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Dear All,

I arrived in Dhaka on August 22^nd. Beli and thirteen month old Isha arrived at my guest house two days later. Most of the following week was getting to know Isha and vice versa, and looking for a flat. Both endeavours were successful. Isha is a total delight and seems to think I’m okay. We celebrated Eid ul-Fitr together on the 31^st with Beli cooking in the guest house kitchen, then B&I returned to Jamulpur (eight hours by bus) to prepare for the shift to Dhaka. Beli has just called to say they are returning tomorrow. The household goods have already arrived. (See below.) If it sounds like we are in the process of forming a family unit, that’s what it feels like, too.

The flat is brand new, 1450 square feet, 7^th floor, tile floors throughout, three bathrooms and a servant’s bathroom and will be serviced by an elevator as soon as the electricity is fully installed. For now, it is like a mini Grouse Grind (Vancouver torture climb, for those not in the know), eight or ten times a day.

At 11:30 Sunday night, Beli’s brother-in-law, Abul Khair, phoned from the border of Lalmatia. Would I take a rickshaw to where he was waiting with the truck and lead them to my flat?

I found Abul Khair, the truck, and driver and we bumped our way back to the flat. Labourers arrived shortly after — contracted through tough negotiations earlier in the evening. The labourers carried the contents of the truck up seven flights of stairs, mostly on their heads. Chairs, tables, beds, china, pots and pans, fridge, and a huge steel box containing curtains, table mats, and a great deal of stuff yet to be uncovered — the contents of the house I had left nearly three years ago. When the truck was empty, Khair and I found a couple of mattresses and slept.

The next day was like opening a summer camp left mostly unattended for two or three years. After depositing the goods in her village eight hours north of Dhaka, Beli traveled her own small odyssey through a marriage, the birth of a baby, and divorce. The goods didn’t follow her through most of this but they did weather three monsoons. Everything in the steel box is pristine. A mahogany table, a glass-topped rattan table that I use as a desk, a bed, two comfortable rattan chairs, and six dining table chairs are very much fit for service. China doesn’t deteriorate and cook-ware has been in use since Beli returned to Jamalpur ten months ago.

Yesterday, the electrician from the guest house installed fans and lights, repaired the surge-protector for the fridge, then helped me buy and install a new ‘chula’ (two-burner cooker) and gas canister. Khair, who had had a hand in the packing and knew where most things were, did most of the unpacking — taking a break every once in a while to make the flat clean and tidy. This morning while I went out to buy take-out breakfast, Khair sorted out the curtains, which we put up after breakfast.

My office projects from the front of the flat, with four large windows on three sides allowing a nearly constant breeze and light and the reflection of cumulus clouds on my glass-topped desk. This afternoon a technician will install wireless throughout the house. Tomorrow I will probably go out and buy a printer; then CEP, South Asia branch, will be fully operational.

I will be returning to Ottawa towards the end of September, and then back to Dhaka for a month or so in January. Note that I now have room for guests (not luxury) in both cities and time to spend with them.

PICTURES: Each picture showcases a different dress. Each sewed by Alison. There are seven in all, and they all went to Jamalpur for the baby parade.

Love,
Pat

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Dear Family and Friends,

I came back from Liberia in early June after three weeks of field work on a mid-term evaluation for a USAID-funded education program.

Liberia is putting itself together… with help from NGOs and International Organizations whose signs are on every corner.

When I was there in 2004, there was still tension. People weren’t confident that the wars were over. Young people who had been fighters and young people who had not been fighters were uneasily moving back together in their old villages – though many former child soldiers, ashamed to return home, stayed in Monrovia, the capital, with no trades except the ones they learned in war. Market women sat in front of the home of a warlord/minister, silently holding up signs that said No More Fighting. My danger bonus was 25%.

In 2009 I visited teachers’ colleges. The students were from all fifteen of the country’s ethnic groups. You could still see wariness, but mainly they were working well together as Liberians. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was President and was respected. My danger bonus had dropped to 15%, and applied only when I was in the countryside.

This year, the streets of Monrovia are livelier; the towns in the hinterlands are more prosperous; and ‘Ellen’ is running confidently for a second term. We once ran into a roving band of ‘commandos’ who were doing a poor job at intimidation, since they no longer carried guns. To [my wife] Vivian’s chagrin, the danger bonus had been eliminated.

