Sustainability in Bangladesh

Bangladesh is no doubt a developing country. At the time of this writing, it is the 9th most populous country in the world. Imagine a population half that of the US all crammed into Iowa. There is virtually no tourism industry here. People don't come to Bangladesh to visit. Why? maybe because there are other countries close by with well known tourist spots and amazing beaches.

 The thing that amazes me about Bangladesh however, is their level of sustainability. Here, there is very little infrastructure for waste management. There are not trash trucks that come around and collect garbage every week (maybe in Dhaka, but not in the villages). There are no trash cans as you walk down the street or even in most buildings. The people here seem to make very little waste and have an amazing ability to reuse things. The main waste that they do have is from imported items packaged overseas. Often when I have made purchases the bag that my items come in is made out of someone's homework. In addition, Bangladesh does not use plastic bags. They have been banned here. Instead they use jute bags. These bags not only save the environment as they are biodegradable but they also promote the local jute industry.

This looks like a recycling station, but no...This is someones
shop, and these items are for sale!

This is not to say that you will not see trash here. In fact, at first glance it seems dirty and the littering is a huge problem, however, the fact that these people are able to reuse so much without having recycling bins and recycling management programs is truly amazing. 

Two boys bathing (or maybe just playing) at the river. All
that "stuff" in the water is water hyacinth which helps
keep the river clean.

In the larger cities you will find many concrete block style houses (like the one I’m living in currently) which are very unattractive and uncomfortable. However, in the villages, many houses are made from mud. These houses are very attractive, stay cool in the summer and warm in winter and are therefore also very efficient not to mention sustainable. In the Hindu villages you will also find very neatly organized sticks of cow manure. This is what they use for cooking fuel. Villagers bath in the river, or use a bucket bath system. Both methods save a significant amount of water compared to a western shower or bath. 

For a developing, poverty stricken country, Bangladesh sure has a lot to teach the Western world!

Bangla Lessons and Corporal Punishment

About three weeks ago, I finally got the Bangla lesson I'd been waiting for. Although my lesson did not come from the person I expected it from...

One morning I woke up and the house was pretty much empty. I went downstairs to request breakfast and get some tea. At the table were Muslima (the maid), Nazma (the helper maid), and Rafiq (the guard). Usually I ask for breakfast and then go back upstairs and wait for it. Today, Muslima told me to stay at the table downstairs, so I did. Apparently Muslima doesn't like playing charades as much as I do, because she began teaching me Bangla. I ran into one of the offices to grab pen and paper. I was so excited I was finally going to be able to communicate with people here! 

I love Muslima. The first thing she taught me was "Ami mas monksha keina" which means- I don't eat fish or meat. She then proceeded to teach me to say the things I would eat- rice, bread, dal and egg... To which I replied "Ami deem na!"  I don't like egg!!!  Muslima started laughing and asked "no egg?"  I was able to communicate to her that I didn't mind having an egg for breakfast everyday but that I no longer wanted them at lunch and dinner too. She understood and somehow this whole thing worked out amazingly for me because when she stopped making me so many eggs, she started giving me bananas!!! I love bananas and we had all been wanting more fruit. Angela and Nazmeen were a little pissed off when I started getting bananas and they didn't, but they quickly figured out where the bananas were hidden and helped themselves

Dahl and Ruti- no egg!

I have consistently only been served one egg per day since that day! In addition to food things Muslima taught me how to say I need something which is different depending if you need a thing or a person. She helped me with directions to guide my rickshaw drivers and common prices for rickshaws so now I can go places on my own, no problem!

Since then a couple of the girls in dance class (the three sisters who helped us get ready for our performances) have continued the lessons. They have taught me "Tome Kamon Achu?" How are you? "ami valo achi" I am fine. "Tomar nam key?" What's your name? and "Ami tomake valobashi" I love you!

