The monsoon that almost wasn't...

I spent the entire month of May waiting for the monsoon to arrive. It was seriously the longest, hottest month I have ever lived through, with temperatures above 40 almost every day and dust, dust, dust, due to the dryness. So when the first rains arrived, while I was walking home without an umbrella of course, they left me completely soaked and extremely happy because the temperature was instantly lowered. However, the torrential rain, and flooding that often comes with it due to terrible infrastructure, that was expected never really came. We had rain, but not often, and not for very long and it kinda just went back to being hot again. Most disappointing! Someone was saying that Dhaka has its own little micro-climate because it is all concrete and things don't happen the same way they used to. no idea if that is correct but the rains definitely weren't as prolific as expected!

I never understood people getting excited about rain, even though I grew up in the country where farmers actually cared about rain, but it always was just a bit of an annoyance. Never have I wished for rain as much as I have here during the month of May. We had an entire assembly at school devoted to the monsoon where classes recited poems about the rainy season, because in this country, the rainy season really is a blessing, it is a gift from God after a few months of extreme heat and it is something that is really looked forward to.

We take so much for granted in life, but sometimes it is really good just to stop and find joy in the gifts that we are given in the form of rain, or maybe it’s a sunny day in the middle of winter, or a day that is under 30 degrees here and not so hot…

Anyway, enough philosophising, here are a few photos of the rainy season from the times where it actually did rain!  

Rain makes everything look so shiny and new...

I thought that the umbrella was fairly useless really!

Monsoon football!

Ahhhh the serenity...

In these past holidays we headed down the river for a break of rest and relaxation in Chandpur. Even though we were only back at school for 3 weeks we all felt like we needed a holiday where there was nothing to do. So we camped out in the mission compound for a week, slept, read books, played ridiculous games on my phone, watched movies and tv series, played cards, swam in the puko (pond/lake) for hours at a time and ate good food. It was wonderful!

I was reminded of the totally ridiculous and awesome movie ‘the castle’ and bonnie dune (doon? I have no idea what it actually is) the place of ‘serenity’. Even though their holiday place wasn’t actually that nice it was their place of peace and they loved it. Chandpur is like that for me, even though, by New Zealand standards it’s actually probably not that great, it is a place that I can go to where it is peaceful (by Bangladesh standards, no place in this country is ever truly quiet!) and I can spend time with trees and flowers and have some time out. I can even swim there, which really is a wonderful thing, even if there are snakes in the pond, and some aggressive geese that need an attitude readjustment and I probably don’t want to know what is in the mud at the bottom…

I love my job and sometimes I even feel like I might love Dhaka (it’s a hard city to love but it does kinda get under your skin) but it’s good to have a break sometimes, and after the death of a very special woman in New Zealand to cancer, I needed peace and flowers and green things. I feel quite blessed that I have a place where I can go to get this…maybe I should come up with a song like the one sung on the castle to sing on the boat down to Chandpur!

We’re going to bonnie doon….do do do… J

A rainbow on the river

The pond-swimming swimming swimming!

The back of the house we stay at-I like the blue

I like reflections

Cute little Kabbo in a tree

Just plain cute

I like leaves

I'm back!!

OK, so I have been rather slack with writing on this blog haven't I?!! I blame excessive heat and dodgy internet. Although mostly it's just that I haven't made time to update this, but I like blaming the heat for everything. It is pretty hot, every day it's above 30 degrees and even though the monsoon has hit, it seems to have missed Dhaka, we get showers every now and then but not anything excessive yet, and believe me, Bangladesh is good at being excessive let me tell you. Although as I type I can see huge black clouds looming in the distance so maybe we'll be getting some rain soon-here's hoping!

I'm on holiday now and am relaxing now that I've moved into my new house and have one week left of my holidays with not too much to do... it seems very strange to have finished the school year in June and now be preparing for a new class but I'm slowly getting used to it. I took over a class last term and enjoyed teaching them a lot so will miss them when we get back to school. They were a loud bunch of noisy rascals and we had a lot of fun together.

