sweat, the size of the population, the density of the population, the geographical location (at the delta of rivers which run through India et al) and the inadequate infrastructure just to name a few, it’s no wonder things get a little ‘on the nose’.

Knowing all this doesn’t make it any easier when faced with a full-frontal olfactory assault, and I’ll be well pleased when a walk to work in the morning doesn’t have me retching in the gutter (which is so often the cause in the first place).

Between the smell of everyone’s morning er, business; the pong of animal intestines under the midday sun; the scent of a few/hundred/thousand people sweating it up; or any of the other multiple sources of stench we’ve become so accustomed to living without in Sydney, I’ll be happy when this side of life goes back to out of sight, out of mind.

Things I’m going to miss loving

3. You mean I’m not European?

Airport Staff: Are you Indian?
Me: Um, no. I’m not.
Airport Staff: You are Chinese then!
Me: Actually, no. I’m not Chinese either.
Airport Staff: Where are you from then?
Me: Australia. I’m from Sydney.
Airport Staff: *confused look* Are you sure you’re not Chinese?

Recently I took advantage of the Eid (end of Ramadan) public holidays and took a trip up to the hills of India. Having discovered that I could fly direct from Chittagong to Kolkata, cutting out the treacherous trip to Dhaka in between, it didn’t take me long to deliberate on whether I should stick around for the festivities, or decamp to another country.

True to form, Bangladesh didn’t cease to amuse me even as I left. The conversation between myself and a member of Chittagong’s international airport staff left us both a bit bewildered. It’s fair to say the airport doesn’t see a lot of traffic in terms of tourist travelers. The curly haired, white, blonde girl dressed in full local garb was clearly messing with the guy’s head. Just as it was messing with my head that in twenty-five minutes, yes, twenty-five (!!!!), I would be in another country.

That’s less time than it took me to drive to my parent’s house last year, and we both lived in Sydney.

Of Asian descent?

True to style for an Aussie, being in such close proximity to international borders is a rare experience, and one I’ve been taking full advantage of. Having taken multiple trips ‘overseas,’(a term which Australian’s use interchangeably with ‘international travel’ since they are one and the same for our lovely distant island), I’ve loved feeling a little bit European.

I’ve even been able to give the language box a bit of a tick and feel all culturally in-synch by rocking up on foreign soil and breaking out a bit of the local lingo with more fluency than the pleasantly surprised West Bengali’s in India anticipated from the white chick.

Sure, Bangladesh ain’t Switzerland and India is a far cry from France, but for this little Aussie, the novelty of being able to pop into other countries for a quick weekend away (or preferably longer) shows no signs of wearing off any time soon. It didn’t stop me from feeling an overwhelming sense of jealousy when I ran into an Italian/Spanish/English speaking German in India who trotted out bits of all four languages within fifteen minutes, but hey, I still felt pretty cool.

We used to vacation

What does one do when one has four weeks left to move out, pack up a life, finish up a job, and say goodbyes? Leave the country of course!

A 10 day trip to Darjeeling and Sikkim in India has hopefully restored my sense of balance and will enable me to become super packer. Super detached from material goods. And super tough (read no tears) when saying sayoonara to my colleagues.

Rather than gab on about the delights of my trip, I thought I'd just link to my photos instead.

Mmmmm, Sikkim: beauty you can breathe.

Stories from the city, stories from the sea

Do you work on women's empowerment?

My response to this question, posed by Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times

Sure, I can tick the box saying I work on the empowerment of women and girls. A big tick. But truth is, I don’t do much. “Can you write your own name?” I might ask. “Does your daughter go to school?” Probing question after probing question, I tease out the threads of women’s lives until they become whole stories without an end.

I might talk to their husband, or their son, but I might not. I might sit amongst the cacophony of colour a group of women create when they sit together in saris to discuss violence against women, or early marriage, or dowry, or divorce and ask what has changed their world. I might laugh at a woman pulling at my curls, tight and defiant in the humidity, and accept her offer of a banana or mango. I might cheer, or cry, or clap as I hear about twelve year old Tania who was promised to a man four times her age; or Nasrima who has rebuilt a road so her daughter can go to school; or Kuki who is training Tasmina to take over her role as leader of the local women’s empowerment group when the funding runs out.

I will lift my lens to meet their eyes. Trying to capture smiles, the shy ones, the individuality of the woman in her black chador, the wisdom in the grandmother, the hope in her daughter. Lights! Camera! Action! I will bring all three with me, and feed off the symbols we devour of life for the bottom billion; dirt floors, roaming chickens, naked children, tube-wells. The bloated bellies aren’t so popular these days, or the big eyes staring vacantly, so I will look for the children who have clothes on, whose teeth are clean and white, who can lift their heads and focus on me.

At the end of the day I will open my notebook, filled to the brim with more tales than I could ever tell, and sort through them. Should I pick Tania and Shopna who have started a small spice business from their slum, fingers stained yellow with tumeric? Maybe Moutushi, the first in her family to finish high school, or Maya, the first to use contraception in her village? Should I choose the educator? The midwife? The mother? The village elder? The husband who supports his wife’s economic independence? How can I choose one when the world is so full of little earthquakes reshaping what it means to be born a girl in Bangladesh?

Do I work in the area of women’s and girl’s empowerment? I guess I don’t. Not really. But by telling the stories of those who do on a daily basis, as part of CARE Bangladesh’s SHOUHARDO Program, I know a lot of people who do. This is their story.