As the youngest of the three girls, Lima (approx 13-14) was helping me with Bangla, she took my phone to type in the words (apparently I was doing it too slowly and she couldn't handle it anymore) as she was trying to type one of the letters in she kept skipping past it (this is an old school phone where each key has three letters and you have to go through all the letters to get the one you want). About the third time she had missed the letter she wanted she said "oh shit!" and I totally lost it. I was laughing so hard. Here is this girl who barely knows any English but she can swear perfectly in the language and even used it in the right context. It was hilarious. I was laughing and she started laughing and her sister was laughing while the third sister was dancing with some of the other girls. A couple of the teachers looked at us and with no clue what had happened, they started laughing at us laughing. I thought she was such a smart girl. I mean after all, everyone knows swearing doesn't count when it's done in another language. She had the problem of having a native speaker of the language she chose to swear in sitting with her.

Lima- the potty mouth! How could you hit
this pretty face?

When it was my turn to dance I got up went through my routine and when I returned to my seat Lima was scowling on the bench. I asked what was wrong and she wouldn't tell me. Her older sister Poly informed me that she had been slapped by one of the teachers! Now I was livid. I had given workshops on alternatives to corporal punishment in South Africa. I couldn't believe that here in this dance class that students pay to come to and have fun, corporal punishment would be an issue. I never got a full translation of what happened but all I can gather is, one of the teachers came over to find out what was so funny and when she told him what she had said he slapped her. He explained to her that shit is a very bad word in America and she should not be talking like that.

I went home and spoke with my colleagues to try to find out if this was a common occurrence in Bangladesh. I wanted to find out more about cultural norms before I got on my high horse and started lecturing about right and wrong. After explaining the whole story to them they agreed that the punishment seemed harsh for the behaviour, especially since I was not offended about the language AT ALL.

I composed a letter and had one of my colleagues translate it to Bangla for me. I gave it to the master teacher the next evening. The letter basically told him what had happened and explained that I did not feel the punishment was appropriate and in fact that I though this girl was very smart for swearing in such great context. I went to explain that I also did not want the young teacher to be punished (as that would just encourage the cycle) but rather that I just wished our master teacher would understand and explain to his apprentices why hitting these students is wrong. He read the letter, smiled and thanked me and I saw him speaking with the culprit later that evening. Hopefully it won't happen again, but I'm afraid it just won't happen while Angela and I are there.

Meditation with the help of the Bangladeshi Army

I have been trying to practice meditation regularly in Bangladesh. There were a couple weeks that were too cold for me to get out of bed in the morning, so I slacked off. Now I have been slowly getting back into it.

As any meditator knows, meditation is difficult. The goal is to try and calm or still your mind. The problem is our minds are constantly racing. For me, my mind often wanders to an idea for a new blog to write, or what I need to accomplish that day/week/month. There are so many things to think about and so little time to think! Yet, I know that when I can accomplish even a few minutes of meditation in the morning before I do anything else, my days seem to go much smoother. I am more ready to face other people, can accomplish more work and just tend to have happier, calmer days.

There are so many different techniques for meditation. Sometimes I will try to sit for short periods, multiple times throughout the day so that I can try different techniques. I usually start my morning with a chakra cleansing meditation. This morning I chose to focus on my breath. I used a form of pranayama where the exhalation is twice as long as the inhalation: 4 sec inhalation= 8 sec exhalation. This allows you to completely rid the lungs of all the stale air before bringing fresh, clean air in. As you slow the breath, you also begin to notice the heart beat slow down and the mind becomes calm.

I kept with my breath pattern and began to clear my chakras. About the time I reached my heart chakra I noticed the sound of an even drumbeat at about 1 beat/second. Rather than getting annoyed with this potential distraction, I allowed the beats to help me stay in tune with my breath and complete my meditation practice. Had I been a bit newer to meditation, I might have allowed those drum beats to annoy and agitate me bringing me out of my meditative state. However, as I have progressed in my practice, I have been trained to focus on sounds only as sounds without attaching to them or being distracted by them. In this way, the drumming actually helped my meditation by matching the pace of my breath counts.

The drums belonged to the Bangladeshi Army who was practicing right outside my window. We live in the Cantonment area and are right next door to the Army base here. I have a feeling this may be a regular occurrence and I happily welcome it in to my meditation practice.