I took pictures and am attaching three for flavour.

The owner of the hotel and the founder and patron of Zorzor Rural Women Literacy School.

The first is the front office of the hotel where I had just spent the night. The woman in the yellow dress is the owner of the hotel and the founder and patron of Zorzor Rural Women Literacy School. She, herself, began school after having three children. With the encouragement of her husband, she eventually earned a high school diploma.

Stop Early Marriage!

The second is on a door of a mud house in a village a long way off the main road. We talked with townspeople. Different generations are back at school making up for years of lost education during the wars. Three of the young people who talked with us walk 40 kilometres to school at the beginning of the week and 40 kilometres back on the weekend. Others attend night classes at the local evangelical church. These are the survivors.

The class is full, so we know that the teacher teaches and the children learn.

The third picture speaks for itself. The class is full, so we know that the teacher teaches and the children learn. Children and parents judge the quality of schools; if the school doesn’t provide value, the children go to work on the farm.

My email misbehaved during most of the trip. When I eventually understood what was happening, Vivian hadn’t heard form me for ten days and was contacting the embassy to learn whether I was lost. Soon I started getting urgent messages saying “Please Contact your wife!” (One of the education team opposed getting involved, reasoning that I might not want my wife to know where I was. She was over-ruled.)

My assistant, Frank, and I spent three weeks, mostly on bombed-out or mudded-out roads, in a four wheel drive Toyota whose multiple breakdowns effectively randomized the communities we observed. I stayed in a different bush hotel every night, usually paying extra to have the generator turned on in the morning so I could type up the previous day’s notes. Eating was good – eggs and bread in the morning; bananas, plantain chips, and roast corn on the road; foofoo or rice and goat pepper soup in the evening. Liberia is a Christian country, so there was beer with supper. In Monrovia I ate grilled barracuda on the beach or Lebanese tabbouleh, hummus, and kibbee at a rooftop restaurant run by Indians.

In the capital, Frank found me a well-run local hotel on the main commercial strip, which I preferred to the beachfront expatriate hotels where I had previously stayed. I may have been a disappointment at the hotel, however. The first evening, while I waited for my pepper soup, the bar filled up – an attractive young woman on every second stool. Each one winked prettily as I walked out. The second night, they weren’t there.

It was a thirty-six hour trip back – through Accra, Addis Ababa, Rome, and Washington. Quicker though than the trip over, when we were diverted through Dakar to avoid the volcano in Iceland.

On my return there was two weeks of report writing – now over. And then the excitement began: First a 5.5 earthquake that felt like a ghost train running through the house. Two days later, the police invaded our quiet agricultural neighbourhood and removed plants and occupants from houses on our nearby corner.

Happy Canada Day and Fourth of July!

Pat/Patrick

• My father’s remedy, which has been given to him by wise women in Montreal (our pediatrician in the 1970s), Nigeria, China, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh:
  A bowl of steaming hot water;
  Twigs of the wise woman’s favourite plant;
  Lean your head over the bowl and breathe.
• The steam is the important part. Each wise woman has her own twigs and the technique works well in every country anyway. The western MD left out the twigs entirely. The twigs make you feel like you’re doing something medicinal and they make the house smell nice. Eucalyptus is common. 

Mark and I spent the weekend steaming ourselves. It may have helped. I used a little eucalyptus oil in the water, which was probably a bad thing because it stung our eyes and we spent less time breathing steam than we would have otherwise. Twigs would have been better, but so would unadulterated steam. 

I hauled Mark in to see his doctor on Monday. It was a walk-in clinic so I was hoping to be seen too, but no such luck. I don’t have a file there and they weren’t going to open one.

• Mark’s doctor’s remedy: 
  1 cortisone nasal spray;
  1 cortisone inhaler;
  Plenty of sleep;
  Regular hand-washing.
• He also got prescriptions for a chest x-ray and an antibiotic, the latter to be filled only if the former shows pneumonia.

So far he’s still coughing a lot and doesn’t feel much better, but he did sleep through the night last night for the first time in a while. 