It was a strange time in my life

Things I’m going to love not missing

2. Oh s*it, bu*ger, cr*p, f**k, da*n I’m gonna ddddiiiiieeeee
 A quick glance over at my upper arm is enough to remind me I’ve had more than my fair share of near death moments this year. The impressive bruise I’m currently sporting is the result of an incident with a motorbike. I was on the footpath, and soon, it was too. The collision wasn’t major, but it was enough to elevate my heart rate and leave a nasty mark. The really big concern for me is not that I got hit by a motorbike while walking home from work, though. The major concern is that it wasn’t a big deal! I didn’t call anyone after it happened, didn’t ice my arm, and didn’t mention it to many people except when they pointed at the bruise with a degree of alarm I perhaps should have shown when it happened.

This cavalier attitude towards my mortality has got to stop.

Between seven car accidents, speedboat trips over open water without a life jacket, overnight bus and train journeys on hair-raising roads and tracks, a mutiny, flying with airline carriers who think ‘maintenance’ is optional, a cyclone, crossing eight lanes of traffic in a rickshaw with trucks bearing down on me, or being out and about on the streets of Dhaka (x risk by 10 after dark) – I’ve had more near misses than I care to think about. 

That be the view from my bus window

one trip to Dhaka. Comforting.

 What really brought it all home was a recent weekend in Kolkata. I spent three days there and didn’t have a single near death experience. Not one. Within an hour of being back on Bangladeshi soil I had three. THREE! In one hour! And I am not the kind of girl who seeks these things out (er, choosing to visit hair-raising countries aside). I’m not an adrenalin junkie. I don’t want to throw myself out of a plane. I don’t want to tie myself to an oversized rubber band and hurl myself off a cliff. That’s not my idea of fun. I like living. I like the idea of growing old and wrinkly and boring the kiddies with tales of what it was like “in my day.” I choose life! 

Which means I better get out of here quick smart. As my father lovingly pointed out the other day, “you know, statistically speaking, the longer you stay there…”. 

Yep, thanks Dad, I’m on it. Four weeks and counting. 

Things I’m going to miss loving
2. The Call to Prayer 

When I first got here there was a half hour period every morning where I dreamt up extremely uncharitable scenarios which all had a predictable end involving smashed loud speakers and gagging. I know it wasn’t very nice of me, or culturally sensitive, or respectful, or any of the things an Aussie Youth Ambassador should be. But when you’re being woken up for sunrise every single morning by warblings from a religion you’re not part of – it’s pretty hard to be respectful.

I solved the problem by getting my brother to send me industrial-strength earplugs. It has been months now since I’ve had to use them though, as I’m finally able to sleep through the first call to prayer.

For those who don’t know, the call to prayer occurs five times a day, just before sunrise, mid morning, lunch time, mid afternoon, and at sunset.

Now that I can sleep through the first one, I love hearing the call to prayer drifting out from the loudspeakers of mosques across the city. As well as being great markers of time now the sweat-factor means I don’t wear a watch (oh, there’s the call the prayer, must be lunch time/going home time/dinner time), they’re really rather beautiful. I find myself pausing what I’m doing and listening in. It makes me feel connected to the city, a part of something bigger, even though I’m not part of the religion.

Sure, I’ve got problems with it too. I’m not sure how I feel about the call to prayer being so public in a supposedly secular state. I suspect it makes some people from other religions feel marginalised, especially given the tense history between Muslims and Hindus here. And it sits uncomfortably with me that religion is used so often in Bangladesh in ways I thoroughly reject – keeping people uneducated, restricting them from participating fully in the social sphere, cementing unbalanced gender roles among others (not forgetting that this can be said about most religions the world over in some way). 

It has taken me by surprise how much I like hearing the muezzin (man who calls Muslims to prayer) make the daily calls, and I was surprised to realise I’m going to miss it. Not enough to stay, mind you, but I have certainly come a long way from being the Girl Who Dreams of Destruction.

Hyperballad

According to my diary, I’ve got about 5 weeks left in Bangladesh and then it’ll be end of chapter, moving right along folks, please GFC clean up after yourself so when I’m done spending all my cash, I can find gainful employment come March. Pretty please.

This gives me 5 weeks to post about the 5 things I’m going to miss loving, and the things I’m going to love not missing. Oh yes, a list, one of my favourite things. Instead of doing the ole’ bullet point number, though, I thought what better farewell to the ‘desh than a long and drawn out departure, spread out over – yep – 5 weeks. So, taking it away at number 5, I bring you:

Things I’m going to love not missing

1. No, no way, oh no, uh uh, that’s not even…you mean it’s…my dinner?

The first thing that probably comes to mind on reading a sentence like that is a scene out of Survivor, you know that old reality TV show where they stuck a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Australia) and made them do silly things like obstacle courses, jigsaw puzzles, and eat rare and exotic food like bull’s balls, spiders, brains etc. But that’s not the direction I’m headed in here.

What I’m talking about here is B – L – A – N – D. Not a word I associated with food from the sub-continent before coming here, but wow, how things change. At first it seemed like a dream. Lentils, naan bread, mixed curried veggies, tropical fruits, roti for breakfast and sweets for dessert. How can you go wrong?

Wrong, though, is exactly the word for Bengali Cuisine. Actually, I take that back. The word I’m really looking for is yellow. Everything here is yellow. Yellow dal, yellow vegetables, yellow meat, yellow bread, yellow fruit, yellow yellow yellow. And while I have nothing against bananas, and think they’re actually on the tasty (and safe) side of the Bengali food equation, there is just something slightly disturbing about an entire nation’s food relying so wholeheartedly on one colour. Especially when you’re from a country that says something about three colours on your plate at every meal (or a rule to that effect). And colour on my plate is something, as a vegetarian, I normally excel at.

