My April Arc
April was a bit of a down swing month for me, to be honest. I did, as Alana points out, go to Bangladesh’s famous forest, the Sundarbans, for Easter. This was a fun weekend, with good company and exotic birds and a special little Easter service on the boat. But the next two weeks were very light on the “uniquely Bangladesh” content. It was, instead, me and my laptop.
The first weekend I was horizontal beside the laptop, under a mosquito net, watching pirated American movies (you can’t buy real ones here). I had the usual foreigner affliction of a bacterial infection, caught from a very tasty felafel at a new restaurant that I recommended to everyone (I of course retracted the recommendation after my gastro-intestinal stress). So that weekend was difficult. But I took some antibiotics and began to look “less like death,” as my boss put it. Now I look “full of life!” (self-diagnosis).
The second weekend I was hunched in front of the laptop, à la late-night university cramming. This was because on day three of the antibiotics, I found something mysterious in my Gmail trash can. It was a congratulations from a Canadian magazine saying that I had made it to the second stage of an internship application process. This was exciting news, but the rejoicing lasted about five minutes before I buckled down to their intern test, four toughie editorial questions that summoned my months-neglected school skills. The only solution was to stay up late for four nights typing, drinking cha and keeping thoughts of resentment (at Toronto kids with library access) far from my mind. I have some hard-luck obstacle stories about fallen power lines, inaccessible printers, etc. but the punch line is that I got it done. All the rest is just developing country tech whining.
As for seasonal weather whining, this is new. (There is an up swing, friends, just follow my arc.) Spring in Bangladesh is hot, and getting hotter. It’s about 35 degrees Celsius as I write this. Thankfully, I’m in Alana’s apartment, so the dress code is less conservative. I’ve gone for the dishevelled beach look, a mirror glance told me a moment ago—sarong, sloppy t-shirt, leaf fan, and flip flops for stomping cockroaches to death. The power goes out for about two hours every night, so I lie in my bed with the leaf fan and alternately flap/hit my face, until the electric fan comes back on.
***
So. I now understand what I didn’t when I arrived, that these challenges, and my anticipated escape into the Western world, can totally remove my heart and soul from Bangladesh. In some ways I needed this retreat. I needed to recharge and reassess, but now I want to be back. Thankfully, my day-to-day work is never far from this reality, and my laptop and I have spend much time puzzling over the details of slum projects—how to involve a community in the planning process? How much does it cost to feed 300 preschoolers for a week? I want to be struggling my way through this tangibility. As much as I can, again, as a white Western woman, and a short-term volunteer at that.
They are so good to me here, sending me off into different places to let me try. Tomorrow I’m flying up to Dinajpur, in north-western Bangladesh, to visit some of their rural projects and collect some more stories. I feel a little rusty, a little creaky in my Bengali interactions. But inevitably, as happens when I visit the field, it will suck me dry and fill me up. I will expend a lot of energy in trying to connect, and in return, I will be filled with the joy of God’s good work here.
The first weekend I was horizontal beside the laptop, under a mosquito net, watching pirated American movies (you can’t buy real ones here). I had the usual foreigner affliction of a bacterial infection, caught from a very tasty felafel at a new restaurant that I recommended to everyone (I of course retracted the recommendation after my gastro-intestinal stress). So that weekend was difficult. But I took some antibiotics and began to look “less like death,” as my boss put it. Now I look “full of life!” (self-diagnosis).
The second weekend I was hunched in front of the laptop, à la late-night university cramming. This was because on day three of the antibiotics, I found something mysterious in my Gmail trash can. It was a congratulations from a Canadian magazine saying that I had made it to the second stage of an internship application process. This was exciting news, but the rejoicing lasted about five minutes before I buckled down to their intern test, four toughie editorial questions that summoned my months-neglected school skills. The only solution was to stay up late for four nights typing, drinking cha and keeping thoughts of resentment (at Toronto kids with library access) far from my mind. I have some hard-luck obstacle stories about fallen power lines, inaccessible printers, etc. but the punch line is that I got it done. All the rest is just developing country tech whining.
As for seasonal weather whining, this is new. (There is an up swing, friends, just follow my arc.) Spring in Bangladesh is hot, and getting hotter. It’s about 35 degrees Celsius as I write this. Thankfully, I’m in Alana’s apartment, so the dress code is less conservative. I’ve gone for the dishevelled beach look, a mirror glance told me a moment ago—sarong, sloppy t-shirt, leaf fan, and flip flops for stomping cockroaches to death. The power goes out for about two hours every night, so I lie in my bed with the leaf fan and alternately flap/hit my face, until the electric fan comes back on.
***
So. I now understand what I didn’t when I arrived, that these challenges, and my anticipated escape into the Western world, can totally remove my heart and soul from Bangladesh. In some ways I needed this retreat. I needed to recharge and reassess, but now I want to be back. Thankfully, my day-to-day work is never far from this reality, and my laptop and I have spend much time puzzling over the details of slum projects—how to involve a community in the planning process? How much does it cost to feed 300 preschoolers for a week? I want to be struggling my way through this tangibility. As much as I can, again, as a white Western woman, and a short-term volunteer at that.
They are so good to me here, sending me off into different places to let me try. Tomorrow I’m flying up to Dinajpur, in north-western Bangladesh, to visit some of their rural projects and collect some more stories. I feel a little rusty, a little creaky in my Bengali interactions. But inevitably, as happens when I visit the field, it will suck me dry and fill me up. I will expend a lot of energy in trying to connect, and in return, I will be filled with the joy of God’s good work here.
posted by Unknown at 01:35
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