Overdue Update Number One: Qurbani Eid in Cox's Bazaar

In the past month, many of the (mis)adventures of these Bideshis have gone underreported. I’ll try to give a few overdue updates over the next few days.

Qurbani Eid fell this year on the 21st of December, just before Christmas – and it happily coincided with our trip to Cox’ Bazaar, Bangladesh’s southeastern beach province (which contains “the longest sea beach in the world,” according to proud Bangladeshis). The trip was our friend Karen’s idea. She is also a Fulbrighter, here doing PhD fieldwork on medical anthropology. She used to live in Cox’s Bazaar as a Peace Corps volunteer, and she wanted to take a trip to her old stomping grounds and visit her old friends. Ben and I were looking for some way to get out of Dhaka during the Eid holidays – we weren’t relishing the thought of witnessing the slaughter of thousands of animals in our neighborhood. The streets are narrow and drainage is poor, and a friend had told us that the blood literally flows inches deep through this area! So we jumped at the opportunity to vacate the premises.

On the 20th we boarded a very plush overnight bus from Dhaka. Tickets were outrageous – 700 taka (over $10) per seat – but we got what we paid for: blankets! and headphones! and comfy reclining seats with adjustable reading lights! And after a 12 hour bus ride, we reached Cox’s Bazaar at about 5:30 am. The air was cool, the streets were deserted, and you could smell a little bit of salt in the air. Karen led us to our hotel, a little place called “Sun Moon.” It wouldn’t have passed sanitation muster in the US – dirty sheets (we asked to have them changed); a toilet that didn’t flush; a filthy trash can – but we decided we could live with it for a few days. Exhausted after our bus ride, we slept soundly for a couple of hours and woke to the strange sound of a screaming animal and loud applause and cheers. We went out to our balcony and had a look to see what the ruckus was – turns out we hadn’t completely missed out on the Qurbani experience, after all. The hotel owner’s family conducted their sacrifice directly beneath our balcony, cutting the cow’s throat and letting it bleed into the street (that part we didn’t see), then tidily butchering it into pieces using the hide as a tarp to keep the meat clean. The work was done so neatly, so efficiently, and nothing went to waste. All the organs, all the meat, even the hide – everything was accounted for.

According to a friend of mine, just before the slaughter of a cow, the names of seven individuals are read out and a blessing is given. The seven names are those who will receive the benefits of the blessing. (In the case of a goat, one person receives the blessing.) When the slaughter is complete, the meat is equally divided among those seven people. Then each of them is responsible for dividing their portion equally into thirds: one part for themselves, one for their friends, and one for the poor. She said that the strict application of this rule would mean that every single part of the cow is ultimately divided into twenty-one pieces. This seems like a very intricate method of accounting; the family whose butchering we watched didn’t seem to be following those rules quite as closely as my friend might have expected. They gave whole pieces away at a time – we watched them give the stomach/intestines to a poor woman, who piled the whole mess into a big basket, hefted it up onto her head, and walked away down the street, swaying under what must have been at least fifty pounds’ worth of innards.

The finer butchering was going on upstairs on the roof. We went up to have a look. Here the women were at work: the men would carry big chunks up in baskets (little drops of blood on the stairs marked their trail); the women sat together on the concrete floor and divided the meat into usable sizes. Their primary tools were boti – knives that curve upward like a sickle blade, with the sharpened edge along the outside of the curve. They rest on the floor on tripod legs, which are held with the feet while you sit or squat on the floor. The floor is to Bangladesh what the countertop is for us Americans: the prep space. It’s a fine system as long as the floor is kept clean… but given my experience with dust and dirt and grime in my own home, I’d just as soon keep my food off the floor.

