The idea of working on a farm as compensation for food and
lodging, while all the while getting to experience a new way of life and a new
country, has been a tantalizing one for me for quite some time. An organization
called WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) provides such
opportunities, and I've been interested in participating in it since I first
heard about it. There are seemingly hundreds of locations in India that
participate in WWOOFing, but Bangladesh sports a fledgling one or two, having
only been started 2 years ago. I've tried to engage in farming-related
activities in Bangladesh before, especially that time last year when I went off
to a random village in the West to try to help with the mango harvest. In
general though, when I as a foreigner try to do work, I'm met with huge
resistance. Guests are not supposed to work. They are to be
shuffled around in plastic chairs, kept in the shade, stuffed with food, and
shown places to photograph. You can guess that I'm not one to abide by
such a prescription. Perhaps going through an organization where the
premise was that I would actually be working would fare differently. It
was no easy task getting things set up; the organizer would respond to emails
up to a week after I had sent them, he couldn't seem to understand that I lived
in Bangladesh and therefore could not Western Union the money needed for the
registration fee (despite my repeated reminders), and I needed to make a day
long trip through the city to pay that 25 dollar fee in person. When I
was discussing with him about what could be set up, I was surprised to find out
that it was customary to pay an additional 3 dollars a day for food and such.
Maybe for a foreigner who is new to Bangladesh and who would brush off
such a fee as minimal compared to the cost of living in the West (and hey, it
would help those poor Bangladeshi farmers anyway, right?), this is no big deal.
It didn't take much time wrestling with my ethics before I decided that
if I had to pay something daily, this opportunity was not for me. Two
thousand taka for registration was enough, and I'm going to work;
ideally this work and the effort it would take would be my payment for whatever
cost my living there would incur. Plus, 3 dollars per day is actually too
much per day for food (especially because I wasn't expecting to eat meat), I
wouldn't know how that money is actually going to be spent (it could just be
hoarded by some guy), and lastly, I'm not interested
in propagating the largely false notion that Westerners have money to
freely dispose of. After explaining this to them, adding the fact that I
could simply on my own hop on a bus going to any random place and attempt to do
the same thing without all these charges, the truth started to emerge. They
had had foreigners in the past come to the farm and live like "kings"
(so he spoke), eating, touring, and soaking in the village life experience
without contributing much. Well, in that case, fine, you should have to
pay. But that was not what I was going to do. Evidently I still
needed to battle the conception that foreigners won't or can't work.
After some discussion, it was decided that I didn't have to pay and that
it wouldn't be a problem. It's funny how I would have never argued about
it if I were going to some other country I didn't know. But here in
Bangladesh, there was no major question in my mind about what I wanted to have
transpire, even if it meant going against the customs of a well-known
international organization. Because of the upcoming Eid holidays, there
was some delay in finding a host what was available, but eventually I was on my
way to some guy's village in Feni.
The fact that I could easily get a bus ticket from Dhaka did not
reflect the sheer quantity of people involved in an exodus from Dhaka to their
native village homes. This chaotic push out of the city during the Eid
holidays is notorious for being time consuming. Two years ago when I went
to Barisal, it took 4 hours by bus simply to get across the city to the docks.
The journey to Feni is usually around 3-4 hours by bus from Dhaka, but my
trip took 9, with constant traffic, many times paused bumper to bumper.
Because I got in late (maybe around 1 am), I slept at the bus station and
went to the village the next morning. I wasn't too keen on paying the
100-150 taka CNG (auto-rickshaw) ride out of Feni to the village, so I scouted
for the local CNGs that would go to a nearby area with multiple passengers.
After finding one, the guy sitting next to me was excited to hear that we
were going to the exact same area (I think he was a nephew of the owner of the
farm), and he hopped out and beckoned me to do the same so that we could split
a reserved CNG. So hard to know what to do in situations like this.
I hate CNG rides that are reserved. They are overly expensive and
unnecessary. It makes the difference between private and
public transportation. In a knee-jerk reaction to avoid giving in to
comforts offered to me (perhaps he thought it would be more suitable for a foreigner
to ride in a private one rather than a local one), I stayed put and requested
that he come back in the local CNG and wait for more people to fill it.
The driver got angry that he had jumped out trying to find a different
CNG (these local CNG drivers at this particular stop I was at were tough
cookies, later on that week I saw one of them get in a fist fight with a
passenger. I don't know what it was about, but it was the only physical
altercation that I think I've ever seen in Bangladesh). In the blink of
an eye, to spite my potential companion who had gotten out, the
driver sped off. Well, now I definitely couldn't get out even if I had
changed my mind. This was not what I had expected, and I was angry.
He must have been thinking that he can prove a point to that other guy by
leaving him behind (don't mess with me, man) and also thinking that as a
foreigner it would be no problem for me to pay a reserved fee. I
explained to him that I wanted him to collect more people because I could not
afford the private fee. He didn't respond. Fuming, I reasoned that
I simply would get out and pay the local fare of 20 taka even if he asked for
more. I craftily took out all the money in my wallet except for 32 taka.
