A Cambodian Christmas

Merry Cambodian Christmas Ya'll!

OK, so it's a bit late but the thought counts.

Cambodia is a country that I am definitely going back to one day. It is a warm, friendly place that doesn't seem too hurried or crowded. This impression of course, is coloured by the fact that I live in Bangladesh, the most crowded, manic place I've ever been too, anything seems relaxed in comparison!

But really, Cambodia is pretty relaxed in my opinion. Staying with a great friend who lives there also coloured my opinion as I had a local guide, someone to show us all the good places etc, which makes for an extremely pleasant experience in a new land. Thanks Mels :)

I greatly enjoyed many things in Cambodia and Vietnam, most of them food related. I wouldn't be a real Bird if I wasn't obsessed with food...good coffee, almond croissants, mojitos, prawns, noodles, green coconuts, more good coffee, ham (now that's something thats impossible to get here!) Christmas cake, iced tea, green mango salad...the list goes on! I'm fairly certain that I put on weight during this trip, and I came back with considerably more luggage than when I left Bangladesh. 

Other highlights included...wearing shorts and dresses (I don't get to do that here so it's terribly exciting, although a bit gross considering my legs hadn't seen the sun in a year and were seriously pasty!) going on tuk tuks (they beat a rickshaw any day in terms of comfort, although a rickshaw is probably more 'exciting' in that you are more in constant danger!) getting my shoes fixed on the street by a crazy Vietnamese man, lots of market shopping, swimming in the ocean (AMAZING! Man I miss the beach) tandem bike riding by the seaside, eating icecream made to look like sushi in Ho Chi Minh City on New Years Eve, then getting yelled at by a policeman on the way back to our hostel for crossing the road in a funny place, getting Christmas fingernails painted, and lots of laughing with friends. 

Here's a few photos....

Christmas nails!

Green coconut deliciousness

Christmas fruit

Cambodia...Buddhist temples and razor wire.

The BEACH! In Vietnam

Doesn't really do it justice, but this is New Years Eve madness in Ho Chi Minh...

Sushi icecream!

One year!

It seems that I am usually starting these posts with..."I'm so sorry I haven't posted in ages!"
I am hopelessly slack at updating this and really have no real excuse except for laziness!

I figured that now I have hit the 'one year' mark I should really write a post looking back at the 1st year I've spent in Bangladesh. I think I'll put it into top ten form, the highlights/major events from my year here...

Starting at 10

#10: Arrival. Arriving in Bangladesh was terrifying, it hit home to me this enormous thing that I had done, this thing that I had committed myself to. It took me ages to settle in and I spent the first few months homesick and scared of failure! Not the most fun time in my life but definitely a time where I learnt a lot about myself. I think I had to go through that to get to where I am now...

#9: Friends. I would never have survived here if I hadn't had some pretty awesome new friends. So many people were so willing to help and take me places, speak/translate for me. I love them all. Sometimes, when I am grumpy with Bangladesh, I remember all these great Bengali friends that I have, and how fantastic they are. It makes me less grumpy...most of the time!

#8: Adopted family. As well as great Bengali friends, there is a wonderful group of foreigners that I work with, both at school and outside of school. They have become my family here and without them I would have packed my bags and come home a long time ago. Ice cream and cakes on birthdays, oranges when sick, cups of coffee, dinners, holidays, dressing up fancy and going to weddings of people we don't even know. Good times :)

#7: The original Class 3. This was the class I took over when their teacher left the school unexpectedly. They were (still are actually) a noisy, rambunctious and gorgeous class. I have a big lot of love for this class, they helped me find my place in the school and gave me a lot of fun memories. 

#6: Holidays at the beach. In the July holidays, I went with some friends to Cox's Bazar down on the coast of Bangladesh. Despite the hideous bus journey it was a lovely trip full of food and relaxation. It was fabulous to see the ocean and swim as well as spend some time with great people. I still think of that trip fondly despite the fact that the bus journey home took 14 hours!

#5:  Chandpur. This place has given me rest and serenity and plants and swimming. It is only a few hours down the river and has become my place to go when I need a break from the indescribable chaos that is Dhaka. There is always a welcome for me there, and in the hot season there is swimming in the pond and eating guava and mango, plus hours sitting on the porch reading a good book. Nice.

#4: Visitors. There have been many visitors this year, lots from Churches that support Ross and Cindy as well as some others. It has often fallen to Caro and I to look after the ones that come to school and it has been lovely being a guide. I enjoy showing people where I live and it helps make me feel like I really live here. Having Kristy here was awesome just before Christmas, any other friends would be welcome...hint hint! :)

#3: The current Class 3. These guys are my babies, I love them to pieces, even the naughty ones, and really really enjoy teaching them. It will be very sad to say goodbye to them in June. They have made me tear my hair out at times and are loud and full of energy but such fun to teach. Their enthusiasm is infectious. 

#2: The noise. It's funny, I hated the noise when I first got here, and I still hate it sometimes now. But it has just become a part of life and it seems odd when there is no noise. As I type I can hear a loudspeaker from the mosque, wailing in arabic I think,  the noise from about 20 different cricket games from the field below my apartment, car horns, the bells on rickshaws and some banging which I think is from the construction site down the road. And that's normal, and not really very loud. The chaos that is Dhaka is very hard to explain, pretty much you just have to experience it for yourself! New Zealand is going to seem very quiet when I go home.

#1: School. GEM School is the coolest place, it is like a little island of fun in the middle of crazy town! Every time I pass through the gates I feel at home, I am welcomed by gorgeous smiling faces of students that I know and love. Inside school I am not a 'bideshi' (foreigner) I am Carley Madam, the crazy teacher who likes to paint on the walls, and sing songs. The absolute best part of my year has been spending my time in this school, becoming a part of the furniture, building relationships with the students and teachers and generally just having fun. It is my home in Dhaka. 

PS. I was going to add photos to this post but my internet is having a spazzy fit so they won't upload. Also, I shall write a separate post soon about my recent trip to Cambodia and Vietnam :) 

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...