Not here I don’t. It’s all yellow.

A typical meal in a Bengali restaurant goes something like this. Get a big bowl of yellow, oily water which we will hereto refer to as ‘dal’, despite the complete lack of, well, ‘dal’ (which means lentils). Throw in a small side bowl of yellow vegetables, or ‘shobji’ cooked to within an inch of their life then thrown into a big pot full of yellow, oily water and simmer until everything takes on a mush-like consistency. Throw in a plate of white rice (which is destined to become yellow as you ‘moosh’ the dal and vegetables together), a side of cucumber, some salt and a slice of lime and there you have it. A la carte, deshi style.




For the meat eaters, it gets slightly better as you get to add yellow, bony, deep-fried fish or fatty, yellow goat/chicken/beef to your plate, depending on Today’s Special.

As a surprise, you never know how fresh the food is when it reaches the table with worrisome speed, suggesting a whole load of ‘here’s something I prepared early…much earlier…maybe even yesterday, or the day before that…’ which can leave you feeling like you’re just a mouthful away from salmonella. Lip-smacking stuff.


Things I’m going to miss loving
1. ‘Hey, kali!’

Bangladesh is deservedly renowned for it’s cycle rickshaws, and the art that adorns them, which some rickshaw wallahs take very, very seriously. Combine this cycle power with the motorised CNGs, and the buses of all types from the dodgy ‘I-need-to-upgrade-my-travel-insurance’ variety right up to the ‘here’s your water, your biscuits, and a blanket, just nod in my direction and I’ll be up in a jiffy to help’ kind, and you’ve got pretty much the whole country covered.

Transport in general is something Bangladesh does well. In fact, it would be entirely possible to not walk more than about 10 steps in any direction for a week or more. All you have to do is walk out the front door, shout 'hey kali!’ to the nearest empty form of transport, and off you go. It’s cheap. It’s everywhere. Come to think of it, it’s like the McDonalds of the sub continent, and just as likely to contribute to the obesity epidemic overtaking the middle class here. It is scarily easy to say ‘why walk?’ when, for 20 cents, you can pay someone else to do your sweating for you. (…Unless it happens to be one of the ten months of the year here when it’s stinking bloody hot and you’ll be sweating anyway…but I digress).



Now every time I curse and swear at the lack of taxis in the city on a Saturday night, I can reminisce about how, “In Bangladesh, we’d be able to just stick out our arm and…”. Oh, I’m going to be such great company when I come home.

Sleeping Rough

Call me slow, but I used to wonder why it is often difficult to get people in dangerous mosquito prone areas to sleep under a mosquito net. It seemed like a no-brainer: Sleep under net & avoid nasty blood-letting and possible infection with malaria/dengue. End of story. I even thought it was kind of...exotic. Sleeping under the net would be akin to those princess type beds I wanted so much when I was a kid. And the romance! There didn't appear to be a downside.

But oh, how my tune has changed. Here's the bit no one actually mentions... IT"S BLOODY HOT UNDER THERE! It turns out that mosquitoes are not the only thing the netting keeps out. Fresh air, or any air flow at all, is rendered virtually impossible.

As I lay awake underneath one the other night, feeling the sweat soak into my pyjamas, the overhead fan churning away uselessly, I spared a thought for those who do this every night. It's crap.

My plea to designers is to come up with a mosquito net that manages to allow airflow while keeping out the nasties. And make it cheap, please. Adoption rates need all the help they can get, considering malaria still causes over a million deaths each year.

The Distance

It might be after the event, but I want to give a big shout out to my sister Kara who did the Oxfam Walk last weekend. For those who don't know, it's a 100km slog, which she and her fellow Snail Trails knocked over in 32hrs. Ouch!

It was in the name of charity, and so far they've raised a tidy $4,335. You can still donate (come on, all donations are tax deductible!) here.



Kara climbing for her life

Wish you were here

I love TV. Everyone who knows me knows that. Especially Channel 10 (with Channels 7&9 coming in a close second and third of course). Neighbours! Big Brother! That AYAD documentary...

Yes, an AYAD documentary! Screening on Channel 10 (Australia) this Sunday August 30 at 3pm.

Find out more, before sitting down on the couch with a glass of wine to toast those out there who can't toast.

These days...

On the job - getting the low down on
a cucumber farm in Cox's Bazaar
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Damn, that girl screams 'glamour'!

Yes, glamour glamour glamour is what this job is all about. I got to play out one of my favourite Beatles songs recently (have a guess) by taking Sally with me out 'into the field' to research stories. In three days we covered: a women's group in a slum:



A community project to rebuild a road and overcome waterlogging so kiddies could attend school even during monsoon



the way to school



An income generating project combining environmental protection in a forest-protecting cucumber farm



And met with a local government chairman to discuss strengthening local governance through grass-roots participation.

Not being one to waste an opportunity, I appointed Sally as photographer on the trip, which is where these pics all come from. Seeing my job through her eyes was invaluable. I once again was able to recall how I felt the first time I walked through a slum, felt the excitement of women eager to tell me all about their small business selling spices, of men proud to be sending their children to school on the back of increased family incomes, and of children showing off through their singing and dancing.