When we reached the farm, he asked for 100. Putting on
my reprimanding teacher face, I told him that I explained that I didn't
want a private CNG and that he didn't listen. The excuse was that he
didn't understand my words. Bull shit. I emptied the contents
of my wallet for him (yes this was working out just as I had planned), and then
Sumon came (the owner of the farm), and gave him another 30 (not what I had
wanted, but whatever). All this commotion over a dollar, but I hate the
argument that it doesn't matter because it's such a small amount anyway.
It's the principle of the thing. Sumon was a hefty,
bubbly, energetic man with a gaze that could convince you his viewpoint was
completely indisputable. He must have gotten that attribute through
practice. I was going to find out that arguing for not only CNG fares but
also any other purchased product was going to be commonplace. As a matter
of fact, on one of our trips into Feni city (which took 15-20 minutes) to get
something, Sumon instigated a debate about CNG fares during Eid time that
involved every single one of the 6 members stuffed inside. Well,
excluding me, I actually can't really understand their informal language at
all. This fiery exchange lasted for the entire journey. It was all
over 5 taka. Such exchanges, although competitive in nature,
demonstrate a larger interest in debate as a subtle form of entertainment.
Many people make the claim that Bengalis debate one other all the time.
I'd agree. The tone they take with one another could instantly
ignite an uncontrollable fist fight in the US, coupled with the side effect of
permanent grudges afterward. However, after the yelling and interrupting
and commotion is through, all parties involved usually seem cordially at ease,
even amused, and even if they've "lost." During that CNG ride
when everyone was stirred up in their yelling, I chuckled as one of the
passengers who was getting off, as he handed the driver his fare, apologized
for all the discussion and very earnestly said that he hoped it didn't cause
him too much trouble. A few days later, I was buying a poster in Feni.
The shop keeper asked for thirty. Sumon rushes over to me.
"Wait, Matt, you want to buy this right?" As soon as I
nod, he throws his full attention on the shop keeper and demands in a low-tone,
very serious voice that he should ask for only 10. I knew he was giving
him his stare of intent, his stare that suggested that there was no there other
option. The shop keeper an him went back and forth a bit. I was
fine to pay 20; Sumon kept up his demand for 10. The shopkeeper actually
started giggling a little bit. I handed over something like 17 taka, and
he took it as he was smiling, as if he was enjoying this little exchange as
much as I could tell Sumon was. It's like a game, with winners and
losers. The shop keeper knew he could not contend with Sumon's brute
power. He probably even lost money through my purchase, but in the end,
it was a good time and we all walk away with a smug look on our faces.
Granted, not always is it this easy, but I've definitely got that hint
from shop keepers before...a face like "ok, ok, you can have it, no profit
for me, but hey, what's the big deal, that was fun."
Sumon's farm was not much larger than others that I've seen: an
area for rice, an area for vegetables, scattered fruit trees, a few ponds to
raise fish, and about a dozen cows. His single house had many rooms and
was concrete instead of mud, wood, and tin. I never really went in there.
I never really spoke with any of the women who were there either (there
were many visiting for Eid). I could tell right off the bat that a more
conservative separation between the genders was in place; the area where the
women would wash dishes and clothes was in the corner of the pond and sectioned
off with tin so others in the pond wouldn't see. Sumon hinted that I
probably should not go there, and I should check the area by the house to see
if there were women before going. Sumon is a playful character though;
these weren't demands, they were just recommendations, and really not even his.
You could tell it was for the women. His eyes would get big in his
explanation..."well, they'll quickly become unsettled to have a male
around they don't know." Sure enough, when I was in the vicinity,
usually the women could cover up their heads, turn, and maybe go away. So
suffice it to say, I never met his wife, but after a few days there was no
anxiety when I would go near the house to dry my clothes on the line or meet
Sumon or something, just usually silence. I stayed in a room that was
built into the "barn" for the cows, a tin/concrete structure
that housed them and their straw for food (their troughs were filled with a
mixture dominated by straw, but complimented by cut green grass and stewed
together with water and ground up mustard seeds, rice grain, and wheat grain).
I had a door that went right into where the cows stayed and even a small
window to see how they were doing. It didn't always smell the best there,
but it was mostly unnoticeable. The setup was actually really great; I
was out of their house and not bound by customs that go along with it,
especially the stifling hospitality that people usually feel the need to
inflict upon you. Instead, it was just me and the cows. And the
mosquitoes. I've never seen so many when they come out at dusk. But
I had my mosquito net, and after crawling inside with only the light from my
cell phone to see with and hearing the chirping and humming of various
jungle-like life outside, it felt just like camping. I got used to no
running water very easily. The water I'd drink came from a tube well.
