Famous Person Sighting

Traffic was difficult getting Sophie the couple of miles to school for her lacrosse practice tonight.  After inching along for some time, we finally figured out what the hold up was - a famous person.  Nope, not Obama.  Not a celebrity being arrested for protesting.  It was.....Ronald McDonald.  Seriously.  Hanging out in front of the neighborhood post office, shaking hands and posing for photos.  Not exactly the person I would have bet we would sight stopping traffic in DC!

When I got home and showed Xavier the photo, his response was "That's scary.  Seriously.  Clowns are the scariest of all".  Guess Ronald doesn't hold the same allure for his generation as it did for mine - thankfully!

Home

I'm winding up a busy week after getting back from Seattle/Vashon.  Having just returned from one island, the kids and I spent Easter weekend on another island - Chincoteague Island, VA.  It's a short bike ride over a bridge to a National Wildlife Reserve, Assateague Island - with stunning, undisturbed beaches on the Atlantic.  I think we needed a bit of island life to help us reenter city life.

During the time on Vashon, I made the very difficult decision to give up my option to purchase the home we had been living in there.  Things got too complicated and too expensive.  However, it has made me - and the kids - really consider what "home" is.  We've traveled a lot and always considered Vashon home. But, owning a home on Vashon felt like a way to "guarantee" that it is home.  In our own ways, we each got to the realization that home is wherever we are and that Vashon is still our anchor and owning a home - or not - doesn't change that.  Somehow, working through that has made this week in DC feel more settled and more "ok" than it had before.  Right now, we're in DC and it's our home for now.  Vashon is where we will keep going back to and we'll make the most of the adventures we have when we travel the world!

Easter at Assateague Island - on the "other" coast

Rosie -making the most of being a DC Dog

Bike Racks, Sun Breaks and Grunge

Yes, it's a Seattle cliche.  I'm sitting in a Whole Foods on a Sunday morning drinking a cappuccino, strangely there is grunge on the overhead stereo (not sure which is worse on a Sunday morning - grunge or musak), we are experiencing one of the rare "sun breaks" lauded by the weather forecasters and bike rack-laden Subarus are passing by in large numbers.  No doubt I'm back in Seattle.

I've spent much of the past few days in Vashon Island (check out today's NY Times Travel Section on Vashon)  staying on a sailboat moored in the Burton Marina, just across the street from the now famous Burton Coffee stand.  It's been mostly pouring rain with no sense of where the sun might be, but the goslings and bald eagles make up for the weather.

Being back, I'm mostly struck by the slower pace, politeness, "colorful" characters and general sense of people being outside - no matter the weather.  As I sat in front of my daughter's former middle school while she was visiting last week, I realized that the kids were outside during lunch, few with coats and mostly running around totally ignoring the rain.  In DC, outside lunch is cancelled if there's even a hint of rain and Xavier isn't allowed outside - pretty much anytime it's under 70 degrees - without a coat.  In DC, even when it's been near 80 degrees, Xavier wears cords and a flannel shirt nearly every day.  Here, he went to his former school for the day in shorts and a t-shirt - all set to be outside in the rain!  Not sure what that's about.

I guess I'm classically caught in between 2 places.  There is much I am learning to like about DC and much I miss about Seattle & Vashon.  I don't quite feel "home" either place but am ok for the moment in observing how similar and different both places are and how each has elements which reflect the various parts of myself.

My Vashon "Home" for the week (notice the raindrops in the water - this was during a "light" rain).

Back Home

Other than being awake at 4 each morning and having some serious fatigue in the afternoons, I've adjusted better than expected to being home.  It is a blessing and a challenge to come home to 2 active kids and a demanding dog and coping with a body that can pull through when needed, but then collapses with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue after periods of intensity - like a trip half way across the world.

After a stunning over 80 degree day and full bloom of the cherry trees on Friday which made me so glad to be in DC right now (I'll check in again in July!), the rain and cold of the past day or so reminded me of Vashon.   Yesterday, I felt that old familiar coldness to the bone that only cool weather with rain can provide and somehow it felt like home.