I went in to work after my failed attempt at a clinic visit but was sent home for coughing too much. I was planning to stay anyway (I don’t always have to work face-to-face with people, and working alone in my little cubicle is not much less restful than sitting around at home) but changed my mind when I got whole-body aches. Crap. The flu. I didn’t get a shot this year.

I went to my clinic yesterday. Mark dropped me off and swiped a face mask to wear going to his x-ray clinic.

I was seen first by a nurse, who didn’t introduce herself as such. I started to realise she wasn’t a doctor when she started asking me questions and writing down the answers without looking at me. Doctors look at you because they’re trying to figure you out. When she asked me what medications I was taking and she’d never heard of them — I had to spell them out — I knew for sure she wasn’t a doctor. She did a swab for a quick strep test (negative) and sighed, said I’d need to see a doctor and took me to another exam room where I was seen by a medical student.

Yaay! I love being seen by medical students. I get to participate in their training and it’s fun to compare what they do with what a doctor does. The medical student carefully went through a standard checklist of questions and turned up notable but irrelevant facts about my poop. She enjoyed listening to my heart, though it had no connection to my cough, just because I have an interesting murmur/arrhythmia. We reviewed my history related to my heart purely for the sake of education. Then she went away to present to the doctor.

When they came back together, the doctor quickly identified that I’d had asthma as a teenager and that my whole-body aches had started only the day before and were therefore from a new virus and not relevant to my complaint of six weeks of coughing. He also made a connection between my heart murmur and my recurrent colds and coughs: I must not use stimulant cold medicines! They are bad for my heart! I assured him that I do not use stimulant cold medicines: they make me feel like crap. (I had always assumed they made everyone feel like crap, but that other people found that more tolerable than their cold symptoms. Now I know that they really do make me feel worse than they do other people.) It was quite cool to compare a newbie and an experienced professional asking questions about an everyday, very banal complaint. They were both smart and nice, but one was better at it. 

• My doctor’s remedy:
  2 asthma inhalers, one cortisone to be used for two weeks to a month, and one bronchodilator to be used for four days or as necessary.
• I should keep them around and use them again next winter when I get sick again and keep coughing long after I should be better, because it’s probably just irritation at that point.  

Anyway, this post is not because I think anyone’s interested in the details of my cough or poop. It’s because I’m interested in the way different people approach similar problems.

My father didn’t ask questions to try to figure out exactly what was causing our misery: he didn’t need to. He could hear us both hacking away and shared the remedy that he uses successfully to ease his own distress when he is hacking away.

The doctors asked fairly pointed questions and took measurements to determine exactly what was wrong. Mark was determined to have a virus and post-nasal drip and given the appropriate remedies to ease his distress; I was determined to have a virus and asthma and given the appropriate remedies to ease mine. For both of us that means cortisone inhalers.

Question: what is the relative efficacy of steam with eucalyptus twigs vs cortisone inhalers? I know from experience that steam has a greater risk, because my sister ended up in the hospital for six days with second-degree burns after tipping a bowl of boiling water into her lap trying to steam her sinuses. And I can bring inhalers to work but I can’t steam my head at work. So even if they were equally effective there would still be reasons to use inhalers. But… is there a fundamental difference between my father’s remedy and the doctors’?

The other question is more philosophical. Going to the doctor gives me peace of mind, and that’s really what I went for. Not the inhalers. Now we know for [pretty] sure we don’t have chronic infections. Mark will know for sure that he doesn’t have pneumonia (but will be able to treat it if he does). This peace of mind is important to me. I want to be told specifically what the problem is and what the scope of it is. I don’t want the uncertainty of thinking we possibly have something worse than usual or worrying about what we’re doing wrong that is dragging things out so long. Without access to doctors, would we be steaming away and not fretting about it? Either steaming helps or it doesn’t. Either we get better soon or we don’t. Would the peace of mind issue become a non-issue?

I suspect it wouldn’t. I don’t think the idea that we become fatalistic when denied information is really borne out by experience. I think we can look around and see that people are pretty free about inventing information when they don’t have it, and give themselves peace of mind that way. I think the exercise of seeking out information when we don’t have it instead of making up an answer is probably at least as valuable as the answer itself, at least in the situation of persistent respiratory thingies in otherwise healthy adults.