The bathroom I would use was basically an outhouse, and I'd collect the
water I needed to use from the pond in two small buckets before I went.
That pond (right in front of the cow house as well as Sumon's house) was
so multipurpose. The dishes were washed there (with straw and ash), the
clothes were washed there, people would bathe there, and sometimes you'd even
toss your garbage in there too. I was against that one. Many days
I'd swim around and collect the plastic I could find, stack it up on the
concrete steps in front of the dozen or so kids that would be inevitably
watching me, and claim to them that the pond and this trash do not mix,
sometimes with more frustration, sometimes with less. Once when I did
this a kid said to me that this was Bangladesh, and this is just what we do
here (you usually get this rationale when someone in the street
is surprised to see you tick a wrapper away in your pocket instead of
tossing it onto the road). I told him that this is not Bangladesh, this
is trash, and this is a pond, and they do not belong together. Sometimes
you just cannot shake that habit though. Once, I was swimming back to the
steps with some styrofoam and was slightly enraged to see the chip bag wrapper
that I had just placed there a few moments ago floating in the water. It
had been tossed back in after having been examined by some of the kids.
"Oh my God," I said,"didn't I just explain to you that I'm
collecting this garbage so that it's taken away from the pond?! (all this was
of course in Bangla)" The tiny faces mostly just stared at me.
Perhaps some things just don't change that quickly. After I'd
collect this trash though, our problems weren't solved. The custom was to
go out away from the house and toss it amongst the trees. All that
plastic. I very intently explained that it wasn't good for their
environment, but a slightly disabling notion crept up in the back of my mind.
How does any person get rid of this plastic? Trucks haul it away
from you when you live in the city, but that doesn't mean that it all
disappears. Perhaps it would even be better for this relatively small
quantity to be absorbed into the relative vastness of this village open space
rather than collected into an ever-growing common heap. I've heard Staten
Island's is visible from space. Becoming unaware of the right course of
action, I maintained that the pond needed to be kept free from garbage, but
then it just accumulated in a tin bucket by the house, and I don't know what
they did with it after I left a week and a half later.
My first day there started with Sumon telling me that I should
just rest and watch Sunil, a hired helping hand, take care of the cows. I
was hoping that this wasn't going to turn into a battle with me insisting that
I work, but of course it's best not to jump into things too quickly.
Later that day we went to a site closer to Feni where Sumon's relative
was building an apartment building. Despite the action taking place
(shoveling brick pieces and sand for the concrete, getting water from the well
for the concrete, putting the concrete in buckets, carrying them up the steps
to the top floor, etc.) and despite my insistence that I at least do something,
I spent most of my time, right where a guest "should" be, sitting in
the shade in a plastic chair. I guess it was for the best. Even
though I tried inserting myself into their system of work, I was rather quickly
pushed out, maybe because I was too slow, or more likely because they really
did have things set up just right with the dozen-and-a-half or so workers there
such that everything was working like a well-oiled machine. And work it
did. They kept up their sweaty, grueling pace all day. That
kind of work is just what I would like to do from time to time. Really
letting off steam, that repetitive activity soothing the mind's focus, a
tangible result, worn-out muscles...just the sort of thing that teaching
English lacks. Bus alas, that was not my role for the day. My role,
to my dismay, may have actually been simply to be there as a foreigner,
boosting Sumon's credibility and reputation perhaps, and acting as a notable
taskmaster pair of eyes to keep prodding the workers on, because look, there is
a foreigner watching and you wouldn't want to disappoint him with a lack of
progress. Maybe that's just my pessimistic outlook, but whatever the
case, I eventually got into a daily routine at the farm that certainly involved
effort.
Waking up around eight-ish, I'd tie on a lungi (cloth around the
legs) and a gamcha (thin towel) on my head and accompany Sunil as we cleaned
the cow pen. This was a dirty job, to say the least. After an
entire night of urinating and defecting, the entire concrete floor was
covered in dung of various consistencies and needed to be shoveled up. In
order to get it onto the codal (a shovel with the blade at a right angle to the
wooden handle), you needed to push it onto the blade with your foot.
After your tarp-lined basket was full, you lifted it up and set it on
your head to then walk out behind the pen and trust it all forward like a
catapult onto the heaping mound. This was actually much easier than
carrying the basket below your head; it's funny you don't see anyone carrying
stuff on their head in the US. Cow dung surprisingly doesn't have much of
a smell involved (thank heavens), but this humbling first-thing-in-the-morning
activity was still one of the grossest things I've done.