Just as invaluable was experiencing her reaction to the not-so-fun stuff. The long days, the travel, the dodgy accommodation and poor facilities, the exposure to people teetering on the edges of the poverty line, barely able to scrape together enough food and resources for their everyday lives.

While I might be nervous about how I'm going to find the transition back into life back home (what, you mean I can't wear Birkenstocks and bright green pyjamas to work?!), it has also made me appreciate, once again, just how much I've loved my job here.

Cool, huh?

Chasing Pavements

From one kind of ordinary week straight into another, I'm back in Chittagong and relieved to know I can still have a laugh at the complicated, bureaucratic, time-consuming and sometimes straight out absurd South Asian ways yet.

With a long weekend looming and no concrete plans to celebrate it, Sal and I decided a weekend away could be just the thing. Our criteria centred on proximity and cost - it had to be close and it had to be cheap. The word spread that there were cheap flights going to both Kuala Lumpur and ... Kolkata (because I loved it so much last time). Of course, fate being what it is, the prices for flights to KL skyrocketed by the time I got my planning-averse self into action, and Kolkata became the only viable escape.

And so begins the tale. Step one, search for flights on the net. A couple of hours in, things look good and we've got two tickets from Dhaka to Kolkata booked and paid for, all online. Next, getting me back to Chittagong. The flight which I can see online for some reason won't let me pay for it, even though this is the very same site I used not more than five minutes ago to book my ticket out. It's 4:30pm - time for Plan B, visiting local airline offices before they close.



A happier rickshaw ride from another day

This involves rickshawing it into town from my office, finding the poorly signposted building, climbing the stairs, promising Sally an ice block, and finding out that the prices advertised on the website are a myth, and I can't afford to fly with this particular Bangladeshi carrier. Right - next airline office it is. I check with this airline who I should try next and am directed to an office 10 minutes downtown. After battling the beggars and crossing the main intersection on foot in peak hour we make it to the office only to be told it's not there anymore. In fact, it's in a hotel right back where we were. Excellent.

It starts to dawn on me that maybe flying back to Bangladesh might not be possible since the prices for available seats are out of my budget. My mind starts ticking over the possibilities and, depressingly, I look up the street to the bus stands. I know buses are well within my price range, if not my time range, so off we go to investigate. Across the road and up the street we hurry, dodging traffic and rickshaw wallahs eager for our business.

The first company I try goes from Dhaka to Kolkata and back. Great! I get directed to the next counter only to be told, however, that while they do indeed make the journey, they unfortunately can't sell me a ticket from Chittagong because there is no electronic booking system. Thanks for telling me that in the first place. Next bus company it is. This time the news is better - I can have a ticket, but only if I'm prepared to travel for over 18 hours to get from Kolkata to Chittagong. Hmmm. I'm only going for two nights. It's a 45 minute flight... Time to try and find that other airline office.

By now Sal and I are drenched in sweat - it's hot out there, even though it's after 5pm. Too sweaty to contemplate the walk, we rickshaw the short distance to the other hotel. Up the stairs, around the corner and... no airline office. Right, back down to the street it is. I look around, appear confused and soon enough men on the street point us to a nearby building. Off we go, up to level three and ... no airline office. Right, back down to the street it is. I look around, appear confused and soon enough men on the street point us to a nearby building. Off we go, up to level three but... no airline office. Right, back down to the street it is.

After repeating this process twice more, we finally find the office we're after, and it's air conditioned. Better still, they fly from Kolkata to Chittagong at a competitive price, saving me what would no doubt be a temper-testing bus journey. They also take credit card! It's all happening. I've said yes, I'm pulling out my card, I'm almost there when the man asks for my passport. Of course I don't have my passport on me - this is Bangladesh! "No problem, we're open til' 7pm", says the helpful man at the counter. Right, back down to the street it is.

Stopping quickly for the promised ice block, we walk back to my place so I can grab my passport, then head back to the airline office. This time it all goes smoothly, me with ticket in hand, and everyone is all smiles until I turn to Sal and say, "We need to get ourselves to Dhaka now - and the overnight train is the most time effective option." Knowing that Sal was near breaking point, I'd sort of failed to bring this up before, hoping she'd break under the pressure and just follow. To her credit, she did, so off we went.



CNGs - relative luxury

Trying to buy train tickets is, of course, a whole other saga in itself. After catching a CNG to another part of town, we make it into the station by holding our breaths for five minutes (because we've clearly chosen the public urinal route), and find ourselves facing what can only be described as a mass of men in some form of chaotic order that is completely incomprehensible to my orderly, western mind.

Always eager to help, men are soon pointing us to Counter 10. Off we go. Except the people lining up for Counter 10 point us in the direction of counter 2. Off we go. Except the people there tell us that line is only for men, and we need to go to counter 3. At counter 3, though, I make it to the front only to be told I need to go to counter 1. By now I'm laughing at the ridiculousness, but notice that Sal most definitely is not.

At counter 1 it finally seems like we're in the right place, though I'm not at all certain until I've actually got two overnight train tickets to Dhaka in my hand. Sure, they aren't sleeper tickets like we wanted, but they're tickets, and they're in air conditioning, and the two tickets are side by side, and that's all good news. I'm all smiles. Time to get a CNG home. Looking over at Sal I ask for a time check - 6:30pm. "Ah, just in time for dinner," I say. "That's not bad at all".