Dancing in Bangladesh: The Performance

This weekend was intense! We had our dance performance both Saturday and Sunday nights. Each day we had to be at the performance venue by 10 am to practice on the stage. We finished practicing around 12:30 pm and took a 15 minute rickshaw ride back to our house for lunch. We had just enough time to eat, get our stuff together and then leave. We then headed to a home with three daughters. Two of the daughters dance with us and the third is in college. The oldest daughter, Poly, helped all four of us (Angela, myself and her two sisters, Shima and Lima) with our hair and make-up.

Eye make-up halfway done!

Lima, Heather, Poly, Angela and Shima. It's too bad the Bangladeshi girls aren't smiling in this photo because they have the sweetest smiles and I love watching these two dance! Bangladeshi's don't smile in photos for some reason, but they are very happy, friendly people even though they often won't look like it in their pictures. 

Then at 5:30, we were off to the performance. What we didn't realize was that there would be a very long speech before the dancing started. We sat there for an hour unable to understand anything that was going on   before we could watch our friends perform.
The opening ceremony consisted of the girls dancing with strings of balloons and the guys come through with more balloons that stayed at the base of the screen for the subsequent performances. Angela and I held candles at the beginning and end of this performance. Then we sat again, waiting for our first dance. 

 Angela and I were so worried about perfection in our dances; are we lined up right? Are our arms at the same height? Are we all looking in the same direction? etc, etc, etc. As the performances began we realized that here in Bangladesh, they do not go for perfection the way most would Europe or the states. As we watched our friends, it seemed there was room to add a little of your own style to your dances. We saw this in our practices but thought, surely they would clean that up before the performance. Nope. That took some of the pressure off of Angela and I but of course we still wanted to look good out there and not like we were just jumping around on stage. The nerves hit as it was time for our first dance- the love song about a Bangladeshi man falling in love with a "maiden from a distant Allah".
I told my partner I had just completely forgotten the dance and he laughed. I'm pretty sure he didn't understand what I said. Cause I was serious! There was one part in the dance that we do twice, although on the first time around, Angela and I both thought we were on the second and froze when we were supposed to move. Angela unfroze a little faster than I did, but I quickly caught back up and the mess up is barely noticeable. 

I have attempted to input the videos to no avail. I think our internet connection
is just too slow here for the video upload.  I will see if Angela has any luck and in that case
try again, or add another post with just the videos.

Once we completed that dance, we had to run to the changing room, get out of our princess dresses and change into Sari's which neither of us know how to put on by ourselves. Poly and her sisters rushed back to help us. Safety pins were flying in all directions. Jewelry was being taken off of me, while new jewelry was put on. I was spinning into the Sari, then back out again to readjust, spin in again, pin, pin, pin. Mass chaos!!! Finally we were dressed and ready for our next performance with a few minutes to spare. We went back down to the seating area to watch another performance. Some of the mother's who are always at our practices ushered me over to them. They tried to help me flatten my Sari as I had so many pleats in it that I looked pregnant! They laughed, told me I looked very nice in their traditional costume "m'am very beautiful!" and gave up on flattening my Sari as the only way to fix it would have been to completely redo it. 

The Folk dance did not go as well as the classical dance which is sad because the folk dances are the reason we wanted to take classes in the first place. 

Angela and I trying to get this little cutie to smile. She wanted
her photo with us but no smile :(

Once the folk dance was over, we headed back to the changing room to put our street clothes back on. by the time we finished changing, the performance was over. We found Nazmeen, who loyally came to watch us perform and we all headed home together in an ez-bike (motorized rickshaw). We enjoyed a very late dinner (10:30pm) and went to bed. I was so incredibly tired, I could not imagine getting up and doing it all again the next day. Angela and I wished it had just been a one night performance and we could be done with it. 
We made it to practice the next day around 11:30am, and didn't miss anything. We got a very happy surprise when we found out we only had to do one dance on the second night (the performances were different both nights and only a few of the dances were repeated). Unfortunately it was the classical dance that we would be repeating. However, this saved us the stress of having to bring a second costume and change at the performance hall. We were very happy to only be doing one dance this time around. The day went pretty much the same as the previous day only this time we requested blue eye shadow instead of red (cause that's so much better). We also decided to wear a fancier bindi instead of the red dot we had on our third eye the previous night. 