Then there’s judgement about when knowledge is necessary to peace of mind at all. Up to what point do we tolerate not knowing, before we either try to find out or make up an answer? What does it say about me that my intolerance for not having descriptions of the exact causes of our coughs sent me to the doctor when I have a perfectly good home remedy that appears no less specific than the pharmaceutical one?

Besides that I felt like crap, of course.

That my father was enjoying the spring weather is remarkable because he just arrived back from West Africa: you might think that the hot and muggy weather of Monrovia and Accra might set him up to interpret an Ottawa March 1 as winter. But no, the birds are singing: it’s spring!

When I was about ten or eleven I was sitting at the dining room table working on a craft and dropped something on the floor. I was about to lean over and pick it up, when I realised that I didn’t have to. I didn’t need it right away and it was perfectly fine sitting on the floor until I did need it. All I had to do was remember where it was. This epiphany was accompanied by a worried suspicion that I was going to regret my insight.

Anyone I have lived with has, with a single exception, complained about my messiness. With that single exception, none has cheerfully accepted my other contributions to the household as adequate compensation for needing to pick up after me.

When living with that single exception, who did not, after all, pick up after me, rather the opposite, the house was so filthy that when a pregnant friend we were chatting with on the sidewalk needed to pee, we lied and said the toilet didn’t work. I think that was when I faced the fact that there was something seriously wrong. We never discussed it.

In Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, there’s a scene where a pathetic, dependent character breaks something and there’s glass on the floor. This is one more contribution to a discouraging sequence of events, not because she attached value to the broken thing but because “now she would have to remember.” As in, it doesn’t occur to her to sweep up the shards; instead she will need to spend the rest of her life trying not to cut her feet by not walking in that spot. I was shocked to discover that I was a type.

For a couple of years one of my annual objectives at work in my performance review was to clean up my desk. I never really got around to doing a complete job. My boss eventually gave up. For the past four years or so my bosses have been elsewhere — Winnipeg or Mississauga or Toronto — and have not seen my desk.

It’s not that I like being messy. I don’t even like ordinary cheerful clutter; I love a stark, open, spare space. One of the first things I did upon getting a regular job was to hire a cleaning lady. It’s more that it seems too complicated. I like doing laundry, and do it diligently even if it means hauling it to a laundromat, even if it takes all weekend. Laundry is self-limiting. There is not an infinite amount of stuff that could theoretically be put into a washing machine. Once it has been washed, it needs to be folded and put away. Very simple. Not only that, I know where laundered things go. Clothes have drawers and shelves and hangers; sheets and towels have closets; dog blankets go back on dog beds; soft furnishings go back where they came from. If I start to clean a house I never know when to stop: there’s always something I didn’t get to and feel guilty about, always a decision that I don’t know how to make.

Mark determined that part of my problem is that not everything has a place to go. I feel bad when stuff is lying around in heaps, but it’s not as though changing the situation is always a simple matter of putting it in its place. There often is no place for it, so more radical intervention is called for. When he moved in he put a lot more storage in. It helps. 

Still, the other day someone said that if I were an employee, she’d fire me; that if I were a roommate, I would be out on my ass in two days. She doesn’t even know me that well. It’s just that obvious.

My boss is in town for a day. I cleaned off my desk this morning in preparation, which mostly consisted of stashing papers and the binders into which they are some day to be filed, into drawers and bins where they will be invisible to the casual visitor. Still, I feel better.

Mark has been stomping around crossly for the past few weeks, issuing dark warnings that we both need to change if we value the relationship. I’m not sure I can change, exactly. But perhaps I can put “cleaning off the dining room table every Saturday” into the same doable category as “laundry.”

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Dear Family and Friends,

Back in Liberia. I spent this afternoon with the Minister for Education and his deputies. They all say they will be up most of tomorrow night watching the inauguration and the balls. All over the world – or at least in my small sampling – people are joyful about the new direction they see in America.

My previous time in Liberia (2004), there was a short break in the war that had lasted fourteen years. My assignment took me to villages where people were rebuilding homes, shops, bridges, wells, roads, and whatever other infrastructure competing armies, often made up of children, had taken into their heads to destroy. The villages were doing their best to reintegrate their ‘lost’ young people, many of whom had done terrible things. The returnees were doing what they could to be accepted back. There were three short, intense wars in 2005, but now there is a stable and reasonably competent government headed by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. There is hope again… sort of. USAID is helping rebuild teacher education. Our team of three is spending six weeks to evaluate this effort and suggest improvements.