Let's take the long way home

I’ve had what can only be classified as an ordinary week. I’ve worked from an office with views and air conditioning, drank real coffee with skim milk, eaten Japanese, Korean, Italian, Australian and Bangladeshi. I’ve had red wine, been to great parties, worn a dress and makeup, had broadband Internet access, and watched some TV. I even used a washing machine – it has been that ordinary.

After a week of living the high life in the capital city, I’m about to go back to Chittagong, which, while hardly the wilderness, certainly lacks the perks of a true ex-pat lifestyle. Having been one in the past to criticise ex-pats for all their lazy ways – with their drivers and cars and high wages and access to good food and drink and all the mod cons, speaking none of the local language while everyone around them is living off the cost of their morning toast for a week – I need to eat a bit of humble pie.

Truth is, the only way I could live here beyond my AYAD role would be if I found a position in the capital which offered access to all these wonderfully excessive things without the hassle of a treacherous 15 hour return bus journey squashed into a weekend to get them. Oh, and an International salary; I’m soon to be broke.

I feel like I have reached the point where I’ve lived outside my own culture, and the things that make me feel comfortable, for long enough, and now I want back in. I want familiar food and familiar faces and book shops and a supermarket that stocks sun-dried tomatoes and soy milk and cereal all in the one place and to go to the movies and the gym and let my cat curl up on my lap and walk the Bondi to Bronte coastline before brunch.

I’m thankful these feelings have come at the right time – with only 8 weeks of work to go I’m starting to plan for my departure and the next few months which will see me go from Dhaka to Sydney via Nepal, India, Egypt, Turkey, London, Amsterdam and Paris (purse permitting).

Until then I’ve got a sleight of visitors coming who I am sharing the Best of the Desh with. What better way to start to say goodbye?

That joke isn't funny anymore

Can anyone else see what is wrong with this picture, or is it just me?



'I'll have one white virgin thanks'

Girls just wanna' have fun

Or so I thought until a couple of my favourite girls landed at Zia International Airport in Dhaka about ten days ago. It turns out girls not only want to have fun, but they want electricity to power fans, oral rehydration salts to power bodies, and regular toilet stops to, um, well, yes.

Lucky for Penny, Sally and I, the 'desh has largely been able to provide all of these between the 'race across the nation' cultural program I designed for us. Think glitz and glamour (the outfits), think exotic, exciting overland journeys (yay for travel insurance), think 'authentic experience' (we'd love to stay for lunch in this tiny village with no sanitary facilities but we simply must run...)

The ten days Penny had didn't sound like much until we began. You see, it all started very civilly with Pen and I easing into our Dhaka days with a cup of the desh's finest (okay, only) Lavazza:



Before exploring the wonder that is Old Dhaka (think The Rocks*), Karwon Bazar (think Flemington Markets), the artsy fartsy parts of Dhanmondi (think Newtown), the shopping and eating mecca that is Banani (think...Paddington?), and the expat club scene (think, er, alcohol).

But things became rather hectic once Sal came to town (yes, there were tears, and they were mine), and the brave girls they are have been whisked from one end of Bangladesh to the other via every means of transport that has turned up. Whether it be back of Bangladesh's environmentally sound answer to the ute:



Pen and I on the back of a flatbed rickshaw in Dinajpur

Or catching regular rickshaws, CNGs, local buses, boats, and first class coaches - we've done it all. Catching sleep whenever we could became the name of the game, which is a lot harder than it looks when you throw in 14 hours of Bollywood music and movies over loudspeakers. Noise canceling headphones, how I lust after you!



Sal displaying her amazing ability to sleep on demand

In the ten days that were, we managed to pack in:



Rangpur and Dinajpur



Mini Bangladesh in Chittagong

The shipwrecking yards



I still don't want a job there, no matter how many times I go

with a side visit to a small village which gave Penny the opportunity to clean off some of the 'goo' she'd souvenired on her feet:



Pumping water from the tube well so Penny could cleanse before the crowd

and time in Sitakundo, a town just north of Chittagong with heavy Hindu influences



A local Hindu temple

where we got invited underneath a tree by a local guru, as you do.



Underground with a Guru

Having the gals here has been simply amazing. I love sharing my life here, and watching their faces light up (albeit sometimes with terror at the oncoming truck...) at the sights and delights has been really rewarding, at least for me.

While Pen has already departed, I've still got Sal for another three weeks, and have even found her a job as official photographer for my next work field trip.

There's plenty of work to go round, so if anyone else wants to come and join us, you know how to reach me!

*Apologies for my readers unfamiliar with Sydney, but it's my blog and I'll...

In the flesh

I am a vegetarian. This term is not as straight forward as it should be, and I’m partly to blame because I am the kind of vegetarian that will sometimes eat fish. Ergo, I’m not really a vegetarian. But, for the sake of this post, let’s just be lazy and call me a vegetarian.

Even worse than being a vegetarian, I am the kind of vegetarian who has read, no, gobbled up really, The Ethics of What We Eat. I’m also a vegetarian who recently watched ten minutes of a non earth-shattering documentary on the BBC that showed tuna in the sea somewhere being slowly suffocated to death in one of those nasty fishing nets that can trawl three quarters of the Indian Ocean in one go. Now I can’t eat tuna.

As a child who spent time on farms getting to know dear Milo before she became T-Bone, and collecting eggs from Little Hen before she made the transition from producer to produce, I know what it’s like to watch farm animals live happy lives scratching in the dirt or chewing the cud and I have no problem with the food chain when it flows like this.

