Najma

School began this week. It was exciting to watch the University emerge from its quiet, ghost like existence into a place filled with wide eyed and nervous students moving in bunches from class to class. AUW is such a new school that right now their are only two classes in place-- a first year and second year. Then there's the Access Academy, a one year prep program for students who come mostly from poor backgrounds and are not yet ready for University level work. The idea is to spend one year in the Academy before moving into the Undergraduate level. The Access Academy is where most of the WorldTeach volunteers teach.

On Friday night I went with my housemate Lihuan (who is the director of student development), the Provost, and the executive director of WorldTeach to a welcome party the second year students were throwing for the new Access Academy students. The dance was on the rooftop of the school. The girls had decorated it with homespun streamers and slightly deflated balloons. There was 7-Up and dry chocolate cake. For a moment I thought I had walked into my 8th grade dance. Everyone lined the walls in chairs, hardly speaking to each other, certainly not dancing.


But as the evening wore on, the atmosphere on the roof changed. Girls rushed up to us trying to pull us out to the dance floor, wanting to snap pictures of our faces with cameras and cellphones. They clustered together by countries-- groups of giggling girls from Vietnam, girls from Nepal with quick English and lovely smiles, girls from India dressed stylishly and leading the charge on the dance floor, and the solemn girls from Afghanistan with pale faces and high cheekbones who rarely left their seats.

I talked to many of the Afghan girls, all of whom offered quiet thoughtful replies to my questions. I was especially taken with one in particular named Najma Qurbani. She had a hard time understanding my English so I talked slowly, well trained from my year in Namibia. She spoke of homesickness, a language I am fluent in, dwelling on brothers, sisters, her parents and her country. But her tiny, bright eyes expressed what her vocabulary could not: that while being away hurts, this chance to learn, to get better, to become her own source of hope matters more.

There are so many things about this job that are incredible. But one of the most amazing parts is the diversity of the campus. Bangladesh is just as foreign to a student from China or Iran as it is to me. Hindus from India sit next to Muslims from Pakistan. Tamils from Sri Lanka eat in the same dining hall as the Sinhalese. No one is singing kumbaya and there can be tensions but for the most part the girls seem to coexist and worry more about their grades than old histories and current politics.


So many cultures and backgrounds in one place makes the world smaller and more accessible. Here we are all bundled together, forced to know and recognize each other. But if the world is shrinking, there's also a sense, almost every day, of glimpsing a new way, or image, or idea, a view just beyond what you wake up knowing in the morning. Friday, before the dance, I looked at Afghanistan and all I could see was a war. Now I can see Najma.

Bhatiary Village Pictures

(kids at the village park)

Iftar

On August 12th, Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, began. Like most Americans I have always vaguely thought of Ramadan as that really long holiday Muslims celebrate by not eating. And that part is sort of true. People wake up at 3am to eat and pray before the sun rises and then not a drop of water or food is supposed to be consumed until sunset at 6:30pm when a siren can be heard across the city signaling time has come to break the fast. That fast-breaking meal is called Iftar.

Experiencing Ramadan in a country where most people are observing it in some way is entirely different than knowing one kid in high school who skips lunch for a month at the beginning of every year. The holiday affects everything around you. Most restaurants are closed. No eating is allowed in the streets (except by the few who duck into tiny stalls enveloped by black curtains. I try not to laugh as I pass by and see men's feet sticking out from underneath as they sip tea in these "Ramadan-free zones"). People are tired and cranky and eye your water bottle with considerable envy. One of the faculty members, Ibrahim, told me that the month is meant to make Muslims think of others who have less than themselves but that often many people just gorge the whole evening and end up eating more than usual. Thanksgiving immediately popped into my head.

Some volunteers and I were in the grocery store around 6:30 one evening and as we perused shelves all the employees gathered in groups on the floor. They sat on cardboard boxes, men with men, women with women, around plates of traditional Iftar food-- mostly fried and sweet goodies and of course dates, the fruit you are supposed to eat first when breaking the fast.

The situation was initially extraordinarily awkward as the prayer was broadcast throughout the store. Calynn, Julia, Trishna and I were the only customers there, hovering in the cereal aisle not sure what to do. I felt like an intruder on some sacred ritual I knew nothing about. But then one of the men insisted we have some of the meal and offered up dates and crackers and sweets and we understood-- Iftar food is for sharing. No one breaks the fast alone.