Here's our class photo, I shall miss teaching these cuties :)

We had a big end of year function where all the classes performed and we gave prizes and all squished together in the library in our best clothes and sweltered in the heat, it was pretty cool but absolutely exhausting. I was pretty proud of my class 3 kids, they performed a play about monsters and were awesome! See the photos below, they were also proud of me because I wore a sari which I find very difficult and hot to wear and also performed in the teachers item where my mobile phone was 'stolen' by another teacher. It made them all laugh because they remembered the day a few months ago where my phone was actually stolen from our classroom (I got it back for those of you who didn't get that story!) and they had their bags searched!

I'll write some more posts about my holidays later, for now here's some photos of the GEMS end of year function....

Little monsters of Class Three

The packed, HOT library

Caro Madam stealing Carley Madam's phone, and also one of the only photos of me in the sari!

Motorbike!

I have always hated riding on the back of motorbikes, something about clinging on and having to lean the right way and not being in control just scares me. So it’s pretty funny, or ironic really, that I recently had a trip on the back of a motorbike, on the streets of Dhaka, the streets which scare me at the best of times, let alone on the back of a motorbike, you’d think I would have been a shaking wreck of fear right? Well, I kinda was, the thought of having to go on the back of a motorbike to the ghat (port) to go down to Chandpur filled me with dread and I spent a day or two contemplating ways that I could get around not going! When the bike arrived on Friday morning, and my bag was strapped to the back, the bike was turned on and I was instructed to get onto the back and make myself comfortable, I did so with great fear and trepidation. I was of course, sitting on the bike sideways, or sidesaddle, as women would never sit astride in this country, which made me feel even more precarious, I had no helmet on (not sure what my insurance company would feel about that!) and I was wearing my normal clothes and jandals, no safety rules here! I think the rule for bikes is that one person (usually the driver) has to wear a helmet, that’s all, and it’s not uncommon to see motorbikes with 3 or 4 people on them, they are a very practical mode of transport in Bangladesh.

As we took off over the Kilgaon flyover (a crumbling overpass which is now restricted to cars, cng’s and motorbikes because it is slumping in the middle and can’t handle the weight of trucks and buses) I prayed to God to keep me safe!! But it was surprisingly much less terrifying than I thought it would be. The bike was comfortable, Kenny drove very well and I felt almost completely safe (apart from when we went beside or in front of buses and I was reminded that I was in jandals with no helmet, on the back of a motorbike, in Dhaka!), safer than going by rickshaw anyway.  As we sped down yet another narrow street filled with fruit stalls, rickshaws and people I smelled the unmistakable smell of the filthy black water in the river and knew we were close to the ghat, and although I was thankful to get off the motorbike, it is definitely not the scariest mode of transportation in this country that I have experienced so far. Although in saying that, it was a Friday (the Muslim day of worship) so there was much less traffic on the roads, making them less manic than usual so it may be an entirely different story the next time I do the trip! I’ll be going down to Chandpur fairly frequently and probably quite a bit by myself, so I’ll probably get a ride on the motorbike quite a bit in the next few months. The guy that drove me is an awesome guy who does quite a bit of work for the school, his wife is a teacher there and their kids are both there as well. I very much appreciated his careful driving around bumps in the roads and the sedate pace that he drove!!

I’m now back in Chandpur after an uneventful boat trip and appreciating the cleaner air and the fact that it is cooler down here.

That’s all for now, no photos sorry as my internet modem thingy can't handle photos and dies a quick death every time I try. I can almost hear it sigh and say to me "Carley, you know I can't handle these large photos, why do you even bother?". Also, its nigh on impossible to take photos while you are sitting fairly precariously on the back of a bike holding on with one hand and holding a bag with the other!  

Gratefulness

On the drive home today I saw a woman cooking lunch on the side of the road for her family who live under a tarpaulin on the footpath, this heartbreaking poverty is a pretty common sight here and it alone would be worthy of a mention. However, the part that surprised me about this woman was that she had, on the footpath, a couple of flowers in a jar and a cloth set up, such an incredible sight among the dust, noise and filthiness of the road. The sight filled me with hope, and also made me feel pretty bad about all the things that I complain about in this city.

I have been inspired by this woman, as well as by a wonderful friend of mine in Cambodia who recently wrote a blog post about staying positive, and I am going to write about the things that I am grateful for. Seeing this homeless woman on the footpath making the best of her situation made me realise just how blessed I am-so here goes, a list of things I am grateful for and that I love about this country. With pictures of course!

1. The colours. I just love, love, love the fabrics, the patterns and the colours in this country. They are so beautiful and are also as comfortable as wearing your pj's, some of them even look like pj's which is even better!

