Durga Puja

This is the first year I've been in Bangladesh for the Durga Puja festival. It is the biggest of the Hindu pujas, but I've never been in the country to see what a big event it is. Now, staying with a Hindu family, I got to see the full experience.

Day 1 & 2 (সপ্তমি, অষ্টমি)

After weeks of discussing travel plans, ordering clothes, and general excitement about the upcoming puja, the first day of the puja arrived, and the festival cooking began. Below is my breakfast plate the second day: puffed rice mowas and smaller naru -- made of coconut or sesame mixed with sugarcane molasses (and delicious, a new favorite of mine). New saris, pants, shirts, shoes, ...and even a new showcase made their appearance.

Day 3 (নবমির)

This became the temple tour day. After sunset, my host family rented a CNG (CNG-powered little 3-wheeler), and we were off for the first mondop -- the tent set up for the Durga figure. At the first one, I took a few pictures and then was suprised to discover everyone was already headed back to the vehicle. After a couple more visits, the routine was clear -- everyone walked up the the mondop to do pronam (greet it) -- and then headed right back to the CNG, perhaps grabbing a snack on the way. By about midnight, we had visited 26 modops ...and spent altogether way too much time crowded into the CNG (7 passengers in a tiny vehicle designed for 3).

Day 4 (বিজয় দশমী)

On the last day, the festivity began late afternoon, with loud music and dancing around the mondops. And vermillion red was everywhere -- with people smearing it on each others' faces and clothes. Before sunset, Durja and the other images were loaded onto vangaris (flat-bed rickshaws) and taken over to the river. At the river's edge the dancing continued, even more vigorous than before (from the smell, obviously fueled by some sort of liquor). Finally after the sun set, Durga was carried down the bank and laid down in the river; and after a lot of splashing around in the shallows, was released to float downstream.

cobra in the kitchen

This morning my work at our project site was suddenly interrupted by an uncharacteristically urgent cry from Kalam, the cook. Reaching for some food on a lower shelf in the kitchen, he was startled by a noise. Pulling his hand back and looking down, he found himself staring at the raised hood of a black cobra.

Here's a little clearer picture taken a few minutes later -- after it was lured outside and then clubbed with a bamboo pole. (The final job was done by the only woman on the premises -- our farmer's wife)

The Naja kaouthia, or Monocled Cobra, contributes it's fair share to the making this part of the world the highest density for snake bites.

(From Wikipedia - Snakebite)

So now we can add cobras to the list of occasional house-mates -- along with mice, shrews, geckos, spiders (some 3-4 inch diameter variety), cockroaches, various ant species, and sparrows.

host family

I've been at my new host family's place almost a month now, but still haven't got pictures up. I'll probably have to wait till a puja day to get a picture of everyone... but here are few in the meantime. Below is the verandah where cooking, eating, and talking happens. Like village homes, their house is a set of small room around this central courtyard area.

The old couple have two sons and one grandson -- Piash. I always get a warm welcome from Piash when I get up in the morning, and he's also been a good language tutor. (For a 3-year-old, he has very clear Bangla.)

And a fish-eye view of my room. On my bed I have a shitol pati, a reed mat that feels cooler in the summer than cloth sheets. When I told a student friend that I had slept on one for the first time, he was amazed -- how could I have survived the hot seasons before without one?!?

Eid with family

Last weekend was Eid holiday, the end of the Ramadan fast. I headed over to Rajshahi to spend a couple days of holiday with my brother's family. My niece is growing up fast, and the big recent change is that she has grown out of her extreme clingyness to her mom. Now she comes to me to play, even when Hosanna is in the house. Here she is talking into a jambura peel

...and Elias laying into the special Eid sweets (paiesh).

Newbigin

I just finished reading Lesslie Newbigin's 'The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.' It is a book I should have read back in college: an excellent discussion of pluralism, as well as the related epistimology.

Newbigin looks at pluralism's roots in the secular Western worldview, with its characteristic division of knowledge into fact and belief. "Facts" are explained through empirical science and philosophy, and everyone is expected to agree on them; there is no room for differing opinions. "Belief," on the other hand, is private matter of personal choice. Religions are tolerated and all equally valid, as long as they are confined to the belief category. So pluralism is limited these beliefs and values, any attempt to challenge the reigning secular worldview in the realm of facts is an attempt to "impose values." (Though tolerated, religions are understood as a sociological phenomena -- which are relevant when talking about human values and superstitions, but irrelevant otherwise.)

This approach fails to see that religions are entire worldviews, or 'plausibility structures' (patterns of belief that determine what is deemed plausible or reasonable within a society). As such, they deal with all knowledge, and they do not make the have same fact/belief divide as the dominent secular worldview. These worldviews are embodied in languages, which are only partially translateable. We have a vast array of religious books available in English, allowing us to get a superficial understanding of other religions, and a "illusion of having an overview of all these different traditions without having had the actual experience of seeing the world through any of them" (p. 57).

In the first few chapters, Newbigin deals compares the ways of knowing and thinking in secular worldview vs. Christian worldviews. Belief is often set against reason: science and philosophy is built on reason, while religion is a matter of belief. But really, each worldview is a tradition of reasoning; a person learning the tradition accepts the theory 'in faith,' until he has enough of the pieces together to be able to think through that tradition. This tradition forms the basis for reasoning and dealing with experience. Comparing the secular and Christian worldviews:

The difference between these two traditions is not that one relies on reason and the other on revelation. Both are inconceivable apart from their rationality. The difference lies at the point of contrast between the two ways of expressing the original experience: "I have discovered" and "God has spoken." (p. 60)

In the Christian tradition, reason is employed not by an autonomous or sovereign individual, but in relation to others and God, as part of His ongoing story.

death in the village

Lal Miah (Mr. Red) lived just across the fields from us. Four days ago he died of rabies. One of our guards, Chan, knew him well and told the story:

When a mad dog attacked two months ago, Lal Miah came away from the fight with lacerations, not just bite marks. But no one could persuade him to get the rabies injections. "God let this happen, let his will be done," was Lal Miah's response to Chan's pleading. Everyone knew Lal Miah as kripon -- a stingy hoarder -- so guessed the 2,000 taka price tag for the injections may have had more to do with his refusal. (To illustrate just how stingy Lal Miah was, Chan described how he ate wheat bread for every meal -- big slabs of wheat may fill your belly, but imagine giving up rice to save a few taka on food!)