After my impromptu celebration in Agora, I was talking to my friend Rifat, a staff member at AUW, about it and she invited me to Iftar at her family's house. I was both touched and excited. Even after almost two months in Bangladesh, much of my time has been confined to the University and work. I looked forward to Saturday all week. We rode in a rickshaw to her fairly large and lovely apartment where I met her mother, father, husband, son, sister, and her niece and nephew.

The feast was already on the table when I arrived. Rifat's mother, a shy round faced woman had prepared it all. Rice pudding with bananas, fried vegetables, chickpeas in curry, papaya with raisins, sugar, and milk, coconut squares, lentils, lassi, dates, cucumber and carrot salad. Everyone welcomed me and we gathered around the table, drawn by the fantastic smells of the food.





All the women including me covered our heads with our ornas (the scarf most Bengali women wear around their shoulders and chest). The men wore beautifully embroidered white shirts and caps that beamed from their warm brown skin. Upstairs I could hear the cartoons that Rifat's son Shyan and his cousins were watching, an amusing aside coupled next to a tradition over 1500 years old.

As the call came over the radio, a brief prayer was muttered and then we dug in. Everyone ate quickly and with purpose—there was little talking. Rifat heaped food onto my plate and made sure I tried every single dish. Each one was delicious.

After eating, each person left to pray and then one by one returned to the table. It was then I got to know her family a little better. Her father was soft-spoken and gentle, conversing in the English of an educated man. Her husband Rony, a law professor who works in Dhaka, was both handsome and kind. Her sister, a doctor, did not share the natural gentleness of Rifat or her father—but her sharp directness often betrayed someone who laughed often and easily.

(Rifat and Shyan)

(cousins)

(Rifat and her husband Rony)

(Rifat's sister and mother)

As I continued to help myself to dates, and watched the undiminished joy on the faces of those around me I grasped that you don't have to be Muslim to appreciate the beauty of ritual and tradition, to admire the discipline bound with the celebration of release and achievement. Just like you don't have to belong to a family in order to recognize kinship.

Later Rifat and I sat underneath the laundry line on her rooftop, a sanctuary of space I know she cherishes. We could see all of Chittagong as the sun dipped and the last call to prayer echoed from different mosques across the city. We watched Shyan run around the same small square of roof his mother played on as a child. She pointed to an enormous tree eclipsing the tall buildings nearby saying she remembered this tree from the time she was ten. It struck me then how different our lives are. She's a married Bengali woman with a little boy in kindergarten living by the constancy of landmarks that have always been and will always be there. I am in my mid-twenties, on my own, and my scenery seems to never stop changing. Yet in her company I often feel like I am talking to a very old friend.




Some of the best days I can remember involve moments just like that. Moments where I find a piece of the familiar cocooned in the foreign unknown. Eating Herero bread baked in the ground with Tjizakuje’s incandescent smile. The sunrise May Day celebration in Oxford, voices piercing the barely lit sky, Spring suddenly there. And Iftar at Rifat’s.

Volunteers, Me, and Omar Shareef

The Missionary and the Atheist

I first saw our Bangla teacher, Dr. Lynn Silvernale, in a small, dimly lit and very crowded bookshop. She was seated in a chair while the rest of us gathered cross-legged on the floor like kindergartners eager for story time. Her hair was the bright pearly white that my grandmother's once was. She seemed both regal and diminutive in her simple wooden throne. I had been in Chittagong only a week or so and had tagged along with some of the faculty to see her speak.

Lynn came to Chittagong in 1961, before Bangladesh was even a country. She traveled on a freighter carrying train engines with only one other passenger for 51 days from New York through the Suez Canal stopping in India along the way to the port city I now live in. She had a clear and very deeply felt mission-- to go into the wilderness of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and convert Muslims and Buddhists to Christianity. And that's what she's done for the last fifty years, this tiny woman, all angles and bones, wrapped in a modest sari. She's also become fluent in Bangla and translated the Bible into the Bangla, a project that took over twenty years to complete and had never been done before.

I listened to her speak that evening and often found myself uncomfortable or in disagreement with her conclusions, but I also could not shake a very sturdy awe building inside me. How brave was this woman to step onto a ship on one side of the world, leave everyone and everything she has ever known, and emerge into the jungle without a cell phone or internet or real roads or understanding a word of Bangla. That kind of devotion, that raw commitment to a cause, not to mention her sheer nerve are qualities to be cherished. And it reminded me that even those you think are dead wrong can still have so much to teach.

After she spoke she opened the floor up to questions. The reverence with which the Muslim men treated Lynn was incredible to watch. While thinking nothing of cutting each other off, dismissing someone else's point of view, whenever they spoke to this 70 year old woman who'd spent her life in their country and with whom they shared a common piety their tones held the same respect and awe I felt in my silence. That she had devoted her life to Bangladesh and God seemed to eclipse all other details.