Sunil would spray the floor down with water after it was clear,
and (depending on how messy I was with dung from head to foot) afterward I may
or may not take a swim in the pond. At about that time Sumon would call
me with breakfast, usually bread (a really fluffy variety from Feni that I
totally loved) or tortilla-like pancakes made from rice flower with bananas and
maybe a fried egg if I had bought them recently. Tea or milk might work
it's way in there too. Despite being on a cow farm, I only got milk a
handful of times. Milk is actually very expensive, so perhaps they
usually sold all it. When the tea was made with the cow milk, oh my, that
was a treat. It much more tasty than the usual tea you get at tea stalls
made with sweetened condensed milk and added sugar. The rest of the
morning I'd usually cut straw. This was the main name of the game for me
during my stay. Straw always needed to be cut for the cows, and it took
quite a while, so it was the perfect thing for me to do. Set up in the
corner of the pen where the straw is heaped and the warm lighting reminds me of
the inside of Will Turner's sword shop in Pirates of the Caribbean, I would
toil away for hours bunching up the straw and thrusting it forward and downward
onto the stationary vertical blade that I would keep in place with my right
foot. My lower back would grow painful if I would sit like that for too
long, and my hands would be quite weak afterward, having been squeezing the
straw bunches for so long. My right foot, on which I'd bunch up the straw
before cutting it, grew a bit raw and even bled a bit just from the sheer
volume of straw that would come across it. It was a
pretty meditative task because of it's repetition, and I found
myself drifting off into memories while I cut away. Despite the
pain it would sometimes cause, I was most comfortable doing that work and
eventually identified with that role, such that it would be my default task if
there was nothing else going on. By my second to last day, I had finished
all of the straw in the pen. That evening though, Sumon bought enough of
a straw stock to fill the pen storage area to the brim. It took Sunil and
another worker hours to move the truckloads of it from the from the home's gate
to the cow pen. They moved it by placing quantities on their heads that
were so large, straw practically the size of a mini van would shield most of
their bodies from view, so that the massive clump seemed to simply float along
above the ground. It was daunting to see the towering amount of straw
pack the pen's storage area that evening. That's ok though, it would last
for maybe 2 months, and I didn't need to cut it all. Still, I had a
staggering conceptualization of how long it would take to do so.
I would experiment with different styles of cutting it too.
Sometimes I'd twist the bundle so it was tight before I cut; I'd vary the
amount to straw too. Eventually to became proud of my technique, but
Sunil came by and claimed that I could do more. He sat down on the small
plank propped up with 4 bricks and blew me out of the water, the straw being
bunched up each time in a heap I would have not previously considered possible
and being completely cut in only 2-3 strokes, compared to my usual 4-6.
Sunil was a small man with small hands. Evidently that didn't make
a difference. He had been working for Sumon, doing cow care work
everyday, for the past 2 years, getting paid 3 dollars a day, an amount
manageable for his food, his rented room for about $8.50 a month, and some
savings he'd send to his wife and children living at their home. He
didn't like living away from his family. One day he grew very silent and
I saw him tearing up a bit. Sumon said it was because he was thinking
about how much he missed his wife and children. I ended up becoming fast
friends with Sunil. We'd work together, buy each other
tea, biscuits, and bananas during our breaks (which would come frequently
enough so that work never lasted more than about 2 unbroken hours), and
sometimes walk around the small nearby town in the evening after work was
finished. Sunil wouldn't say much, and when he would speak I truly only
grasped about 15% of it. Village language is so different. That's
ok though, he'd repeat when I'd ask him too, I'd smile and nod the rest of the
time when I didn't get it, and with tasks anyway it's best to observe.
He'd understand everything I'd say though. It was a funny sort of
communication.
I'd swim and bathe before lunchtime, which was around 2.
Bathing in public has always been something I've been envious of other
people for, because when I try it, I'm so awkward and clumsy. After a few
days though, it became quite simple, the trick is to keep yourself covered from
the waist down the lungi or towel you're wearing, even though you need to need
to use soap down in that area and even though you need to remove the lungi
you've been swimming with while you dry. As you can imagine, that
situation doesn't become any easier when you have dozens of pairs of curious
eyes, sometimes including females, staring at you the whole time. I liked
swimming in the pond. It was kindof scary having the fish nibble at me
from time to time, but it was relaxing nonetheless. After swimming and
bathing, I'd wash my shirt and lungi with the same bar of soap. I'd hang
them up to dry, and they'd only take a few hours in the beaming sunlight to be
finished. Around 1-3 or 3:30 there was a bit of a lull in the day where
all the shops would close and most people would be resting (Sunil would have
gone back to his room too). Sumon would bring my food in metal tiffin
containers, and I'd eat somewhere. The food was good, but constantly had
a backdrop flavor of shrimp or dried fish. By the way (vegetarians
beware), those fishy additions do not make a vegetable dish (in Bangladeshi
understanding) anything else than still just a vegetable dish.
I got out of the habit of eating in my room because of the
incessant ants. By the time you'd finish eating, the grains of rice you
would have dropped would already have been carried halfway across the floor.