2. The fruit and veges at the moment are great, we are just coming into watermelon and pineapple season which fills me with great joy as they are pretty much my two favorite fruits and are exceptionally cheap!

I also love the markets and the way people carry enormous loads on their heads, it's incredible!

3. Buses. I am grateful for buses, because even though they terrify me sometimes, they are easy to catch, they are usually the biggest vehicle on the roads and you are therefore less vulnerable to being squashed, and people on them always surprise me with their friendliness and willingness to give up their seats for the poor white girls! 

4. Electricity! Every time the power comes back on I am so grateful for electricity, the ability to sleep under a fan at the moment as it gets hotter and hotter is something that I am well and truly grateful for. You can understand why the power goes off so much when you see the power lines! There are too many people in Dhaka and not the infrastructure to deal with it, but there is power most of the time, and wonderful inventions such as IPS and generators which mean that the power keeps going.

5. Beautiful kids. It seems that everywhere we go we get trailed by gorgeous kids yelling at us (admittedly, it's pretty annoying, but I'm focusing on the good here!). But they are beautiful and the ones I'm getting to know are awesome, you can communicate with kids even if there is a language difference!

6. School. This follows on from the beautiful kids, I love the kids at school (even the naughty ones) and they make me being here completely worth it, every day that I walk through the gate at school and get greeted by multiple students with big smiles, it makes me realise why I am here. Their enthusiasm is infectious and I enjoy teaching them a lot!

7. Food! Every morning we get breakfast from here, 2 borota (like roti) and fried egg with large chunks of chilli in it. It sounds odd, but it's really good! I really love being able to buy food from roadside stalls and the price is awesome, very cheap. I haven't been sick yet from any food I've eaten yet (and I've eaten from some fairly dodgy-looking places!) so another thing to be grateful for! 

That's pretty much it for now, there are many other things that I'm grateful for, these are just a few. I'll finish with a beautiful picture which shows just how gorgeous pollution makes sunsets, there is a silver lining to every cloud...

Rain!

I don't generally like the rain, but the other day it rained in Dhaka and it seemed like the most wonderful thing on earth!

It has been so dusty here and the pollution has been awful, but as soon as it rained, the air instantly seemed cleaner. It probably wasn't cleaner at all but it just felt so much better. All the dust was washed off the trees and their leaves were green again, there were less people in the street, no one was burning rubbish by the side of the road, it was a bit cooler and it made me very, very happy! I must remember to be grateful for these small things as here it can be very easy to focus on the things that annoy or frustrate me, of which there are many. But there are also loads of things that are beautiful and amazing in this country, one of which is rain in the middle of the dry season! I am sure that when the monsoon hits I shall be complaining about the excessive rain, but at the moment, a small amount of rain does wonders for my mental health!

I think that the Bengali people are made from sugar, as they seem to think that if they go out in the rain they will melt. On our way to school I saw rickshaw pullers with plastic bags on their heads to keep off the rain, their passengers covered in tarpaulins, and umbrellas springing up like mushrooms along the street, all this for about an hours worth of drizzly rain. (nothing compared to New Zealand's recent 'weather bomb' I'm sure!)

Since the rain it has been dry again, and the dust has settled back onto everything, and I look forward to the next time it rains! However, since the weather has been getting hotter, the pollution is less and my horrible 'smokers' or pollution cough has been getting better by the day, for which I am truly grateful. Life is good.

Here are some photos of the rain-it was so exciting I took my camera out while waiting for our breakfast to be cooked at the roadside stall just down from school.

The leaves are GREEN!

If you look closely you can see a guy with a plastic bag on his head.

Umbrellas, scarves...it wasn't even cold!

Adventures and Birthday fun

Its been an eventful week this past week. I’ve been sick (although that’s just an ongoing theme!) I’ve been across the city and back and out for dinner three times (a great achievement in this country), I’ve been filmed in class, I got a 150 Taka (that's about $2 NZ) haircut from a beauty parlour down the street, I’ve been serenaded in Pizza Hutt and I’ve eaten an enormous amount of cake and watermelon!