Ramadan started today. All around me people are waking up at 4:00am to eat before the sun rises and cannot so much as drink a drop of water until it sets again. I don't know how the rickshaw drivers can manage. As I walked home this evening, restaurants were setting out food by the side of the road for folks to break the fast. Many at the University are observing the holiday as well, including my friend Samiya.

Samiya is a young, soft spoken, lovely woman. A glance at her smooth face and its demure features would betray someone no older than twenty-five but her feet tell a different story. I remember glancing down at them one afternoon and in seeing their weathered, hard, calloused skin I for the first time considered she was not a girl. Samiya and I have adopted each other somehow over the last month. I think we share a similar loneliness. I'm new and far away from home. She's from Bangladesh but she's a rarity here: despite the fact that she will fast for the entire month of Ramadan she confessed to me in hushed tones not long ago that she does not believe a word of the Quran. She does not believe in God at all.

What is most fascinating and also sad about Samiya is not her specific beliefs or non-beliefs. It's her attachment to secrecy. She told me with real fear in her voice that I couldn't tell anyone what she had confided (and I actually changed her name and a few details in this post since this is going on the internet though it's doubtful anyone from AUW will read this). Her parents and in-laws are not aware of her lack of faith. And she seems so isolated within her own culture. Her difficulty in making real friends in a country that is so outwardly pious and that does not accept the notion of doubt is a predicament I completely understand. I remember growing up in my small Georgia town, that rigidity of belief, that inability to question or wonder or even consider another way without condemnation is something I felt almost every day at Gainesville High School.

The volunteers have arrived and they are wonderful. I've been running around like crazy this past week with the busyness of campaign work. But at night, as I'm crawling into bed for much needed sleep, I have a few quiet minutes to reflect on the uniqueness of an experience that offers me the chance to meet both Samiya and Dr. Silvernale in the same month, in the same country, in the same spirit of kinship.

Who will I meet next?

Hierarchy

There's a tiny room in my house shaped like a rectangle-- maybe 10ft by 3ft. Adjoining it there is an even smaller room which has a hole with a pipe connected to it. I assumed this was a strange kind of storage space until my friend Devlynn told me they were my servant's quarters. The servant would sleep in the one room and use the bathroom in the hole in the other room. Never mind that I have three perfectly good toilets in my apartment.

It's been a frantic few weeks trying to prepare Orientation training, making sure the volunteers have good living arrangements, figuring out who will be teaching what, and about five million other things that seem to come up a day. And even with the craziness of my job right now, I have had time to experience the city and its people a little more, both the good and the bad.

Last weekend a woman working as part of the AUW administration named Rena invited Devlynn and I to her house for lunch. She's married to a very wealthy business man from the Punjab province in India-- bordering Pakistan. I was not too surprised when her driver picked us up and whisked us off to a large house in a gated community. I was slightly more taken back when she introduced us to her four live-in servants and a very old, very bony woman who was the Nanny of her two sons (the sons spoke impeccable English) Salman and Zen. I was shocked when as we sat for a delicious, beautiful meal with a water pitcher on the table and instead of refilling our own classes, someone was called from across the house to come in and fill them up instead.

That day at Rena's I saw in concentrated form what I've been witnessing in bits and pieces since arriving. The first is that there is a large swath of the population that has almost nothing. These are the begging boys outside the grocery store who saw fit to hit me when I refused to give them money. These are the women who fish garbage out of the ditch in front of my house. These are the rickshaw drivers who have to pay such an enormous amount to rent their rickshaw that they can barely break even despite driving people around 12-14 hours a day. But then there's this tiny segment of society that seems to have EVERYTHING. The man who owns the apartment building I live in uses the total amount from the rent he collects as a spending allowance for one of his sisters. It's her "fun" money. A girl I work with stared at me with confusion and pity when I told her I cooked for myself here and at home in America. And one of the apartment buildings where we house teachers has a separate staircase for workers and cleaners because they are not allowed in the elevator and they are not allowed on the stairs that foreigners walk on.

I know this is not uncommon-- anywhere you go- you usually always have the super rich and the very poor but here that contrast is so vivid. And the lines between those who barely own shoes and those who don't need to because they are carried everywhere they go are fixed and unapologetically reinforced. Class is not to be wiped away or hushed up or acted as if it doesn't exist. Class is to be celebrated. A factory owner or brick layer or sweeper of streets isn't just what you do. It's who you are always going to be.