I think there was a mouse too; one morning I was surprised to find that
one of the bananas I had hanging from the ceiling had been halfway nibbled
away. After resting/eating/reading I'd meander my way back into some form
of work when Sunil would return and we'd work for another 2 hours or so until
dusk. At that time, maybe I'd swim, maybe Sumon and his nephews and I
would sit in my mosquito-ridden room and have conversations, or maybe we'd go
wandering up and down the town road, chatting with various people.
Invitations to have tea would be ceaseless no matter how late it was.
Once at around 9 pm Sunil offered an energy drink (people basically
consider it to be tasty soda) to me so incessantly that I couldn't do
any better than compromise to drink only half. Sometimes conversations
with shopkeepers would be amusing, sometimes problematic. I never
appreciate the request for me to take someone to the US, especially if it's
asked over an over again. If someone believes that I can actually do
this, no matter how many times I claim that I can't, it just seems like I'm
being selfish and lying and I actually do possess some secret power to admit
people to the US and afford their plane tickets. Something else that
ended up inching me higher and higher up the irritability scale was
how people would sometimes communicate with a major lack of specificity.
You'd see this a lot when people would ask questions. For instance,
I could be walking down the street and someone might shout "Where!"
in my direction. This might be the basis for several different possible
questions I can think of, including "Where are you from?" "Where
are you going?" and "Where have you been?" Although I
usually don't respond to people to shout in my direction (like that one old man
who would shout "Bangla!" at me whenever I'd pass him...I never
really figured out what he was trying to say), even if I were to respond, do
you expect me to take a guess as to what you're asking, or shall I try to
figure it out by asking you back another? A similar situation I remember
when I was coming out of the cow pen and Sumon scurried up to me and said
"vegetables!" Are you asking for my opinion, or perhaps voicing
the lunch menu? Usually I'd just take the snooty teacher route and in
such cases reply with "well, what's you're question?"
Oh, and another thing, I hate it when kids scramble around me and shout
"what's your name?!" and "how are you?!" or even mimic the
entire possible exchange by saying "Hello, what's your name? how are you?
I'm fine!" in one long memorized string. Does this aversion make me
a bad foreigner, or perhaps a bad English teacher? I'm annoyed because
they'll say it over and over and over again, and even if I reply, they'll keep
asking, as if they like the sound of their own voices. Much of the time,
if you try to respond to their calls by engaging them in an actual
conversation, not in English, in Bangla, they'll simply remain silent.
Then maybe I'll be like "why did you ask me these questions if you
don't want to talk with me?" Then more silence and then I'll bubble
on the inside and stomp away in an air of frustration. I remember once
being mortified when many many years ago I tried to practice my beginning
Spanish with a Spanish speaker by asking a question and
not understanding their response. I hope I wasn't doing the
same to them when I would make such pleasantries so tense and critical.
Needless to say, my patience did wear thin due to all these things, and
although it's fun to be able to actually speak in Bangla, this next hurdle of
remaining level-headed is an even more difficult one than learning to speak in
the first place.
It was Eid during my time in the village. I don't like Eid.
It combines my least favorite parts of both Thanksgiving and Christmas by
being focused on slaughtering cows and buying lots of gifts (especially
clothing) for family members (well we eat turkey, not beef, but you get the
idea). Perhaps I shouldn't be so critical, but I'm not fond of mass
killings and I'm not fond of focusing on purchases, as if buying things really
is the key to a happy occasion. Consumption is what this holiday is all
about. Well, and family gathering and time off to relax too. The
Hindus also had their Durga Puja during about the same time. Colorful
displays of long-haired gods were set up in bamboo-propped scenery. It
didn't take long for me to lose interest as the whole crowd of people
stood mesmerized watching the children dance around in circles in front of
the scenery to energetic bell jingles and drum beats. The incense brought
back memories though, and the massively intense use of way more than enough
lasers to amplify the experience was wowing. In general I try to stay
away from religious events, mainly because it's another perfect opportunity for
Bangladeshis to try to service my experience in an attempt to give me the time
of my life. I'd rather just watch than be the center of attention.
It's funny for me to notice all these complaints come up. I never
had so many when I first started traveling. Perhaps this is what it means
to be jaded. So for Eid we ended up buying a cow from the market place in
Feni. Forty-five thousand taka: $540. Those cow bazars crop up
everywhere, even in the roads, and congest things even more than the worst
traffic jams. We had to walk that cow back to the house, which took
several hours. The whole time on the way back, people who would notice us
in shops and stuff would shout "how much??" intent on finding out how
much we paid. This sort of behavior is excitedly rampant during the cow
commerce at Eid, but in general is rather ever-present, as most any random
Bangladeshi who you might be speaking with will likely not only be interested
in what you've bought, but how much you've paid for it. I think it's
along the same sort of lines that I talked about before when we think of buying
things as a game. How low can you go? I remember walking back to my
house with a jackfruit in my hands last summer. Every two minutes,
another person in the street would inquire its price. Whatever the
reason, it's surely a good way to keep up to speed on the season's prices as
they fluctuate. So we bought a cow and also sold a cow at another bazaar.