When I’m home in Australia, my reasons for not eating meat (or eggs) are twofold*:
1. I believe I am making a more ethical choice by not eating meat given a) the conditions many animals are raised, fed and slaughtered in to keep the supply of flesh flowing, and b) the negative environmental impacts that result.

2. I believe I am making a positive health decision. Since cutting meat out of my diet (for me, a progressive process) my fruit and vegetable intake has gone through the roof, not to mention legumes and all those yummy things which health people assure us are the nutritional equivalent of attaining nirvana.

Add to that the fact that I just don’t miss the stuff, and it all means I’ll be very surprised if I ever go back to chowing down on a juicy (read bloody) rump steak.

But then there’s this other reason, which Paul McCartney has conveniently already articulated for me: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian” which rears it’s head every time I go to a ‘developing country.’

Taking a walk through Karwon Bazaar, a large market in Dhaka, I found myself once again thinking, ‘I am so glad I’m a vegetarian!’

I couldn’t imagine picking out one of these little guys,




Or one of these comfy looking chooks



Or point to a pound of chicken flesh (see baskets above) that’s been sliced and diced on the market floor and think ‘mmm, that’ll be perfect for tonight's main course!’



Every time I see things like this I'm reminded of just how far removed the majority of people I know are from the food chain. In a country like Bangladesh, it's virtually impossible to avoid, and I think it's a good thing. There is no pretending where your goat curry came from.

It also reminds me that McCartney got it wrong. Slaughterhouses do have glass walls here, and I've never met a single Bangladeshi vegetarian. Not one, in over eight months.

*Oh, and there's that small part of me that always wanted to be a hippie but was (un)lucky enough to be born in the wrong decade with an aversion to dreadlocks which make me think of those huge Irish wolfhound dogs that are interesting to look at from afar but up close are kind of smelly and, well, unpettable. So deep.

Beggar on the street of love

It’s fair to say I didn’t know a lot about Bangladesh when I applied for this job. I knew a few hazy details – they had a cricket team, for example, and it was near India? And some taxi drivers in Sydney were from Bangladesh. I knew this for certain because three nights before I got on the plane I was having one last hurrah with my friends Michelle and Jez, and the taxi driver who took me home in the wee hours of the morn was listening to the cricket in Chittagong. We shared a moment. Or at least I had a moment. He was probably quite glad to leave this babbling, slightly slurring, overly emotional girl on the curb.

So those are the things I knew – Bangladesh had a cricket team, was near India, and there was a Bangladeshi taxi driver in Sydney. Overwhelming really.

If I start talking preconceptions though, I had plenty. For one, the India thing. I assumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that Bangla food would be similar to Indian food. It isn’t. I was pretty spot on with the expectation that there would be lots and lots of people, there are. And that there would be lots of beggars. There are. And that I would find it hard to deal with the whole ‘begging thing’. Once again, I was spot on. To quit beating around the bush, the begging thing absolutely sucks.

I’m not going to bother trying to be articulate about it because there’s nothing fancy or warm and fuzzy or intellectual or even interesting about the conditions of a society which forces an entire underclass of people to rely on the generosity of others to survive. The very fact that it has taken me over eight months to even write about is a good indication of how inadequate I feel.

Not a day goes by where I am not approached by someone – a man with his femur (that’s a big bone in your leg) sticking out through the flesh, dull with dried blood; an eight year old girl carrying a naked and malnourished toddler with the kind of bloated belly we’re all familiar with from those old World Vision ads; an old women with cataracts so murky I wonder at how deftly she negotiates the traffic.

I’m cornered in the market by the old lady with the walking stick, followed home to my door by street kids who try to hold my hands or hang off my shoulders, helped across the road (yes, he stops the traffic, for me) by a man with what looks like cerebral palsy to my medically untrained eye.

The only way I’ve found to ‘deal’ with it is to have one policy and stick to it. The idea of trying to value one persons’ wellbeing above another’s is so repugnant to me (though I understand it is an important part of many people’s lives, it’s something I’m just not cut out for) that I’ve had to take a ‘one size fits all’ approach. I just don’t give.



A reminder for me from the Kolkata metro station that things can change

When it comes down to it, I believe that if I give to children, I am helping perpetuate the cycle which keeps them out of school, uneducated, vulnerable to the sex trafficking and prostitution industry, and attractive slaves to gangs a la Slumdog Millionaire who take their cut of the money begging pulls in.

For everyone else, the sick, the disabled, the people shamed from their communities, the ill and the ageing, I leave them to the mercy of the ill-equipped government and NGO services that are too few in number, but who are there, and who specialise in bringing beggars out from the underclass.

At the end of the day I believe whatever small amount I would give will always be inadequate – and would not form part of the bigger solutions required to address the system which fails so many.

Fortunately the organisation I am involved in here is working on the bigger solution bit. This doesn’t make me feel any better when I walk the long way home to avoid the boy with one leg who begs in front of the fruit stalls at the end of my street, but at least it’s something.

Caffeine in the morning sun

What a way to start the day: chuckling at the improvised rain hat my rickshaw wallah was wearing. It made my morning.

Well that and the two cups of freshly brewed coffee I drank warm for the first time in ages, courtesy of the welcome drop in temperature. So far monsoon season gets two thumbs up from me.

Little earthquakes

Shunajur Village is sixteen kilometres from anything resembling a town centre. To get there you have to follow a small dirt road for fourteen kilometres, then continue on foot up and over the river. At the small shack on the left after the bridge, turn left and follow the dirt path into the trees. You know you’re in the right place when you get to the thatched huts. If you’ve got access to a four wheel drive, the journey takes about an hour in good weather; much longer by any other means.

