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...........  

Arriving in Bangladesh

By way of Beijing and Bangkok, I finally arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh at 2am.  This is my first trip to Asia and my frame of reference is all the time I've spent in Africa.  Perhaps it was the hour, but my initial impression was that there was a decidedly different "vibe" than what I feel when I land most anywhere in Africa.  There is something alive and pulsating about Africa that I just didn't feel here.

I got out into Dhaka a little bit today and it is a large, dusty developing world city where horns are honking literally constantly.  A couple of colleagues and I went to buy clothing and gifts.  Fabric is a weak spot of mine and Bangladesh is the place to indulge!  I bought a couple of salwar kamiz - the 3 piece outfits women here wear.  They are comprised of a tunic, loose drawstring pants and a wrap.  Silks, cottons, batik, weave, embroidery - they have it all and it is beautiful!  On our way back to the hotel, we jumped in a tuk tuk, which is basically 3 wheels, a cage and a motor.  The cage served to allow air in to cool us off and keep street vendors out.  Our driver immediately turned around so we were driving the wrong way down a major road.  Within a couple of blocks, we finally made a turn and got going the correct way.  I rapidly figured out that the traffic hierarchy for who gets the right of way is:  big trucks then newer model cars then older cars then tuk tuks then rickshaws then people on foot.  Thankfully we weren't at the very bottom of the vehicle food chain and finally made it back safely.

Tomorrow is a day of meetings then a few days of site visits in an urban slum and a flight out to a rural area.  I'll no doubt have much more to share.  

Spirit of '76

It's 76 degrees today.  That's all I have to say :)

A Good DC Day

Saturday was the kind of day that exemplifies why we moved here - as opposed to Friday, which found me at the DMV for another 2 hours and after making no progress whatsoever, needing to leave to get work done and having to pay $14 for parking.

But, Saturday is the focus for this post.  In the morning, we woke up to sun, spring weather and trees blooming,  drove down the hill to Georgetown, pulled into a parking spot for the Embassy of Lichtenstein and dropped Sophie off at the uber-modern Swedish embassy complex right on the banks of the Potomac.  She was going to a United Nations Foundation event for one of their initiatives,  GirlUp www.girlup.org . GirlUp catalyzes adolescent girls from this country to learn about and support the hardest to reach adolescent girls globally.  She spent the day learning about the plight of millions of girls forced to marry in their early teens, girls who aren't allowed to go to school and many other important issues.  She came home ignited and full of ideas to help her school's chapter of GirlUp raise funds and awareness for the causes of her global peers.

While Sophie was off at the "House of Sweden", Xavier and I headed to Le Pain Quotidien - a favorite little French bakery/cafe that I first went to in London.  We could barely talk to each other beyond the sounds of pure delight as he sipped a belgian hot chocolate and I oogled my cappuccino with a generous heaping of hazelnut spread (organic version of Nutella - yum!).  We looked to the day ahead and decided we'd drive to Virginia and check out the 2nd half of the Smithsonian's air & space museum.  We'd already gone to the main museum on the mall in DC. Xavier has a report on Charles Lindbergh coming up,  so we headed to the huge hangar near Dulles airport where airplanes and space craft - from gliders with barely any structure to the Concorde to the space shuttle Endeavor - are on display close up.  I had my own personal guided tour - Xavier loves flight and has soaked up amazing details from reading and studying about it that he was able to point out planes, tell me where they were from and little tidbits about how they were used.  It was a lot of fun and a great way for him to gather more information for his report - Wikipedia pales in comparison!

We all returned home exhausted and grateful that we have so many resources right in our own backyard.  I'm headed off to Bangladesh this week for site visits of MAMA work.  I am very much looking forward to it and will no doubt have stories and photos to share!

 Le Pain Quotidien - chocolate bliss

Real astronaut suit from Endeavor