We waited there the better part of the day, and our asking price of
60,000 taka eventually was reduced to a comparatively meager 36,000. Most
of that time I would go just out of the bazaar to where I could collect green
grass for our one to eat. A last meal sort of thing. When you gaze
upon the vastness of a cow bazaar, you can get a grip on just how many animals
are going to be killed for this event. There must have been thousands,
just in that small town. I wondered what others thought about when the
cows tried to fornicate, which happened waaaay much more than I expected.
Well, I hadn't expected it at all; they are all males. You could
visibly see the exchange take place, one cow moving its rear in the face of
another, the second jumping on the first, both appearing visibly frustrated and
upset when they were shouted at, whipped with sticks or rope, and forced apart.
What would a Muslim think of such behavior occurring in the wild? I
hadn't thought about that one before. It seemed that for the most part
they would laugh it off. The cow bazaar day ended up being a good one;
we'd get tea every so often, we'd all chat as we waited for another prospective
buyer to stop by, I'd argue with the children as to whether or not a cow would
drink tea, I'd meander off and pick grass, the late afternoon sun through the trees
and leaves and straw on the ground reminded me of fall, almost as if we were at
a pumpkin patch. Sunil and I walked back as night fell. I'd ask
what the lightening bugs were called and he'd go off on some monologue about
something I couldn't understand, but I could tell it was something positive, so
I agreed and smiled and giggled, then he'd talk more. Then I'd ask about
the fog, and the same thing would happen. I loved the fog, cooling
everything way down, and dissolving the far-reaching rice paddies into white in
the distance. Maybe by the time we reached home we also talked about the
moon cycles, what we eat for lunch, his room rent, and my thoughts about
Halloween.
For Eid day itself, I was not at 100%. In defiance, I decided to
fast the whole day and hastily mentioned my dislike of animal slaughter
(especially halal slaughter where the animal's neck is slicked open and left to
bleed to death rather than killed outright by beheading) to anyone that came up
to me and brought up the holiday. As I was cutting straw that morning, I
couldn't figure out whether or not to watch the slaughter take place.
Maybe if I were the cow, I would want another to witness my pain.
Then again, if the others saw me watching, they might think I was enjoying
myself and supporting the event like they were. Sunil, a Hindu, wasn't
going to watch, so I wasn't either. We went to a tea stall and waited it
out. Everyone in the area started the morning with a massive prayer at
the mosque, then proceeded in their killing at around 9-10 am. As we were
off to get tea, I glimpsed a victim through the trees. It was on its side
in a pool of blood and an alien gasping sound struggled out of the gash in its
neck. I hated this. At the tea stall, I was visibly downtrodden as
well as angry, and I didn't really recover for the next day and a half or two.
This was not my comfort zone. Despite how many cows were killed,
the morning was relatively silent, and you couldn't
hear desperate mooing or struggle. Sumon brought me lunch (vegetables)
but I said I wouldn't eat. He continued to badger me about it until I
said that I was fasting. His eyes widened. "Ooooh, wow...good
for you!!" He put his hands together in praise. Fasting during
Ramadan is a key component of Islam, and the fact that I was fasting then was
therefore an act of piousness instead of defiance. With great interest,
he took my food away and asked me lots of questions about whether or not I was
drinking water or tea, whether or not I could eat paan leaf and betel nut for
energy, and when I would break the fast. By that evening, everyone in the
area seemed to be aware that I was fasting, even the kids at the pond.
The next morning, he and the nephews anxiously awaited 10 am when I would
eat again. They had bought me a new jar orange jam, which they referred
to as orange gel. A nephew actually tried to give it to me the night
before through my window. I think they're used to breaking fasts with
something sweet, maybe for energy. I didn't have any; I didn't want to
attract ants, I had nothing to eat it with, I wasn't really interested in the
first place, and hey, my waywardly defiant mood was still as strong as it gets.
Whenever Sumon would offer to treat me to tea or say that food was ready,
if I was cutting straw, I'd say that I'd come later. Once, he had cut up
a jambura fruit from a tree for me and Sunil to share. Jambura is very
similar to grapefruit, but it's a bit bigger. It took him several beckons
before I finally relented and stepped out of the cow pen. In my mind, I
remember the storm of negativity..."I don't even like this fruit, and how
do you expect me to eat an entire half...an entire half is huge...I'm
so tired of following along with your misguided thoughts about what I would
like.." (This would be a good time to reaffirm that although my
experience in Bangladesh has brought beautiful things to me, it has indeed also
brought out my worst sides.) Those fumes clouding my mentality slackened
after a few bites. I ate the whole half, as well as a portion of Sunil's.