Anyway, we watched the butchering process until the only thing left was the scraped hide, which the men folded up and dumped in a bucket with the tail flopped over the top. We watched them wash the blood from the street and rinse out the gutter, and pretty soon there was no evidence of a cow ever having been there at all – except for the bucket of hide, that is. Leaning on our elbows on the balcony railing, Ben and I pondered what we’d seen. It made me feel sad: all those animals, all that blood. Millions of them, all over Bangladesh, dying in the streets. All over the world, in fact. So much death. But Ben’s take was different: these people know where meat comes from, he said. They are connected to their food in a way that we’re not. We go to the supermarket and buy a steak and pull off the plastic and toss it on the grill and it’s dinner. We don’t have to think about the fact that it was ever alive, or where it came from, or whether it died a good death. But here you invoke Allah and you spill the blood with your own hands - I think it’s a really humane thing, actually.

We spent the rest of our first day on the beach, which was miraculously empty – turns out that even though Cox’s is the number one tourist destination for Bangladeshis and honeymooners, and even though winter is its peak season, Eid is the one day when people are guaranteed to be home with their families. So we had much of the beach to ourselves that day, and rolled up our pant legs and waded out into the water and looked for shells, and drank cokes at a little snack stand and ate puffed rice with mustard oil and chilies and tomatoes and onions and watched the sun start to set. Toward evening more people started coming down the beach, and we decided to call it a day – walked back toward our hotel through an eerie pine forest planted in the sand. It’s supposed to be a buffer for big storms, protecting the town behind it from cyclones and tidal surges and other Bay of Bengal maladies.

On our second day we paid a visit to the lively harbor, the departure and landing point for fishing expeditions on the Bay. Bangladeshis don't eat much seafood, but in this area they do a lot of exporting - everything from little sharks (hammerhead and otherwise) to squid and octopus and sole. Ben got some great pictures of the boats; the smaller ones will go out for three or four days at a time and the bigger ones can spend up to a month at sea. As frequently happens, we were 'adopted' by a prestigious male in the community who took it upon himself to point out interesting sights and answer our questions. Turns out he has a few boats of his own; this is a picture of him with Karen and me next to one of them. He also took us on a tour of the ice-making facility, a government-operated ice-cube tray that produces thousands of kilos of ice at a time. The ice is frozen in huge bricks, maybe three cubic feet or so, and then they're pulverized under picks and hammers wielded by skinny young men with superhuman strength. Our presence at the harbor was something of a spectacle: we drew a crowd wherever we went and people seemed to be almost in competition to be the first to answer our questions, point something out, pose for a picture. It was a crazy, noisy, smelly place. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The rest of our stay was mostly uneventful: some shopping at the Burmese market in town, some pacing on the beach. Bangladeshi beach behavior is quite different from American and European customs. We sit on the beach. Build sandcastles. Stretch out on beach towels, bake in the sun. Read. Wear sunglasses and bathing suits. Bangladeshis pace. They don’t stake out spots on the sand; they walk in groups along the water’s edge. The kids might take a dip; sometimes the men in their lungis go out for a swim. And the women might wade, up to waist depth if they’re very daring. But swimming in a salwaar-kameez is a recipe for disaster: between the baggy salwaar pants and the enormous carpet of an orna, there’s too much fabric to make staying afloat very easy. So mostly everybody sticks to the shore. Ben and I decided that we’d like to sit on the beach, though, and so we bought an overpriced starched cotton bedsheet at one of the shops in town and spread it out on the sand and lay down with our books. We made quite a scene. At one point there was a whole group of kids standing around the perimeter of our blanket, gawking wide-eyed. I grouched at them to go away. They retreated a few steps, watched us read for about fifteen minutes more, and finally lost interest. As we were leaving the beach that day, we were mobbed by the same group of children – this time they wanted boksheesh – alms. Madam, boksheesh, saar, boksheesh, they chanted. Ben and I have gotten very used to this phrase; we hear it everywhere we go. We tried the “ignore and outpace” tactic, which tends to be generally effective. But one little guy wouldn’t be outrun; he trotted up alongside Ben and held out his hand. Boksheesh, saar, boksheesh. One hundred taka? A hundred taka. About a dollar fifty – an obscene sum for anyone to request here. Utterly outrageous. Ben and I looked at each other and started to laugh. We laughed almost all the way back to our hotel.