Talking about the weather, paying bills, running errands, helping with homework, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, making the meals - it's all just life and some of the many details that make us human and not so unlike the families I visited in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh Video

Photos from my trip.  Such beautiful people and places.  The photo with the elderly woman shroud in blue with beds on the floor is an urban slum birthing clinic.  The following photograph of the stool and various water vessels are the only "tools" she uses for assisting in births.  Most other photos are people we visited and photos I took of people taking photos of me.

http://youtu.be/XtVjJGOxkx8

Babies and Bathrooms

Today's site visit was definitely rural.  We were in the area of Sylhet and drove out to visit various women and health workers.  At one home, we had to park and walk into the village for about 5 minutes through winding paths lined with bamboo and foot bridges over the area's many, many pools of water.  In this area 2 Western women were a spectacle to say the least.  I took several pictures of people taking pictures of me and generally caused a stir wherever I went.  After we left one home, I told the driver I needed to use the restroom.  Although it is rural, a downside of being a westerner and a woman in a rural area is that it's impossible to just take a discreet pee on the side of the road.  After much discussion with our local guide, the driver pulled over to the side of the road, got out, went into a home and came back out, motioning for me to come inside.  I was led into a dark room and then shown a bathroom which was actually better than expected - cement floor and fairly new standing platform.  I was a bit horrified when I came out and asked our guide how the driver knew to stop there.  Apparently, he saw a house that looked like newer construction and figured they'd have a decent toilet.  He arranged with the family to let me use it and much to their surprise and mine, there I was, a random Westerner peeing in their bathroom!

After a very full morning of visiting moms and adorable babies, we flew back to Dhaka and were met by the onslaught of horns, gridlocked traffic and pollution.  I am exhausted in that "wow, what an amazing trip it's been" and "I can't believe this is my job" kind of way but am very ready to get on the plane at 3 tomorrow morning and start the long trek home, kiss my kids and my dog and go to sleep for days.......

Early Morning in Sylhet

I'm in Sylhet, an area in Northeastern Bangladesh, just near the India border.  As with every other morning on this trip, I am awake by 5am with a couple of hours to process my time here before I launch into another very intense day.  This time, I am staying in an "all-things-made-in-China" hotel with an arrow pointing to Mecca on the wall, hearing the first of the day's call to prayer and having a very distinct feeling that women don't stay here alone very often.  After a monsoon rain and small earthquake our first 24 hours in Dhaka, I am also very aware of the substandard nature of most of the buildings here.  

This was to be a "rural" site visit and I was expecting rural.  I somehow forgot the incredible concentration of people in this relatively small country.  Rural is not really so rural.  Sylhet is filled with all the paradoxes of the developing world - children picking through trash heaps to find a scrap of something that will either serve as food or a toy right next to high end shops selling jewelry and embroidered silk saris.  The traffic is beyond insane and it's clear there isn't a lot of fear of head-on collisions as cars go head to head with large trucks barreling down the road, swerving at the last second only to miss a rickshaw by mere centimeters.  I have stopped looking out the front window and instead engage in conversation with my colleagues in the back seat.

I am also struck by how similar the roadside stalls and general day to day life looks so much like africa.  Then, I realized it's because 90% of what's sold on the roadside is all the same cheap plastic and metal stuff manufactured in China and sold in every corner of the world.  Local products are edged out by these unattractive Chinese goods that never biodegrade and don't do much for local trade.  Also, the produce is nearly the same as in Ghana and cooking methods similar, but the cuisine is very different.  The difference is the local herbs and spices.

At the end of the day, after visiting women and babies in their homes, touring a health clinic and running into people who are one step above being slaves with bundles of tea on their heads going to get their day's harvest weighed at the factory, the thing that sticks with me most is - we are really all the same.  We have beautiful differences in our cultures, food, clothing and beliefs, but at the end of the day,  we want to be happy, healthy, respected and loved and we do everything we can to make sure that our children are better off than us...........