I remember becoming captivated by the fruit, its refreshing crisp taste
(especially after having been working with the dry straw, it's appealing
vibrant pink shades of color. Looking up from my sticky fingers, I
realized that that was one of the most comforting culinary experiences I've had
in a long time. I stood for a moment, puzzled. Why had I been so
pessimistic about this fruit? For the rest of my stay, I'd be slyly
hinting at people that I'd love it if they could cut me up a jambura to eat.
Interestingly, they wouldn't consider jambura a possibility to eat during
the late afternoon and evening, so I'd ask in the late morning. Once, I
felt so tempted to get another fix of jambura, that I went about picking one of
my own from a tree. I asked Sunil where I might find one in arm's reach,
and he pointed to one that was hanging out a bit over the pond. Licking
my lips, I climbed a bit up the tree, held on with one hand, and dangled most
of my body out over the pond to just barely reach a jambura, wrap my hand
around it, and pluck it from its stem like a monkey. Sunil and I started
cutting it with a grass knife when Sumon hurriedly came over and said
something both urgent and reprimanding to Sunil. I asked what the
matter was, and Sumon turned to me with that intent gaze, his eyes wide.
"That is grandmother's jambura tree, and grandmother is crazy.
She has a very bad temper, and she will be very, very angry."
The part of me that was like "Oh, pleease, it's just a fruit"
was much louder than the part that repented "What have we done?!
What will grandmother do now that we have picked her precious grapefruit
without permission??" Sumon started glancing around, saying that he
would come up with a story that might get us out of trouble. Grandmother
must have been very, very hot-headed. I think our alibi was that it fell
off the tree of it's own will and we fished it out of the water and I
unknowingly ate it instead of giving it to grandmother. I don't think
anything actually came of it though. Grandmother stayed in the house.
She wouldn't have known that one of her forbidden fruit was picked from
her tree.
Christine was fond of jambura too. She was another American
staying there with me also through the WWOOFing program. She was supposed
to have gotten there about when I did, but poor organization on the part of the
office in Dhaka had rendered her a few days late. I had just had a
conversation with Sumon a day or two before she came about how even though so
many people suspect that a foreigner will not be able to tolerate the food in
Bangladesh because of its spice, lack of palatability is just as likely, if not
more likely, to be caused by the high amount of oil they use when they cook.
I've heard that complaint from my friends at least as much as anything
having to do with spice. Bangladeshi food actually is not that spicy.
You know that presupposition that I as a Westerner cannot tolerate spice
really grinds my gears. There is a subtle implication of
weakness involved. It is very different for someone (perhaps a
Bangladeshi) to go somewhere else (say the West) and dislike the food because
it's bland and boring than for someone (say a Westerner) to go to a place
(Bangladesh) and dislike the food there because it gives them pain. In
public, I try to eat green chilies very visibly with my food if I'm in the mood
to counter this idea. In any case, it's confusing why no Bangladeshi has
brought up this difference of oil content when so many of my western friends
have. I don't know if Sumon really understood or not, but lo and behold,
Christine shows up, and when I offer her a fried doughnut
hole-like morsel from the tea stall, she declines because there is
too much oil involved. HA! She said that once she threw up in
Romania because they were cooking with too much oil. I was eager to share
this news with Sumon to prove my point. Christine is a very interesting
women. Having semi-retired from the restaurant business (at an age
between my mother and grandmother's), she has traveled the world WWOOFing and
offering service/aid in various countries. She told me stories about how
she was aiding disaster relief in Thailand after the tsunami came. She
also told me about how she had been farming in places like Nepal and throughout
Europe. It was so comforting to have a character like her in the midst of
the village, another who was just as intent on working as I was and someone to
bounce ideas off of about our experiences. She stayed in the house
because she was a woman. She told me I was lucky to be living out of the
house; so many people would come into her room and look through her things and
such, that sort of experience service and lack of privacy that I was so
familiar with. They probably expected certain things about her that
weren't true too; she had told me when she first came that she was afraid they
wouldn't give her any actual work to do because she was a woman, and she didn't
want to have all this way just to look after small children or cook. I
told one of the nephews about how we need to figure out what work she can do,
and he said rather matter-of-factly, "Oh, don't worry, there's a baby in
the house." I chuckled..."That is exactly what she does NOT
want to be responsible for!" They soon got the point and told her
she could to weed if she wanted. After I left I'm sure she took up straw
cutting. Maybe she'll also get to do odd jobs like I had gotten to do
too, like going with Sunil to cut grass with a knife in the rice paddy for the
cows or moving wood around so it can dry in the sunlight.
Christine may have claimed that it was better for me to be out
with the cows, but that environment did have it's downsides. One night,
Sunil had separated one of the mothers from her calf so it wouldn't drink all
her milk and we could get some the next day. Not a good idea. When
she wants to nurse, you know it. The mooing. The mooing. She
does that too during the day when her calf is outside and she wants to nurse.