On our last day, I received a call from my friends the Barois (aka the Sidr Family). The eldest sister asked where we were staying in Cox’s and was delighted to hear that we were at the Sun Moon. They are my dear friends! she said. Please tell them I said hello. So I did as she asked, told the owner that Irene’s family from Nodda Bazaar in Dhaka said to send greetings. Next thing I knew, we were invited to the owner’s upstairs apartment for tea and a meal – which turned out to consist of the very cow that had been slaughtered two days before. A fitting end to our stay, we thought, and thanked them profusely for their hospitality.

The ride back to Dhaka was as miserable as the trip out had been comfortable. We got tickets on another bus line; the bus was late in departing, the seats were tiny and very uncomfortable; no lights for reading/knitting; no apparent shock absorbers on the bus chassis. We lurched into the night. The road seemed to have worsened terribly in the three days since we’d arrived; we clattered and bounced over all kinds of strange obstacles and bumps. Despite the grimy curtains hung in front of the windows for insulation and the blankets and shawls I’d heaped over myself, I was cold. My window wouldn’t close and there was a constant whistle-blast of chilly air on my face. We tried to sleep. At some point the bus stopped and a whole lot of shouting began. I gradually figured out that the driver of the bus was completely lost, and the passengers were giving him hell for it. He’d been driving through backroads from one little village to the next – that was why the road was so bumpy! It took us two hours longer than it should have just to get to the halfway point.

By the time we reached Dhaka at 6:30, we were grouchy and out of sorts. We found a ridiculously overpriced rickshaw to take us to our house, where we went directly to bed (so nice to be able to stretch out! To lie flat! Not to lurch and bump!). At 8:00 Rashida, our part-time "house help", came up and pounded on our door, asking for us to give her our trash can. I stumbled to the door and tried to explain, in very bad half-asleep Bangla, that we’d been gone for three days, we didn’t have any trash to give her, we’d been on the bus the entire night with very little sleep, could she please just let us sleep and not bother us this morning. I closed the door, scuffled back to bed. Fell asleep again. At 9:00, more pounding on the door. We stirred. I sleepwalked to the door. Tajul, the doorman, wanted to use our faucet to fill his washing bucket to wash the building’s stairs. I groaned. Told him please, not now, please ask someone else, please please please let us sleep. Closed the door in his face. Sleepwalked back to bed. Ben turned to me and started to laugh. “Merry Christmas,” he said. And I cracked up, too, and we laughed until we fell asleep again.

To The Market

Leaving the House

The Sidr Cow Saga Continues...

Well, friends and neighbors, a blog update is long overdue from this Bideshi. While Ben has been regaling you all with stories of near-death experiences in buses and video tours of our home, I’ve been studiously avoiding Blog-Land. My motivations are selfish: I have made a terrifically embarrassing discovery, and have been trying to figure out how to break it to our readers, especially our generous Sidr Cow Fund donors. In a series of deliberations, my Chief Advisor (aka Bideshi 2) and two other influential members of my cabinet have suggested that honesty is the best policy; they thought our constituents might after all find some humor in what I am about to relate. So here goes – I hope you’ll all forgive me for the inconveniences I have caused!

