Off to the village for Eid Break. I went with an AUW student named Charmin, who's father Gies is also the University cook, to spend the biggest Islamic holiday Eid, in the "real Bangladesh" as the locals like to remind us city dwellers. Eid ul-Fitr celebrates the end of Ramadan and is a time to dress up and eat and visit with friends and family. We traveled by about 3 hours by bus, on a somewhat terrifying trip where I longed for both a seat belt and Dramamine. Little towns dotted the landscape in between stretches of nothing but rice paddies and lots (and lots) of water. For the first time I understood Bangladesh's existence as a sinking country.
We finally arrived at Charmin's house where we were greeted by her mother who hugged us tightly as if we were relatives returning from a long journey. Charmin's house was a small cement home with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a tin roof. Besides her mother and father, her younger sister Tonne (15) and younger brothers Robin (19) and Salman (8) were there. The siblings were quiet at first, staring at us with wide, curious eyes and shy smiles.
Almost immediately we were given food. Juice and homemade coconut pastries and sugared dumplings and rice and vegetables and fried lentil cakes and curried meat and fruit and tea. I must have had 18 meals in the two and half days I spent in the village, all made by fasting hands. Every few hours some new concoction would appear followed by the insistence on eating and eating a lot. It is the first home I've been in where there was no extra person to help cook and clean. Everything was done by Charmin, her mother, her father, and her siblings.
We were all a bit timid at first but curiosity soon won out over reticence. Salman was a big cheeked, bright, thoroughly happy child. The closeness he and Gies shared was palpable; the little boy followed his father everywhere, hugged him constantly, and the two were often teased by others in the family about their obvious affection for each other. Robin's English was broken and hard to follow but he seemed to understand everything that was going on. Tonne was the shiest of them all but she followed her big sister around, watching our interactions closely, never far behind the others.
Charmin showed us her family's pond where we fed the fish they were raising. Even in a modest yard there were so many plants growing-- red, green, and black chilies (black are the hottest), mangoes, coconuts, bananas, and limes. The coconuts towered high above us, topping trees without branches. I asked Charmin how they were able to get them down. She told me there were boys in the village who could climb the trees in thirty seconds to retrieve the fruit. I laughed and told her that couldn't be true. An hour later, one of these village boys appeared and proved us both wrong. He scaled the tree in five seconds, not thirty.
We made quite the spectacle, foreign and strange in a village where few foreigners ever visit. Kids and adults alike would stop by to peak in and see if the rumors were true, Americans running amok in the Bangla wilderness. The same questions came from everyone. First, "are you married?" followed by what country we were from, who our families were, what did we think of Bangladesh, and then, sometimes, what job we were doing.
Eid fell of the 11th-- that morning Charmin's family was up early-- by 6am already cooking. The men went to the nearby village mosque to pray after eating. The women prayed at home. The village was a bustling place for Eid-- with people dressed in bright colored saris, hands decorated with henna, bundles of food in their arms visiting houses to show and share with others their good fortune. I realized as I watched the excited shuffle from home to home, that no matter where you are or what your station in life, people find a way to express the vibrancy of being alive. In Namibia it was the grand dresses of the Herero women and the ceaseless singing and dancing. Here it's the spiciness of food and the radiant cloth that people decorate themselves with.
Tonne had a few of her friends drop by. One of the fourteen year old girls had just been married, Charmin whispered to me. I tried not to stare and quickly forced the pity out of my face at the site of a child who'd never met the man she was to marry, and who in three years would be delivered to him and to an entirely new life she did not choose. Charmin, a married woman herself, noticed the pity anyway. And she confessed to me that while she loved her husband (her marriage was not arranged though her parents' was), she missed the freedom of her youth when as a young girl she could run around the village, go swimming, and do scandalous things like ride bikes and brush off the expectations and customs of her elders. And I understood that while it's not universally true, most 10 year old girls in Bangladesh have more outward liberty than their mothers.
We briefly visited another, even more remote village (of Charmin's husband's family) and there almost no men were at home, only the women. As a group gathered at our exhibition, I watched the older women the closest. There were beautiful wrapped in cotton saris, marriage bracelets encircling bone thin arms, wrinkles earned and lovely carved into their faces. I could not take my eyes off of them and how they sat closely together, whispering and chewing tobbaco wrapped in betel leaves. I could feel the years of shared experience between them, the bonds formed by their similar hardships and by the partition between their world and the world outside.
My favorite moment of my visit was the night the power went out. And with no back-up generator the cement home became a furnace in a matter of moments. We were all sitting in one of the bedrooms. Charmin's family, utterly concerned that the Americans might melt, brought out hand fans and there by kerosene lamp we all sat waving these fans, trying unsuccessfully not to sweat. The family teased each other in the darkness. I witnessed tenderness between husband and wife, father and daughter, brother and sister. And we were invited into that tenderness as the kids laughed and poked fun at our pale, swollen feet. We laughed too.