As far as villages go, this one is pretty lucky. It has a tube well providing safe access to drinking water, and sanitary latrines. The odd cow, a handful of goats and ducks add their animal sounds and smells into the village mix which remind me of the hobby farm I used to spend summer holidays in. Not that I eat cows or goats or ducks, or even eggs. Trying to explain that to the villagers is like trying to explain that where I’m from falling pregnant isn’t dangerous. The very idea is hard to grasp for women who give birth on dirt floors with the help of traditional midwives, of whom 79% are illiterate and untrained. I use the term ‘women’ loosely, since 60% of women have already given birth by the age of 20. I’m 28 years old. These statistics scare me.

At least I don’t have to be scared for the girls in this village. Through women’s empowerment support early marriage is widely understood as being dangerous. Considering the average age of marriage for girls is 14 years old, this is something to be excited about. Here girls are lucky, they can carry on being girls and go to school until they’re 18; they don’t have to worry about giving birth on dirt floors just yet, let alone dealing with a husband or a family in law.

In fact, the future is as bright as it has ever been for the girls in this village. With any luck, they may not have to give birth on dirt floors with the assistance of the local midwife who was trained by her mother, grandmother, or neighbour. The name and number of the local government health visitor is well known here, so the possibility of delivering little Jasmin or Faisal with the help of a trained midwife is a little bit closer to becoming a reality. These girls may also have some say in deciding the size of their family, as the welcoming of contraception use by the older, respected women is becoming more widespread. Since all of this healthcare costs money, though, nothing is guaranteed.

When I say this healthcare costs money, it’s important you know what I mean. I’m not just talking about the actual care itself. Of course these women will probably have to pay for the doctor and/or nurse, and any follow up medication or bandages etc. But they also need to pay to actually get there. Those sixteen kilometres on foot when you’re pregnant, sick, or injured must feel like six hundred. The alternatives are paying a rickshaw puller (man on a bike) or CNG driver (motorised baby-taxi) to take you there, and then bring you home. This is expensive stuff though, if you’re from this village. It’s a long way, and they don’t earn very much.

When I say they don’t earn very much, it’s important here too that you know what I mean. In this village, women earn money through selling vegetables they grow in their front yards, or by hand sewing detail onto salwar kameezes. If you do a combination of these, you can expect to earn between 100-200 taka, or AUD$1.85 - $3.75 per day. This doesn’t leave enough to buy luxuries like apples, let alone pay for rickshaws or CNGs. Considering that most women aren’t involved in paid work, this again puts these women in the lucky column. With only 4% of women earning a cash wage, earning anything at all is a huge step in the right direction. We all know what money buys.

Which brings me to how optimistic I am for this village, or more correctly, the people who live in it. From the outside, it looks like they’re getting a lot of the important things right. They’re becoming healthier, educating their children, and earning money. On the governance side, they’re forming committees enhancing women’s empowerment, and solving village problems collectively, then marching up to the local government to demand the services the law says they should be receiving. Their girls will be women before they become wives and mothers, and their boys better equipped to be good husbands and fathers.

Yes, as far as villages go, this one is pretty lucky. Or not, really, since luck had nothing to do with it.

We're all in this together

I love technology. I love the Internet. I love my lap top. I love mobile phones. I love my iPod. I love electricity. (This last one I shouldn't really say out loud given how most electricity is generated the world over, it's terribly 'unleft' of me).

I especially love these things today because even though I've not left my apartment (thank you recurrent Bangla belly for at least being mild this time) here is what I have done:

* confirmed my flights to Egypt, Turkey and the UK for later this year
* applied for a new passport
* wished my brother safe travels for his flight from Barcelona to Paris this morning, and then discussed the luxury of treating himself to a pair of sunnies from the Louis Vuitton store in Paris this afternoon
* planned, gossiped and joked with my sister
* spoke to my parents
* consoled a friend who had a big one and behaved a little badly last night
* heard from friends in London, Sydney, Brisbane and Bangladesh
* found out about the eradication of smallpox from Larry Brilliant and the future for dealing with pandemics "we [now] live in each others viral environments" (2007, about animals and humans); and Richard Dawkins' view on atheism "we are all atheists about most of the Gods humanity has believed in, some of us just go one God further" (2002)
* listened to The Beatles, Radiohead, Patti Smith, The Pixies, Placebo, and Badly Drawn Boy, and
* watched a Belgian arthouse flick, Le's Enfantes

To do all this I used a mobile phone and a laptop connected to the internet with a SIM card in (another) mobile phone using a data cable with my laptop giving me access to: iTunes, vodcasts and podcasts, skype, a dvd player and facebook, among other things, which made all this possible.

The revolution of communication technologies is incredibly exciting to experience on a professional level for someone who works in communications - especially the drop in costs of communicating globally, and the way that people the world over can collectivise (oohh, sounds scarily communist doesn't it - it's not, I promise) over issues despite not knowing each other from a bar of soap, and being geographically disparate. A perfect example is the current activity on twitter following the Iran election.

Personally, however, it's even better. Communication technology has effectively bridged the gap of living alone in a foreign country, and has made me feel completely connected and part of it all.

While all these electricity-hungry gadgets don't bode well for climate change, I'm eager to see where we go next. Between e mail, text messages, skype, blogs, social networking sites like facebook* and twitter, I know my world has changed for the better. And it looks like I'm not the only one.