Early on the morning of December 28th, Ben and I take an auto-rickshaw from our neighborhood to one of the huge teeming bus stations at the edge of Dhaka. Once there we manage to find our way to the appropriate ticket counter and eventually to the appropriate bus – a typical specimen, filthy, impressively dented, its seats covered with grease-stained antimacassars and aisles littered with trash and gooey with spit. Mmmm. Then begins our four-hour lurching, careening ride from one of Dhaka’s large stations to Gopalgonj. The countryside is gorgeous outside Dhaka; everywhere there are people out working in the paddy fields, planting a new crop for summer harvest or fixing irrigation ditches with hoes and hands or crouching over a little plate of rice. In almost every field there was at least one woman pedestrian, wearing a bright-colored print sari draped over her hair, balancing a basket or sack on her head and a child on one hip. Sometimes there would be another kid running along beside her barefoot. At one little village we passed an elephant standing by the side of the road in a little open plaza among tea stalls and corrugated tin shops – I poked snoozing Ben and he looked just in time to see the tips of its ears and the top of its head, and then it vanished behind the curve of the road.

Halfway into the trip we cross the Padma river (one of the two major rivers in Bangladesh, here pronounced “Podda”). Everyone piles off the bus in an open sandy space where there are long lines of stores selling tea and crackers and tortilla-like flatbread and various fried snack foods and cokes and grapes and oranges. We wind our way out toward the river, which could be the Bay of Bengal for all we can tell; it’s so wide that we can’t see the bank on the other side. We shuffle along with the rest of the crowds and into one of a number of boats strung up along the shore. “Launches”, they are called – passenger ferries with a lower cabin and an upper deck, where you can buy hard-boiled eggs and have your shoes shined while you chug slowly across the river.

On the other side, after a 20-minute crossing to the opposite shore, we made another longish trek by foot to another bus. It was slightly less dinged up than the first had been, but its seats felt much smaller. Ben had to sit with his knees stuck out into the aisle. I wanted to find a restroom quickly before the bus started up again and asked the woman in the seat ahead of me if she knew where the women’s bathrooms were. She looked at me kind of funny and said, well, there were some in the launch. The launch? I said, disbelieving. Will there be another stop? She shook her head. How long till Baniarchor? I said. Two hours. One and a half at the very least, she said.

I crossed my legs, bit my lip, and tried to fall asleep. But with the jerking and honking and swerving of the bus, sleep was a tricky project – every fifteen minutes or so I’d stir and sit up and gaze out the dirty windows at the world rolling by. As we went further south, we passed something I’d never seen before - little clusters of homes made of bamboo frames with tarps strung over them, tent-like. People cooking over open fires rather than the clay ovens that are typical of village kitchens. Where were the huts made of corrugated iron sheets and the woven cane fences? Why was everything such a mess? Everybody seemed to have all their worldly possessions piled up outside their tent-homes. It looked like utter chaos. Gradually it dawned on me that these were temporary housing arrangements for those who’d lost their homes in the cyclone.

I started to think about our own Sidr victims, my dear friends the Barois, and their poor dead cow. I watched the scenery tipping and pitching outside my window and imagined how delighted our dear friends would be when they’d heard about the surprise we had for them. I started rehearsing in my mind how I would tell them that they would have a new cow, a good healthy cow. I was thinking about how fitting it was that the local Cedaredge 4-H club had donated to our cause, and how Ben and I would go with the family to a dairy somewhere nearby and pick out a cow – maybe even with a calf! – and how we would take lots of pictures to post on our blog, and how all of this would be such a wonderful way to bring strangers together through charity, etc. etc. And then we would pass a pond or a creek or a river and I would suddenly remember my uncomfortable bladder, and I would squeeze my eyes shut and count to three hundred and try to fall asleep.

