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....