*yes, I still think facebook could be better termed stalkerbook, which I guess means I'm a stalker, but I prefer to think that getting good at using this stuff is more preferable to not using it at all. What did Shakespeare say - 'there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so'?

Where did you sleep last night?

Another month in the 'desh has come and gone and I've been a busy little bee, albeit one who feels like it's been blown about in one of the almost daily monsoonal lightening storms here.

This part of the world being as full on as it is means I've had barely any time to really contemplate 'the big questions', like where my next paycheck is going to come from (given I'm at the 8 month mark); I've been far too busy gallivanting around the place. In the past month I've been from the bottom left of Bangladesh (Cox's Bazaar), to Chittagong, Dhaka, up to Kishoregonj and Netrakona (which has the best food in the 'desh I've had so far), back to Dhaka, across to Kolkata in India for a long weekend, back to Dhaka and back to Chittagong. Don't ask me what day it is. Actually, don't ask me anything important for the next five days, which I am planning to spend catching up on sleep and generally enjoying my own bed, coconut husks and all.

The advantage of running around the place as if I was conducting my own personal Amazing Race, er, without a partner and the tv crews and glamorous locales (jeez, quite a stretch I'm making there...) is that I've done some pretty cool things like:




Given a poetry reading




Watched storm clouds roll in from a boat in Kewajore

Kewajore, a remote part of the Kishoregonj region, is flooded for six months of the year. It took 3 hours to travel less than 30 kilometres to get from Kewajore out to one village in the area. Crazy. When we finally got there, I spent the day trying not to appeal to every villager in sight to jump on our boat and head on out of there (ok, not really, it was a small boat and I had one of only two life jackets) because it is simply insane living that close to flood waters, which as far as I can tell is only going to end badly in a country wracked with natural disasters. It was a big lesson in understanding just how little land there is available in this country, forcing people to live on the equivalent of a sandbar at the beach.




Visited the Opera House of Kishoregonj

While I was wandering the streets of Kishoregonj, a local lad latched on to me, and offered to give me a walking tour of the city including the "city highlight": the oldest water tree in Kishoregonj. Tourism Australia, eat your heart out.

My trip to Kishoregonj was followed directly by hightailing it out of the country to:




Drink champagne




and cocktails




with the girls - Natalie and Casey




in Kolkata

Which while it wasn't quite the oasis I was hoping for (perhaps I should have twigged that a half hour flight to another part of Bengal, even if it is in a different country, may not result in a drastic change in culture), Kolkata still offered enough of the good stuff to keep us entertained.

To prove that it wasn't all about the booze, we took in a few cultural sites, the highlight for me being:




Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying

I've never seen such high quality care being given to older (dying) people before, en masse. Clearly they have no staffing issues since there were plenty of volunteers, and I imagine the funding streams are fairly consistent for a charity (though this place is a strictly 'bare-bones' affair), but still. I was impressed, and even left a bit speechless at the good work being done.

As for how the weekend ended? Only with the worst flight I've ever been on, and I've flown Aeroflot.

It involved:
- a dead body: the man who died as we were boarding our plane in Kolkata,
- a five hour delay,
- a mini-revolt: staged by (male) passengers desperate to get off the plane to perform their prayers even though we had boarded the plane and were about to take off, complete with trying to get into the cockpit and banging fists against the plane doors,
- flying through a lightening storm: because turbulence was what the already agitated passengers on this flight needed, and
- men behaving badly (again): by refusing to stay seated with the plane was taxiing, and instead pulling luggage from overhead lockers and crowding the aisles before the plane had even stopped.

All this was topped off by a midnight traffic jam in Dhaka, which was about the point where my frazzled nerves gave up on me, and I spent the taxi ride holding my head in my hands, eyes shut, sweat dripping down my back, pledging that I would give my left kidney to spend 24 hours in a country that worked.

But now I'm back in Chittagong and I've done the grocery shopping and spoken to the family, and had a long cool shower and (this part) of the world seems like a better place again. Life on the merry-go-round is set to continue too as I prepare the cultural program for my first visitors!

Penny and Sally, don't forget your insect repellent, sunscreen, and duty free quota of 2 litres - you'll need all of them where we're going...

Today's Lesson

Guilt. Five letters. Implies regret for an action(s), intended or unintended.

I’m carrying around bucket-loads of it at the moment. Which could seem out of place given that I’m not exactly living the high life, or taking it easy on the work front, or earning money, or doing a whole host of other things that normally induce feelings of guilt in me (eating the whole pad thai myself/ordering a second bottle of wine, then a cocktail, on a school night/driving instead of walking/paying $100 for a pair of shoes/choosing the magazine insert over the actual paper…)

But I feel guilty nonetheless. I feel guilty when I walk past beggars, guilty when I spend AUD$10 on a meal, guilty when I want to go home alone and have a glass of wine rather than ‘gossip’ with my non-drinking colleagues, guilty that I live in a lovely apartment, guilty that I splurge on olives and flavoured soy milk and diet coke, guilty that I’m not working harder or longer or faster or better. Guilty that I’m not reading more, learning more, writing more, engaging more with the world.

If I was to pick what I feel most guilty about, though, it would be that I have been born into a culture which affords me the choices and possibilities, (as both a person and a woman) which have led to this opportunity to work overseas with the support of my government in an area I feel ever more passionate about. And for that I am very, very grateful.

If you’re looking for me this evening, here’s what I’ll be up to:

guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful,guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful,guilt grateful, guilt grateful, guilt grateful...