On Tuesday we went to Gulshan (about 10km away) for a friends birthday dinner. It seemed like an easy enough task to manage-catch a cng, find the restaurant and eat dinner, simple right? Ha! Catching the cng was our first challenge, even though we had a native Bangla speaker with us, every cng was full and whizzed past us. However, after standing there for about ten minutes with no luck, a couple of traffic cops came up and asked where we were going and then they started helping us! It was absolutely hilarious as these three men were pulling every cng over, regardless of whether or not they had passengers and asking them if they would take us, I think in some cases they were saying ‘you have to take these girls!’. After about 15 mins of this, and multiple mosquito bites later, we finally got an empty cng willing to take us and we squashed in, thinking that we still might manage to make it to dinner on time! 1 ½ hours later, after sitting in horrendous traffic and stopping and asking directions multiple times we arrived at dinner, only an hour later than we said we would be there! And the funny thing is, no one was surprised or at all upset that we were so late-it’s just expected! Amazingly, the trip home a couple of hours later, took us only 20 mins as the distance isn’t really that far.

The lovely cng driver that drove for a very long time to get us to dinner! 

The other really notable thing that happened was Saturday which is of course the best day of the year, being my birthday! J I was made pancakes by the lovely Carolynne, got given a beautiful sari and an enormous watermelon and was taken out to lunch at Pizza Hutt by a group of fantastic people. Pizza Hutt was great, twas nice to eat something distinctly western and the funniest thing was that the staff sang me a crazy birthday song (not the old standard Happy Birthday, I think it was one written for Pizza Hutt!) and made me stand up in the middle of the restaurant! It was hilarious, and they even gave me a birthday card from Pizza Hutt, made me feel very special! I was also sung happy birthday in Korean by one of the families with us at lunch-lovely! The day was made great by the awesome people that have surrounded me in this country as well as the people from home who sent me messages and those few who I got to talk to. I thought I would be more homesick yesterday but it only hit me a little bit…

Then today one of my classes sang me happy birthday (the proper version!) and made me feel very much like I belonged at school, infecting me with their joy and cheekiness! All in all, it was a great week, despite being sick, filled with many experiences that I will remember in years to come. 

My lovely birthday cake!

My birthday watermelon and the $2 haircut!

Some of the beautiful GEMS school students celebrating Falgun, the start of spring. 

Down river

I just got back from a trip down the river (actually about 3 rivers, but more on that later) to another school about 4 hours down river from Dhaka that I will be working in a bit this year.

It was an incredibly interesting trip, travelling by boat is great as you can see what happens on the great waterways that are the lifeblood of this country in relative comfort. Driving is almost always semi-uncomfortable and can take an exceptionally long time!

The river teems with life, there are a bazillion boats of all shapes and sizes and in varying degrees of disrepair and factories spewing out crap into the air and into the river. It seems like such a travesty, that this country, which was once so beautiful, has been turned into a filthy wasteland. The brick kilns are horrendous, they burn everything to keep them going and in a ever growing ring around Dhaka there are masses of brick kiln chimneys spewing out foul smelling black smoke (their only benefit is that the smog makes for beautiful sunsets!). And the rubbish is also disgusting; everything is simply thrown off the boat to sit in the river, such a shame that this massive waterway that in some ways sustains this country has been defiled so badly.

Apart from that, the trip was fascinating, Bangladesh is basically a river delta and the rivers are absolutely ENOURMOUS! We took the boat down a ‘small’ river (about the size of the Waikato or bigger), which met another bigger river, and then turned into the biggest river I have ever seen. I honestly thought we were going out to sea; such was the expanse of water. It doesn’t seem right that you can be on a river and not be able to see the other side!

The further you get down the river, the cleaner and greener everything gets as well which just lifted my spirits greatly. You can actually smell the river when you get about an hour away from Dhaka and it’s foul, so to get away from that for a few days was awesome. I was very excited to see trees and flowers, and to be able to walk to school was awesome. I also made friends with a couple of puppies which was lovely-I miss having a pet to fuss over!

I’m looking forward to spending more time down there, to get my fix of trees and flowers and puppies and also to build some good relationships with the new teachers in the school down there. It’s a great break from the madness of Dhaka…

Coming out of Dhaka...

The beautiful clean air! There are millions of these chimneys spewing out smoke. 

Brick, bricks, bricks

Pollution makes beautiful sunsets! And this is a river that you can't see the other side of!

Coming into Chandpur, just a little river.