We’ve been in Monrovia since Wednesday. The attached pictures may give you some of the flavour. We’re off tomorrow for two days to see schools and teacher training colleges in the countryside. We’ll come back to sharpen our survey instruments then head back out for more intensive interviews and observations for the next four weeks.

Lunch today was cassava leaf stew with fish, chicken, and shrimp… and rice.

Update on Beli: She’s bought a rickshaw and some rice. She rents out the rickshaw and will sell the rice in small packets. Her life as a businesswoman has begun.

Affectionately,
P.

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Dear Family and Friends,

Friends and Family who do not like to look at pictures of freshly sacrificed bulls and goats bleeding their life out into gutters (You know who you are!), should not [scroll to the images at the end of this post]. The Eid al-Adha festival commemorates God’s gift of a ram in place of Ishmael, whom God had commanded Abraham to sacrifice. In Judaism and Christianity, the child in this story is Ishmael’s brother Isaac. (Wikipedia)

The sacrificial animals began to arrive two days ago. The cattle spent yesterday on display on the street. At my last count yesterday evening there were six bulls and five goats in the parking garage. This probably means that every flat with a head of household remaining in the city had an animal to sacrifice. Not counting the foreigner.

This morning around eight o’clock, the male householders went to mosque and by nine oclock they were all on their way back home. Servants and guards had trussed the animals during mosque. The men assembled in front of their houses near the trussed animals. Hujurs (Arabic teachers) circulated, checking what looked like order books. Then the killing began. The labourers would line up an animal and hold it steady, then a Hujur would step in and with eight or ten strokes slice through the neck. Then the chief cutters begn the work of deconstruction, sending buckets of meat and bones into the garage as they were filled.

An hour or so later we heard a stampede, as hundreds of poor people with thick plastic bags swarmed into the garage. There must have been a signal that our flats were ready to distribute the one third of the meat that goes to the poor. (Another third goes to relatives, and a third is reserved for the master and his family.) Our guards lined the poor people up, then began letting them out out, each receiving a chunk of meat as they passed through the gate. Smaller swarms have been moving up and down the street all afternoon, but now seem to be heading home. There is little evidence of the carnage, except that the street has been washed. We can expect that about one third of the cattle slaughtered during the year will have been slaughtered today.

Sort of like Christmas and Halloween. Now everybody’s eating.

Affectionately, P.

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Dear Family and Friends,

A few pictures from a quick trip through some of the Sidr-affected areas. Not much to say. None of these are untypical. If you see a picture of a damaged school, multiply this by thousands. Houses flattened — multiply by tens of thousands. The boat in the forest was a considerable distance from the sea. There were clothes high in the trees, illustrating why some people survived by hanging on in the tops of trees. Whole business strips destroyed, washed into ponds and canals. I enjoyed seeing the man taking tea and waiting for normalcy to return to the bits of his home he had managed to retrieve to build a perimeter to live in. Beli’s sister and family have been patching their house back together. They will be able to make major repairs using some contributions we brought from family. There is a picture of Beli in the gate of an ancient and beautiful mosque — built in a day, according to legend. A mammoth tree fell across a wall of the mosque, but no damage at all to the mosque itself.

Good and bad developments. The good: The school-based teacher development strategy I have been proposing and promoting has taken hold with the bureaucracy and we are moving ahead with implementation. The bad: They want to do it right away and I more or less have to be involved, meaning that the two-month winter holiday I have been looking forward to has been reduced to one month.

The ‘cold’ season is kicking in with fresh vegetables being hawked on every street and market. It’s a good season for eating. Beli has started two hours a day with a tutor and is reading everything in sight. People are starting to think about their new clothes for the upcoming Eid and life is feeling festive. Even as two former prime ministers are in jail and at least a third of the last parliament is either in jail or facing prosecution.

Affectionately,
P.

*** *** ***
Dear Family and Friends,

Happy Thanksgiving! Apologies to those who feel the reference is out of date (Canadians) or a cute local reference (most of the rest of the world).

