OK. Where did I leave off? I was leaving Dhaka for Rangpur, the larger city that is about 2 hours by car from Gaibandha, where JiVitA's headquarters is. Everyone calls Gaibandha "P ace Q." It took me a long time to figure out that that meant "program headquarters."
After a 6-hour bus ride from Dhaka to Rangpur in which I was annoyed at how many times the driver honked the horn (seriously. It's every 30 seconds or more often), I landed--yes, "landed" is the correct word--in Rangpur. I wandered around until the JiVitA representative who is the "sender" for the Rangpur office found my dumbass and carted us both to the "faculty house", which is a beautiful six-story building complete with several guest rooms, a kitchen, a high-tech conference room, and a data management facility.
Maybe I should explain the concept of a "sender." Basically: it's hard to get anything accomplished in a place like Bangladesh. Richer families and companies have a person or people who are the South Asian equivalent of a porter. It's an outdated concept for the Western world, but basically, the sender's job is to do things that would be a hassle for the family members to do. While I was there, our sender went out and bought me a charger for my cell phone when I realized I'd lost mine. He also helped me to get to and from the hospital and eye doctor when I got sick. The sender can also accompany females on their sojourns into the city so they won't have to be alone. People keep saying it's not safe for women to be by themselves, but as far as I can tell, Bangladesh is a safe place when it comes to things like robbery/mugging/violent crime. (There is, of course, the systemic political violence and stuff like stalking and eve-teasing--which I will talk about later.) Going out by yourself as a woman is not really a logistical difficulty, nor is it all that dangerous; but it pushes a lot of social boundaries and can therefore be more of a hassle than it's worth.
I had a couple of days in Rangpur during which I also met the cook, Jahangir. Jahangir has to be in his mid-forties, although sometimes it's hard for me to tell how old Bangladeshi people are. He has a twenty-year-old-ish daughter, which would confirm this idea, but who knows. Jahangir (or Jahangir Bhai, as I ended up calling him--Bhai means "brother") has a fantastically thick head of hair which looks uncannily like a wig. I know it's not a wig, though, because occasionally he would get the front of it (obviously not the back) cut. He walks with a shuffling kind of limp due to being bowlegged, I assume from rickets. He has very kind eyes and a mouth full of browned and crooked teeth, and he was basically my surrogate parent while I was in Bangladesh. Every time I got sick he would try to feed me more food, which usually backfired. While I was eating, he would tell me stories about the other foreigners that had lived in the faculty house, especially Alain Bhai (my advisor). Most of the time I had absolutely no idea what he was saying. It actually got so that I would tell him stories in English, knowing he had no idea what I was saying. This kind of thing seemed to work for us. When I left, Jahangir came to tell me that he didn't know I was leaving so soon and was very sad because he wanted to cook something special for me. I felt so bad that I cried, which made Jahangir cry. He is a complete sweetheart.
Jahangir is also an inventive cook, which I really appreciated. In any given week in the US, I can eat food that has origins from Germany, Italy, Thailand, Japan, India, Mexico, you name it. In Bangladesh, the two main things you eat are rice and lentils (dhal bhat). Rice is the staple. There is no food without rice. As you can imagine, I got sick of rice.
Fish is also common, but this is fish that has just come out of the lake behind your house. As such, it is definitely fresh, but it also has a head and a spine and lots of tricky bones which are difficult to separate with your fingers. It feels weird at first, but at the end of my stay, trying to de-bone a fish with a knife and fork just seemed stupid. It's much easier to just dig in with your hands and have at it.
Anyway, I got sick of fish too. I also got sick of mutton. This comprises about 70% of what I would normally eat, which meant that after a while, I just kind of stopped eating. I reached the point where I would rather have eaten nothing than another bowl of rice. I realize how spoiled and awful this sounds and although I've said I have no shame anymore, this is actually something I am ashamed of--even though I still do feel this way. If I were to go back, and I think I would like that at some point, I would only want to go back to Dhaka. In Dhaka, you can get coffee (impossible anywhere else). You can also get cheese (also impossible anywhere else). Dhaka is teh awesome.
Woo, tangent. (Is the Katamari Damacy reference too awkward?) My point was that Jahangir, in an attempt to get me to eat (I had lost 10 pounds by the time I came home, most of it in the space of a couple weeks), started asking me what I wanted to eat. One of the foreigners working at JiVitA in Dhaka, who had lived in Rangpur before and knew Jahangir, told me that he knew how to make pizza and if I asked, he would make it for me. I didn't believe here, but finally I asked him anyway. "Pizza?" Jahangir Bhai said something like, "We'll see, I don't think there is any cheese." (I am not 100% sure of anything that Jahangir Bhai said to me the entire time I was there.)
Jahangir did his best and we ended up with a pizza that had some 2-month-old mayonnaise as a sauce, sort of globbed onto the pizza and a little bit burnt in the toaster oven. It was delicious.
And... now I'm hungry. If you'll excuse me, I think there is a bag of potato chips in the vending machine of the hostel with my name on it.
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