Unloading boats

Sunset and the boat

Beautiful flowers and trees :)

How to get from A to B

We were taken recently to a slum project run not too far away from where we are currently living. It was a memorable trip for many reasons, (beautiful kids, amazing work being done, 5 people crammed in an auto-rickshaw!) but the main one was the various modes of transport we took to get there and back. I will probably talk a lot about modes of transportation in the coming months as every different way of travelling is different and seems like an adventure (someone said to me the other day that their rickshaw ride that day was like a ride at Disneyland, except real!) and there is always a story to be told!

Every morning and afternoon we take a rickshaw to school, in the mornings the traffic is not too bad so it’s generally fairly tame, although fairly bumpy as the road surfaces are pretty bad. But the journey home is often a bit mad; a rickshaw is essentially a bike with a trailer and you sit perched precariously on a seat that is frequently on a lean and the rickshaw wallah weaves his way through traffic, cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses (with men hanging out the doors yelling at the rickshaws to get out of their way-at least I think that’s what they are saying, my bangla isn’t great!) other rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, people, produce! I am a little more relaxed about it now but the first few trips had me clinging to the seat for dear life! The trip to the slum project was a bumpy auto-rickshaw ride with 5 girls crushed in the back-jolting over every bump in the road, of which there were many.

The ride home was a rickshaw through a rabbit warren of tiny streets which was the bumpiest ride I’ve had yet, my legs were sore from bracing myself and we got rear-ended a couple of times from making abrupt stops for cars, not to mention the potholes in the roads!

I seem to have gotten off-topic. What I am trying to say is…getting from A to B in this country is not easy, it is an adventure every day that at the moment seems exciting but I can imagine that in a few months I may find extremely frustrating! Every mode of transport has different pros and cons, and at the moment it’s a matter of trying to figure them all out and use the best one for where you are going! All very confusing-there is no jumping in the car and going from A to B here, it all depends on where you are going and who with and whether or not they will give you a good price!

I have a feeling that I’ll be so used to it by the time I get home that New Zealand roads will seem very boring, but at the moment when I’m about to get crushed by a bus while teetering on a rickshaw, I do miss the well-ordered streets of home!

But life is an adventure right? 

Lots of Rickshaws merging with buses and trucks!

The view from the back of a cng or tuk tuk.

First Impressions...

Noise. Lots and lots of noise. This is a city that is teeming with people, the roads are full of cars, rickshaws, livestock, carts heaped high with all sorts of goods and pulled by people, buses, trucks and people walking everywhere. Sitting in front of the van that picked us up from the airport, I could see all the seemingly near misses with trucks and rickshaws as we wove our way through the mayhem and was glad that I was so tired after the 31 hour journey that the near death calls didn’t faze me. It amazes me that it looks like such a crazy mess, yet there is some kind of order and the drivers seem to know exactly where every other car on the road is, their reflexes are super fast also! It is a sensory overload just going down the road, sounds, smells, and sights, colours- it’s very difficult to describe.

I had kinda expected all this as it is very similar to India but this country is also very different in many ways that I am beginning to discover. At the moment I feel quite helpless as my Bangla is terrible, so it is very difficult to go anywhere without someone who knows the language. Thankfully there are lots of people willing to help, take us shopping etc, which is great. I’ll be starting language classes soon hopefully and have already learnt a few useful phrases.

I start work on Sunday (the weeks here go from Sunday to Thursday, as Friday is the muslim day of worship) and will be working with some of the younger students, which will be a new experience for me! My job is more to work with the teachers instead of actual teaching so it should be interesting…I went into the school on Thursday just to meet everyone and the kids are beautiful and seen very eager to learn-education is a gift here, not a chore! I look forward to starting work and beginning to feel more like I know what I’m doing, at the moment its all very new and slightly terrifying (and exciting) just walking out the door.

I shall write more soon, these photos are of the view out my window where we are currently staying, a ten-minute rickshaw ride away from school. 

Leaving New Zealand

I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog to let you all know what I'm up to as I depart on my next big adventure.
As I say goodbye to everyone I'm starting to realize that I'm actually leaving and it's all becoming very real!
I have one week until I leave and I'm busy sorting out what I'm taking, saying goodbye to very special people, and hanging out with friends and whanau. I'm pretty excited/terrified about what awaits me in Bangladesh and look forward to sharing about all my adventures!

Goodbye until I arrive in Dhaka....