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!