My father is working in Bangladesh these days. This is his latest letter, published with permission.

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Dear family and friends,

I’ve been back in Bangladesh for about a month after three months away. Vivian and I had a busy summer. Happy times in Ottawa with Alison, Mark, Bertha, Matthew, Vivian’s mother, and friends… and a contracted version of the annual birthday barbeque. Short visits to Cortland – including the Port Watson Street Canada/USA Birthday Party. Two weeks in Vancouver and environs, welcoming Daphne (newest granddaughter). And two weeks in England visiting with friends, Vivian’s relations, and Danjuma and hiking in the Lake District. Busy, and rewarding.

My plan on returning to Bangladesh has been to spend as much time as possible in schools – assessing what government can do to support teachers’ professional development at the school level; and finding out what teachers and well-functioning schools can do to support their colleagues. This is paying off. The primary system has been in decline for the past several years, but now we are finding pockets of locally initiated innovation and collaboration (through necessity). Documenting this supports our bottom up approach in opposition to the top-down bureaucracy.

The attached photograph is from one of the school visits. The little girl was sitting inside the classroom door when we were ushered in for a ‘cultural event.’ She was so small, I thought she might be being baby-sat. Our first entertainment was an older girl who accompanied herself on the harmonium singing classical Bengali songs. Competent and affecting. Then the little girl took her place in the front of the classroom and waited for her music. She danced for a full ten minutes with sensitivity, variety of movement, and extraordinary skill. She never slipped from her program, as far as I could tell. She stopped when the music stopped and received her applause without changing her expression. She accepted the praise of the women in our group apparently without needing it. A tiny, confident, and accomplished artist.

We are now in the holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan is all about fasting, and fasting is all about food. From sunup to sundown observant Muslims neither eat nor drink (even water). But there is makeup time throughout the night. The fast is broken around six p.m. with ‘iftar.’ I think iftar is supposed to be a light meal, but from what I see on the street the public face is about frying things in oil… mainly meat and vegetables. The iftar Beli [cook-housekeeper] serves is quite different. Tonight it was haleem, a mixture of pulses that she stewed in a beef curry. We topped it with cucumber shreds, ginger, green chilis, onions, tomatoes, and chopped coriander.

As iftar finishes, the faithful are called to pray. The men walk in hordes to the mosque wearing long white robes and prayer caps. Women stay at home. (Beli prays on a prayer rug in her room.) Following prayers, serious eating can begin… but last night we both agreed we don’t need a second evening meal. Beli was hungry a good part of yesterday because she had not had enough appetite to stuff herself when ‘suhoori’ came around. Suhoori is the last meal of the night, prepared from three-thirty onwards and eaten shortly after four (followed by prayers and then serious napping). We have our own rituals for Suhoori. Mullahs shout out the wake-up call from the microphone tower at 3:30 a.m. Beli has an arrangement with the guards to phone her and report the mullahs’ announcement. My task is to listen for the guard’s call and wake up Beli. Beli shouts that she needs ten more minutes’ sleep. I go to my computer and think charitable thoughts. By shortly after four, Beli has assembled suhoori, which she eats while I watch. Eating done, she prays and then goes back to bed. I may work for a while, then go out for a run. With everyone napping, the streets are quiet and the park is nearly empty. Beli gets up around seven to make my breakfast. Life is good!

This morning, there were Rapid Action Battalion police sitting around the entrance to the park on the embankment at the end of the lake and in inflatable boats on the water. This might have something to do with fundamentalist rallies yesterday… over a cartoon published in a satirical magazine. Maybe the police thought the crowds would try to drown the cartoonist.

The entrance to the park is the centre for another kind of action. A couple of weeks ago at around 5:30 in the morning I shuffled my way past a collection of young ladies trolling for rides home to finish off their night’s work. As I moved past them, the whole group rose like a flock of swallows and ran along beside me, touching my arms and shoulders and giggling in their saris. I picked up my pace and quickly outdistanced them. I am sure they would have done better with better shoes. Still, it was nice to see entrepreneurship combined with healthy living at this time of the day.

Affectionately, P.

This is where someone with a blog has been asked to list a certain number of things about themselves that nobody knows, then to tag a certain number of other people with blogs to do the same thing, and they do, and you are one of the certain number of other people. Then you are in the difficult position of either complying or publicly rejecting an invitation from someone you have a relationship with. I’ve been dreading this happening to me ever since I started posting.