And so the trip passed. At last we got down in Baniarchor, a dusty village on a riverbank. Koligram, our actual destination, lay just across the river. We called our friends’ mobile and were told to sit tight, they’d be there shortly to meet us. After fifteen minutes of pacing and rocking and reading and re-reading various bits of Bangla signage on the sides of buildings and cars, my friend Dolly came walking up the road to meet us with a hug and a grin. She suggested that we have tea. I begged her not to feed us any liquids and implored her instead to take us to her family’s house as soon as possible. So we went through the little village and past a series of lumber mills, down the riverbank to where another set of shallow wooden boats sat waiting for passengers, some driven by poles and oars, others by loud spluttering motors. We got into one and out again on the other side, walked up the steep reinforced bank and down the other side, then down into another little village where a brick walkway led out among more stores – shortbread cookies, dried fish, packets of chanachur-the-Bangladeshi-Chix-Mix, tea and betel; tailors shops where skinny men operated ancient treadle machines; sari shops where skinny men stretched out on curling linoleum and snoozed the warm afternoon away. On either side of the path were tidy rows of fuel for the womens’ clay stoves: hollow jute cores with cow dung neatly packed around them, neat finger-shaped ridges down each side. Lined up like a fence of oversized incense sticks. No, poop sticks, I thought to myself, and almost giggled out loud.

We wound through the village with Dolly clutching tight to my hand and calling out to almost everyone we passed as Auntie or Uncle or Cousin – her parents were both from Koligram, so a good percentage of the village is related to her in one way or another. We saw a lot of building going on – people hammering on new wood structures, replacing roofs, cutting down huge damaged tree limbs. It’s been like this for a while, Dolly said. Everyone’s still doing repairs from the storm. People really suffered during Sidr, she said, and shook her head. I thought again of our secret plan and felt like skipping. At last we came to her family’s main house, a good-sized “pukka” house, made of brick and concrete, with its tidy swept courtyard and her father’s grave all decorated for Christmas with tinsel and garlands, and chickens and chicks and ducklings and ducks all awkwardly hobbling around and squawking and lurching, and squealing kids playing cricket. And then our path curved around past a little stable, and there, to my utter amazement and dawning dismay, I saw:

A cow.

A full-grown red dairy cow.

Happily munching away at her feed.

And my first thought was, oh well, they went and bought a new one already. So I asked Dolly, did you get a new cow? And she looked puzzled. And she said, no, we've had this one for a while. It was her baby that died in the storm.

And I looked over at Ben and immediately felt just sick. Great, Jen, I'm thinking. Marvelous reporting. Why, why, why didn't it occur to me to ask whether the cow they'd lost had been their only one?!? I just assumed that when Dolly had told me "our cow died", the tragedy was self-evident - if I were on an assignment I'd be fired for sure!

I excused myself and locked myself in their restroom while I tried not to panic. What’s the problem? I thought. This is great – they’re much better off than I thought! They don’t need a cow after all, how wonderful for them! But how wretchedly, terribly awful for me, who has now collected something in the neighborhood of $460 for the cause - for now I must write to our wonderful sponsors and tell them the ridiculous truth. In short: ONE of the family’s 2 total cows died, and while they have no milk now, they've had the cow inseminated and sometime this year she'll calf and there will be more milk to sell.

Which brings me, then, to Plan B: If you have donated money to the Baroi Family Sidr Cow Fund, you are fully entitled to a refund and our profound apologies. But if you’d like the money to go to another form of Sidr relief, we suggest using the funds we’ve collected to help those left homeless by the storm. Habitat for Humanity in Bangladesh is a great organization that provides temporary shelter and permanent housing using what they call “sweat equity” and zero-interest loans. Donations and on-site build volunteers help keep the costs down. Ben and I have been in touch with their administrators and volunteer coordinators, and we’d like to be able to participate in a build later in the year. We propose using the Sidr funds for that purpose – if the two of us can get slots on a volunteer team, we’ll be able to meet and work alongside a Sidr-struck family. If we can’t get slots, we’ll still be able to donate the money we’ve collected to Habitat to help pay for materials and other building costs. What do you think? Is this a fair substitute? Perhaps it’s not quite as compelling/profound/poetic as the original story, but it’s still a way for our community at home to be involved with a community here.

So in closing, I extend to all our readers my very sincere and very embarrassed apologies for my oversights. Please forgive my zeal – I solemnly promise that my future reporting will be more thorough!