Vivian has asked me to send out an announcement that I am fine following Sidr, the recent Bangladesh cyclone. I live in a concrete and steel building in the capital city, well out of the path of major destruction. I was wakened by the clattering and roar of the wind and stepped out on the balcony for a couple of minutes. Then stepped back inside to wait for the light to fail. In the morning the ladies were out sweeping the street as they do every morning. There was just more to sweep. We got electricity back a day and a half later.

Last weekend I did get out of the city on school visits and saw about of a third of the rice crop lying down from the storm. This was in areas not badly affected. Poor people will be paying more for rice and eating less. As a rich person, by local standards, I have a 50-kilo bag of rice in my larder. (Is it appropriate to be thankful for being rich rather than poor when living in one of the world’s poorest countries?)

The papers are full of human-interest stories and statistics. All are horrific. I think nearly everyone in North America has heard that there are ten thousand dead, despite what is generally accepted as good planning, storm shelters, and warning systems. Some communities have been totally wiped out. In others, most families have lost members — often those responsible for feeding the family. Eight thousand schools have been flattened. Houses were damaged or destroyed. Broken fishing boats lie on their sides in the forests. Most shrimp operations are devastated, leaving their owners in terrible debt.

Many relief organizations are helping out but the scale of the disaster is difficult to deal with. Potable water is often not available in areas of high salinity. Rice dropped from helicopters can’t be cooked because there are no working stoves. But there are also stories of people starting to rebuild. And, like in New Orleans, there will be more than one industry doing well with new construction. Today, on the front page of the newspaper I read, was an ad announcing a donation of 1 taka (not very much) for the relief of Sidr victims with every bag of cement sold, but nothing about a discount.

As I was leaving the bank this afternoon, a group of college students came up and told me that they were collecting money for Sidr victims. I could tell them, “So am I.” Several of my family members, on hearing that one of Beli’s sisters had lost a side of her house and all of her fruit trees, pledged contributions. The husband is a good and thoughtful man and a tailor, whose customers will not have money for tailoring for some time to come. We’ll be taking our contribution to them tomorrow in Jessore (for those of you with maps) so they can start to make urgent repairs.

Saturday we are planning to return to Dhaka through the Khulna, Bagerhat, Pirojpur, Jahlkhati, and Barisal (for those of you with really detailed maps). These are some of the hardest-hit districts. I don’t know what I’m expecting to see. It should provide context for what we’ve been reading about and seeing on television.

*** *** ***
Vivian said I should send some disaster pictures. See attached photos of Patrick Just After The Fall

… and One Day Later.

It was about 6:30 a.m. and I was entering the final third of my stately 7-kilometre jog around the Dhanmondi Lakes. Suddenly a toe caught a ravenous slab and hurled me onto the concrete path. Just as suddenly, I was surrounded by a crowd of middle-income Bangladeshis, whose doctors have told them to walk every day to treat their diabetes and high blood pressure. (I have never seen a foreigner out there, though I’ve heard there is one.) I was helped to a bench, offered handkerchiefs, and provided with advice. One offended onlooker announced to the others in Bangla that Bura (the old man) shouldn’t be running. I was slowly becoming the victim of a campaign to get me to the emergency department of a brand-new hospital nearby when a wonderful man identified himself to the crowd as a doctor (he may have been one), examined me, announced that despite all the blood it was only abrasion, and helped me into a rickshaw. I was pretty spectacular for several days, but this is now history.

The second day after the accident my driver told my national counterpart, with whom I spend hours each day, that I had been injured. Muhammad Ali looked in horror at the bandages and contusions and asked me why I hadn’t told him.

I’ll try to have some pictures of how the real disaster is recovering in a few days.

Affectionately,

P.

Addendum: I am travelling along a somewhat bumpy road southeast of Khulna. I can’t see the screen because of the sun.

I feel odd about being a disaster tourist, but I’m sticking with Ogden Nash’s advice that not doing things you could have done is worse than doing things you shouldn’t have done. Onward.

This is beautiful country and it is clear that nature has the upper hand here, and will cover up the losses.

Right now we are about to stop and see an ancient mosque, rising in the jungle.

More later.

*** *** ***
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, M., 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.