I am twice fortunate. Once, that I have only been tagged to list eight random things about myself. They don’t have to be secrets I have held for up to 43 years. Twice, that the person tagging me is someone I know only incidentally. I commented on her blog recently that I was imagining little joeys in my Bartholin’s glands, so she drew my name when she decided to tag her commenters. Thus I can choose not to accept the tag without damaging a friendship.

Hm. Not so dreadful. Maybe I can do this.

1) I received my high school education in Nigeria at a mission school primarily for children of missionaries. Moving to Nigeria was a bit of a shock, but not a big one. It was clearly different from where I came from, which was Montreal. So, keep an open mind, look for opportunities to enjoy and learn and share, and do what you need to do to keep yourself safe. Attending a mission school was disorienting in a much more fundamental way. The greatest difficulty was coping with the fact that the other kids looked like me. They were mostly white Americans, wore western dress, spoke English with American accents. It was hard to see and adjust to the cultural divide. Not only were they fundamentalist Christians (at the time I started at that school I hadn’t realised there were still people who believed in God), most had been born in the bush. They spoke various West African languages and Pidgin in addition to English. They believed in witchcraft. The friends they were raised with from babies, and who they played football with when they went back to stay with their parents over summer vacation, were West Africans who spoke little or no English. Some of their friends died in childhood of illnesses like dysentery. One of the school’s functions was to teach American culture to these children of missionaries to help them when it came time for them to go ‘back home’ to college. I didn’t get this at the time. I knew (North) American culture as well as most thirteen year olds, and I didn’t understand why a school for (mostly) white children in Nigeria would not put more effort into bridging cultures - which was my need. I didn’t get that I was one of the few who didn’t already have a very solid bridge of their own.

2) I loved Bible class in high school. We were taught about how people think and make judgements, which was fascinating to me. The agenda of course was to prepare us for missionary work so that we could overcome people’s resistance to our attempts to convert them, but I subverted it to my own ends.

3) I googled some people from my past not too long ago. One I liked and respected greatly. I found out that he died in 1995. He’s still being mentioned in current publications. Another I allowed to harm me. She now has a colostomy. I think because she had cancer. I don’t know how I feel about either of those facts.

4) When I split up with my girlfriend of ten years, she took one of our three dogs and moved into a crappy apartment. Six years later she’s living in a different crappy apartment, is lonely without a girlfriend, is unhappy at work and her dog is always sick and needing expensive vet care. The dog has also recently started to leave large puddles of pee everywhere. In the meantime I have gotten together with a Man, we have bought the building my ex and I lived in together and the Man has been fixing it up and making it beautiful, I’ve had promotions at work and my dogs are as healthy and continent as they were ten years ago. I feel guilty but not responsible. I think there’s something immature about my feelings but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be aiming at.

5) I am a lesbian married to a man. I never thought I would marry - as a true Canadian I hold that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation - but now that I’m married I like it. I freely recommend it to everyone. (Note also that as a Canadian I could marry a woman just as legally as marrying a man. By recommending marriage I am not at all promoting heterosexuality. No. Here in Canada those are two completely independent thoughts!) (Oh - the answer to the usual question: “Well, I’d certainly prefer him to be a woman, but nobody’s perfect.”)

6) I am addicted to medblogs. This has almost completely supplanted my earlier addiction to advice columns. What I have learned is that medicine is a profession that will engage you intellectually, physically and emotionally. It will keep you sharp into old age. These are good reasons to go into medicine. A bad reason is wanting to help people. If you think you want to help people it’s just because you haven’t met enough of them. I don’t know if this is a widespread or universal attitude among doctors, though I suspect it is. From a patient’s perspective, I find it comforting. I don’t have to be likeable to get good care. An individual doctor’s level of misanthropy (or distance) is well-established before they meet me, and they are still in medicine. Because they want to be. For reasons that have nothing to do with me or my likeability.

7) I have almost no imagination. I can think very analytically about something that already exists, but I have almost no ability to create something that does not yet exist… say, a trip to somewhere I haven’t been yet.

I wonder how my life would be different without my dogs. They are wonderful companions. Pepe asks to be carried all the time, and carrying a soft, sighing 2.5-kilo creature is very soothing. Poupoune’s absolute joy in her walks is infectious. So one would think they improve my life, and perhaps they do. Perhaps without them I would be more driven to seek human companionship. I can’t know.

Who I tag: nobody. This one ends with me.

Cedrika Provencher was abducted over a month ago in Trois Rivières.

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Children play in the alley behind my house, which is usually fun to watch and listen to except when the children hang on the branches of the plum tree and break them. Then I become the cross mean neighbour lady and tell them to stop.

For over a month, the only children playing in the alley have been boys.