Cruella Deville

This time around our performance was flawless. unfortunately the video wasn't as good, with people walking in front of the cameras. We received tons of complements from all the little girls (5-8 year olds) who had adorable costumes for their performances. We also received complements from many people in the audience and the mother's who had been watching us since day one. We stayed and watched the rest of the performances. 
We were then brought up for pictures and stayed for at least an additional 30 minutes taking pictures with everyone. We were also asked to perform our folk dance again this Thursday at the folk festival. It will be an outdoor performance and it is the dance we really enjoy and get to wear our bells around our ankles for. Although it will be another long day, we want a chance at getting a better video of that dance and again, attempting perfection in our dance.




 All in all, a great experience!

Ma'm No Beautiful!

Muslima and I after our outing

I must say, despite all the eggs she feeds me, I do really like our maid. Muslima is very funny and her and I often play charades since neither of us is able to speak the others language.

Today Muslima looked at me and got this sad scrunched up look on her face. She shook her head and said "ma'm, no beautiful". hahaha, okay....RUDE! She then came over and looked at me even more closely and began touching my eyebrows and saying something in bangla to another maid who occasionaly comes to help Muslima. Now I understood...

One of the beauties of living in developing countries is a lack of mirrors. I didn't have a mirror in South Africa or Costa Rica. I do have a small mirror in my bathroom now but it is always so fogged up after my shower that I usually don't bother with it. In addition, shops are nothing like the malls we go to back home so there are not mirrors in every store to check your appearance with. I actually really like this because when I can't see what I look like, I no longer care about make-up etc.

Back to today's issue. I have not bothered to "clean-up" my eyebrows since I arrived here. Muslima was telling me my eyebrows were not beautiful anymore. So, I am going out today to buy some things for my upcoming dance performance and while I am out I will get my eyebrows threaded. I have no idea what that is going to be like, but that is what they do in Asia. Not waxing, threading. I will finish this post after I return.



I'm back! It's actually been about a week since Muslima told me I wasn't beautiful. Things have not worked out for one reason or another to go to the beauty parlor and my eyebrows have continued to get worse. Finally today I told my coworker I wanted to go get my eyebrows done. I told him I would take Muslima with me since men are not allowed in beauty parlors here, they go to barber shops (it's like going back in time 60 years here!).

My eyebrows being threaded

Muslima hailed a rickshaw and we were on our way. We went up to the parlor and I sat in a standard swiveling beauty parlor chair. I was than shown (since they can't ask me, I won't understand!) to slide down into the chair so that my head could rest on the back. Then the cosmetologist began threading my brows with a piece of string. It wasn't too painful but still made my eyes water. It actually went pretty fast, less than ten minutes for sure and possibly less than five. However, my eyebrows are much thinner now than I like them. I thought it would be obvious to just follow the shape and get those stragglers underneath, but no... they really cut them down! Oh, well, I will be able to let them grow back while I'm living in an Ashram in India, no one there will care if I'm beautiful or not.

I know its not my best photo, but
here are my newly threaded, thin
Asian style eyebrows

All in all, with the round trip rickshaw ride to get there and back and the threading itself, I spent 65Taka, that's about 75 cents! Eyebrow waxing in the states costs no less than $10 and sometimes $20-$25. So even though my brows are a little sparse at the moment, what a bargain! And...Muslima says I'm beautiful again :)

Kid's take the cake-Bangladeshi babies

I just love this little guy's polka dots!

While all babies are cute (with the exception of human babies- don't deny it, they are not cute until at least 6 weeks) I have to say as far as domesticated animals go, kid's (or baby goats) take the cake.

Here in Bangladesh we don't get too much of a winter. Some of you heard my cries of "freezing" here but that had more to do with me being unprepared than actual freezing temperatures. Once I bought a hoodie and a couple pairs of socks, I was fine. Now, the colder temps appear to be on their way out and we are making a transition into what appears to be Bangladeshi spring time. I have seen many more babies in the last week than previously.