The mooing was actually incredibly loud, especially when you're that
close to it. It's as annoying as a baby's incessant cry, something that
tells you that you have to do something to fix this
situation now. It was about 11:30 pm. I hollered at her
to stop a few times, and she'd quiet down a little, but the start right back up
again. I was curled up in my clean bed and the last thing I wanted to do
was fully wake up, open my carefully-tucked mosquito net, and go stomping
around in cow dung to try to fix the situation. My hopes were irrelevant,
and my hollering eventually did nothing to calm her down. The mooing grew
in volume and frequency until I blew up in a frenzy, hastily exploded out of
bed, threw on my sandals, and stampeded into the cow pen, practically falling
on my face from slipping and sliding around in shit. I spotted her in the
far corner with my cell phone light and charged over there. Her mooing
continued. Falling over myself, I reached her, wound up, and in boiling
frustration smacked her on the bottom part of her back as hard as I could.
I had seen Sunil do that (less fervently of course) when he wanted them
to get out of the way or stop misbehaving or something. My hand stung.
Seemingly prompted to amplify her proclamations of disease, her
mooing grew even louder. Freaking out, I fumed over to the tin that was
tied up to separate the two of them and clawed at the rope that was propping it
up until it moved enough for the calf to get through. Once that was
finished, so was the mooing. She may have not given as much milk the next
day, but at least I got to sleep after that. It took me a number of
minutes to cool myself down after that. Trigger-happy vehicle drivers on
the roads of Dhaka, beware. You see what happens. If you shove loud
noises into my space with your horn-blowing, you run the risk of me attacking
you. Do not suffer from the same fate that Betsy did.
In another more positive but equally unconventional instance,
Sunil shows up at my door around midnight and asks to be let in to see the
cows. He turns to me and says that one of them will give birth tonight
and asks if there is enough space on my bed for two people so he could be here
when she delivers. How he knew was beyond me. I figured we would
have heard signs of the mothers discomfort before the delivery, but nope, just
some grunting and a wet thud as the calf spilled out at about 4 am. The
mother continued to grunt as she licked her new-born. By the light of
cell phone, Sunil initiated the calf by pinching off the soft bottoms of his
hoofs so he'd be able to stand, tying some straw around his head and through
his mouth (I asked him about this and I think he said that the calf needed to
get the taste of straw or something), and blowing in his ears (I guess to clear
them out). Within about 2 hours, the calf was able to stand a bit and
stumbling around. Sunil had to work pretty hard to get it to nurse, but
by the next day it was no issue. I was surprised at how painless and
quick the whole process was. Suddenly the next day, there you go, a new
cow. The mother's placenta fell out the next morning in a heap on the
floor. She started eating it, and I was totally unaware of what to do, so
I sort of turned a blind eye. After a few moments, Sunil noticed and
rushed over to her, hollering. He took it away and scooped it up in the
poop basket. The bloody gooey mess filled most of it. I wondered
what he'd do with it. I guess I was expecting something a bit more unique
(I don't know, stem cell research, make a shampoo, something) than burying it in
the mound of dung behind the pen, but hey, he's the expert.
So, with a sore but satisfied body, I return to Dhaka.
Perhaps I'll go back when it's rice harvesting time. No matter how
busy I would be with harvesting rice, and even if it's just for a weekend, I'm sure
I'd find a few moments to at least relive the familiar straw cutting, a
refreshing pond swim, and another relaxing evening walk through the winding
moonlit foggy path to the town where I will practice yet again in conversation
with others the virtue of patience. Skills like that take time and
effort, at least as much devotion as cows require.
How did
they know what to do? How does this happen? How can I build a
precision-labyrinth of so many steps from across the world? As
questions flew around in my head, I reached the end of the line.
There they were, the madras shorts. One pair, another, and another,
every few seconds. I stared at the pair hung up to label the work
being done on that line. Other people would see at that pair. Not
the Bangladeshi consumer. I've never seen anything like that here.
But how is that possible? There are so many here! Such production,
but no sales. The chief export, number two in the world (right after
China), such a massive industry, but they will go right into boxes.
Quality-checked and neatly organized, sterile-style tightly packed
boxes will leave the factory fortress, be carried on those exclusive
'emergency export' trucks to the Chittagong port - an elusive and
strictly forbidden area. Some ship will carry these across the
world's oceans, contact with no one. Somehow then the next eyes that
see them belong to a child enjoying a soft pretzel, a group of
slightly hung-over teenagers who don't have anything better to do on
a weekend than browse through a mall, a soccer mom eyeing another
item on a birthday list. The 'Made in Bangladesh' print on the tag,
however, doesn't get much attention, a distracted glance at best,
promptly disregarded by the accustomed habit of seeing that every
item for sale is made in some foreign country. Doesn't really matter. Is this
on sale today? …