Soon after his death, Lal Miah's relatives came from Dhaka to take care of his stuff ...and what a lot of stuff there was. Four van-rickshaws loaded up the scrap steel and other sell-ables. After they were done the house was a pile of ruins.



So the man who didn't want to pay for medicine, had everything he owned sold to pay for his funeral. Today was the milad, the prayers for the dead, which were followed by a meal for everyone in the village. The Tk. 30,000 they earned from selling Lal Miahs stuff paid for a cow and 120 kg of rice. He had no children, so his land will then be sold to provide for his wife and old mother.


Lal Miah's was the second untimely death this month. Just a couple weeks earlier, a young girl from the other end of the village committed suicide. She was from a poor family, and had a boyfriend in another village who was more well off. When the parents found out, they intervened, and she hung herself. Her grave is in a bamboo grove right across from our house.

flags

Since the start of the world cup, I get asked "which team do you support?" almost as much as I get asked "where are you from?" (which is a lot). Everyone has there team ...and, as you can see from the flags, there really are only two options. Half of the country is in mourning after last night, and the other half is holding their breath for tonight's match.

Even the gypsy camp on my bike ride to town was flying their colors.

Gazpacho

I made this for the first time this week -- a perfect meal for Bangladesh in March & April, when Tomatoes are down at Tk 5-10 a kilo (3-7 cents/lb) and the weather is at it's hottest. Along with Middle Eastern yogurt-cucumber soup, it is now one of my favorite hot-weather foods. Any other good cold soup recipes?

Cambodia

The MCC annual retreat this year was in Cambodia. After the retreat time was over, several of us headed up to Siem Reap, in the NW part of the country. This was the capital of the old Khmer empire, and the area is dotted with stone temples.

Until recently many were overtaken by the jungle, but now there were restoration projects everywhere. The scale of the buildings was amazing -- Ankor Wat (above) is the largest religious building in the world. Despite the scale, the walls are covered everywhere with some of the most intricate carving I have seen.



Another highlight of the time in Cambodia was lots of good strong coffee. (The white is condensed milk.)

Lilahazir Foundry

Yesterday I was biking my usual route home, coming through one of the more rural sections of the route. In a clump of trees, between several acres of rice fields and a pond, I saw a red blaze through an open door. I stopped to look, and soon was invited for a tour of foundry ...as the sweaty bustle of the pour kept up its pace.


Molten steel and slag were pouring out of different sides at the base of a 20 ft furnace. The steel was caught by men in T-shirts and lungis with steel buckets on 4-ft poles. After tossing in a chunk of silica, they hauled it over to the sand molds, set into the floor all over. As they poured, others held the mold lid down with bamboo poles.

Most of the castings from this foundry are for tillers and threshers and other locally produced farm equipment. This foundry also had about 10 lathes for machining the castings -- all within a space about the size of my parents' apartment.


Toward the end of the pour there was a explosion of sparks from one of the molds, and I looked over to see an old man frantically shaking out his shirt and lungi. My guide told me they hadn't held the lid down hard enough; gas can build up underneath and then blow back with steel and sparks. The amount of safety equipment at the foundry was about the same as the ship-breaking yards. (And with the intense heat, they probably have even less motivation to wear anything more than their lungis.)

Ship breaking

This last week I spent in Chittagong, and it finally got to visit the ship breaking yards, just north of the city (clearly visible on Google maps). These are where ships go to die, and they are a booming business in Bangladesh. About 700 ships are decommissioned each year, and most of them end up in Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan. With it large tide variation, the Chittagong yards are well suited for the larger ships, and takes about 70 of them a year (the number is growing as new yards continue to open).

The ships are run aground under their own power during high tide, and then stripped of all the valuable smaller parts. They are then cut up into sections that are pulled up onto the beach with cables and winches. After a lot more cutting, moving, and sorting, the steel and parts are hauled off by truck. Almost everything is done by hand and with hand-held torches; The trucks and winches are often the only machines around.

Some of the steel hull plate and pipe is reused intact, but most of the steel goes to re-rolling mills or other steel re-processors in the area. Several miles of the Dhaka-Chittagong road, just inland from the yards, is lined with shops selling various other ship parts: pipe, valves, stainless steel galley (cooking) equipment, furniture, fire equipment, electric cables, generators, tools, insulation, lifeboats...

It is an amazingly efficient recycling system, with just about everything being reused. About 100,000 are employed directly or indirectly by downstream industries. Estimates at fraction of Bangladesh's steel supplied by ship breaking range from 30-80%. On the other side of the country, in Bogra, all the electric wire I've bought came from the ship yards.

The first two pictures above are not my own; the second yard we visited agreed to let us in, but only without cameras. As the number of ship breaking yards grows, newspapers have been reporting the pollution from the yards, mangrove forest destroyed to make room for them, and the appalling worker conditions. Ironically, my best buy from the ship breaking stores was safety equipment -- eye, ear, and breathing protection. Those seemed to be piling up and serving as mice homes, while all the yard workers worked without any safety equipment, sometimes not even shoes.