My friend Angela kept telling me that I needed to find a baby goat and have my picture taken with it. She kept telling me how soft they were. So I kept looking, but I had a hard time getting close to them, they were a bit skittish and none of them seemed that small. The ones I had been
 encountering were probably more like teenage goats.

What a sweetheart!

Finally, I found some baby goats to cuddle with. My local co-workers thought I was a bit crazy and were like "Wow, hahaha, you really like goats!". To which I just smiled and asked them to take a picture.

They are so soft and when you pick them up, they just relax completely. Have you ever noticed a goats eyes? Their pupils are little rectangles that sit horizontally in the center of their pretty golden iris's.

While puppies, kittens, chicks and calves are all adorable, it's the kid's that I feel win first place in the cuteness category. Of course, I'm open to disagreements here.

Dancing In Bangladesh: Part Deux

My not so beautiful Sari, with blouse
and matching bangles

I have been dancing in Bangladesh now for about three weeks. After the first week, our teacher and one of his apprentices took us shopping for our Sari's.

Apparently there was some kind of misunderstanding (that's what happens when you don't know the language of the country you're in...). I thought we were going to get Sari's for the performance and they were going to cost us 570 Taka (about $5). Well, that was true, however that price did not include the blouse and petticoat for the Sari ensemble nor any of the jewelry that we would be required to buy for our folk dance. In addition, we are dancing two dances and therefore need two completely different costumes! We will wear our Sari's for the folk dance which are green, yellow and red. Along with the Sari we had to get matching bangles, a nose pin, flowers for our hair, a bindi for our forehead and henna to decorate our hands and arms with.

My Princess Gown
May have a second life as
a "Glenda the Good Witch"
costume...

Our second costume which is for more of a ballet style dance is a poofy silver and white princess dress. Seriously. When we were shopping with our teacher and he was picking out the fabric we kept asking for a photo of the dress design. Finally when we took all of our fabrics to the tailor, we got to see a picture. There in the pattern book was an adorable 3 year old white girl dressed in her princess Halloween costume. That is what they wanted us to wear for this slow love song we are dancing to with partners. For this costume we also had to buy diamond looking earrings and flowers for our hair. He also wants us to buy black shoes, to which I am refusing. Who would wear black shoes with a silver/white dress? I'm trying to convince him to let us dance barefoot as that's how we always practice. The only shoes I have really seen here are sandals and I don't see how those are going to stay on my feet while I'm dancing. In addition, if I found some heels, I don't really think I would be capable of dancing in them either and then he will be wishing he had let us go barefoot!

Ghungroo

My favorite part of dancing here though (besides all my new friends) are the ghungroo! Ghungroo is a string of bells that we tie around our ankles to make noise when we dance. It may be the only part of my dance costume that makes it back to the states with me, but they will be my favorite and most memorable souvenir ever! We only get to wear them with our Sari's in the folk dance, but they are awesome. The dancers here have this amazing ability to slap their feet to the floor and make a clapping noise. This along with the ghungroo is what makes Bangladeshi dancing really intriguing. I am trying very hard to get my feet to make the clapping noise. Right now I can get it about once out of ten tries.

A close up of the borders on my
princess dress

Too cute! HADER. This is what my teacher wrote on the bottom of my
bag that had my costumes in it...Apparently this
is how you spell my name here :)

Our big performance is next week! I ended up spending way more than anticipated on these dance classes. Between the two costumes and ghungroo, all the jewelry and the classes themselves, I have spent about $65 (yup, dollars, not taka). While that may not seem like too much for dance costumes etc, consider that my salary is about $120/month, which is a pretty typical salary for the average Bangladeshi.Granted I don't have to cover rent or food costs with my salary, so for me anything I make is to do exactly this kind of thing with, but how a local affords to dance here...I don't know. They must have to save up all year to afford the performances.

 This is going to be the most memorable experience ever. We are going to look so incredibly ridiculous in our costumes and Bangladeshi make-up (don't even get me started on that part, just wait for next weeks photos after it happens) but we will definitely be laughing about the stories we have to tell for many years. In the end, the money spent is irrelevant.