House Tour

The Rumors Are True

Whatever rumors you’ve heard about South Asian driving – they’re true. Bideshi 1 and I have now ridden several buses hither and yon across the country, and can confirm their veracity. Most have been dirty and overcrowded. People, parcels, and sometimes even livestock jam the seats and aisle. The distance from seat-back to the back of my seat is often shorter than the distance from my knees to the back of my seat.

Recently after boarding a bus, Jen clambered over a mass of people and luggage to her seat, sank down with some relief, put her feet on the floor, and stepped on a chicken. The chicken was not happy and told her so. Jen was not happy and told the owner so. The owner was sorry for the inconvenience and graciously jammed the chicken down among some packages on the other side of the bus. The chicken still wasn’t happy, but nobody much cares what a chicken thinks. So it was all good. Eventually even the chicken resigned to fate and shut up.

On most trips we’ve been seated somewhere in the mid to posterior region of the vehicle. There we can typically look out a grimy window and see the country side pitching and yawing pleasantly from side-to-side as we charge along. Always there is the sound of horns honking and engines roaring. Frequent accelerations in all directions hint that the path is strewn with obstacles that must be either avoided or overrun, but the precise nature of the obstacles has remained a mystery – until recently.

On our last journey we had the privilege of sitting in the very front-most seats of the bus, where I at least, had a clear view of the road ahead. It was very illuminating. The road was strewn with rickshaws, motorcycles, pedestrians, potholes, speed bumps, livestock, and other cars, vans, and trucks in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In places it was very narrow - sometimes less than two trucks wide. Faced with the view of so much traffic competing for the roadway I found myself wondering how we would get anywhere. But then, I realized that there is a system – that in fact there exists a well defined rule to order the flow of traffic – namely the vehicle with the most momentum and loudest horn has the right of way. All other vehicles yield in order of descending momentum and horn volume.

Slow truck ahead? No problem. Just lay on the horn, swerve into the other lane (yes the one full of oncoming traffic) and gun it. That sedan headed straight for us at sixty k? No problem. It’ll move. Rickshaws in the road? A few cows? A little courtesy toot should do. Don’t bother with the brakes, they’ll move… Things do get interesting when two vehicles of comparable momentum and horn volume find themselves barreling in opposite directions down the same lane while the other lane is occupied by a slow moving truck, three rickshaws, and a motorcycle.

Thankfully there is a system here too. In every bus there is a copilot whose job it is to ride in the leading doorway on the left side of the bus and holler warning information to the driver and to persons outside the bus. The louder the copilot yells, the more relevant his comment to the safety of the intended audience. Faced with the situation of two vehicles of comparable momentum (say our bus and another bus) careening towards each other, the copilot will yell, “Oy, rickshaw!” to the driver, then “OY OY OY!!!” with his head out the window to the rickshaw. The driver continues to lay on the horn and the gas. When he’s passed the truck (and both buses are maybe three meters from utter mutual annihilation), the driver begins his swerve back into the other lane - the rickshaws had better be gone by now! The swerve is timed so that the leading right edges of both buses pas within about two feet of each other. In the rare circumstance when the oncoming vehicle actually had to apply some brake, this distance is reduced to six inches or so.

In employing these rules for efficient motorized travel, it is important to remember a few points that may be counter intuitive to some bideshis. First, just because the vehicle is designed to be driven on the left side of the road doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself to only half the road. Oh no. Efficient travel requires the whole thing. Second, just because it isn’t paved doesn’t mean you can’t drive there. Road too narrow? Use the gravel shoulder (never mind that it’s only three feet wide and there’s a twenty foot drop to the rice paddy below). Third, remember the road signs have been put there for the amusement of those passengers wishing to engage in a little missile-hurling practice. Signs should therefore bear no relevance whatsoever to any decision made by the driver.

With these things in mind one can see that, not only is it possible to travel the congested roadways of Bangladesh, it can be a downright exciting way to spend the day!