The Mymensingh Road!

The Mymensingh Road!

this truck is being repaired in the middle of the road!

Part 1
Getting to Mymensingh
This is something we do regularly but something we should never take for granted. There are numerous pot holes (up to 5m in diameter) to go around.

In fact there are all sorts of things to go around, rickshaws, bikes, walkers, tempos, goats, sheep and cows... and that is just the slow stuff. Then there are the other cars, trucks and buses... lots of trucks and buses.

All of these things are also trying to get passed one another and beeping or tooting all the way! Just because something is coming towards you does not mean you cannot overtake. Just beep your horn and keep going and hopefully someone will blink first and move over a bit. Mostly this works well BUT we see a lot of accidents too.

On the way up this week we saw 3 accidents. The worst was between a truck and a big bus, which was then run into by a smaller bus. Can you see why traveling mercies takes on more meaning here!




The road outside our hotel was closed to traffic because of crowds of Eid shoppers

Part 2 Coming home
I wrote the above in our Hotel room in mymensingh. Our trip home was less eventful. Reading and taking photos are great distractor (thanks Jacquie who lends us books). There are many things to get used to about Bangldesh. It seems not to change and yet it does!
On the way home there were numerous people in 3 or 4 different work parties replairing the road... so hopefully by our next trip after Eid, there will be less pot hole to slow us down... that may mean more bus crashes to avoid however!

Road being repaired..NB broken bricks in baskets on heads. These will fill the holes!

Project visits

Project visit
Project visits.
Over the last few weeks we have visited 4 of Symbiosis' projects. We are most impressed with what we have seen and learned. Later blogs will break things down a bit more with stories etc... this is sort of background stuff!

Symbiosis works very much at the grass roots empowering the poor and marginalised especially women. Women form groups of twenty and commit to 8 months of literacy classes. These classes are 2 hours/day 6 days/week. Most women reach a literacy level equal to class 4 children in Bangladesh. This group then goes on to become a savings group. Each member sacrifices to be able to contribute the price of about a handful a rice to the group pool. Each group appoints a
chairman, secretary, and cashier from within the group. Members then borrow from the the group for small income generating purposes such as purchase of a goat or cow,establishing a small grocery stall or buying a rickshaw. This loan is repaid, with interest to the group. These groups are the basis for other environmental, social and health awareness raising activities.

We have also visited pre-schools where children are given the necessary training to be able to pass the government entrance exam so that they can access government schools.

I think our most amazing visit so far has been to the sandbar project. These are displaced communities who have no security as the sandbars on which their who lives are built could be washed away in the next flood. The homes, school etc are all demountable and are packed up then a flood is on its way. They are all then rebuilt once it has passed. The members of these groups seemed so keen to learn and do their best for their community. The government provides no infrastructure so the community have requested help from Symbiosis in setting up a school. This is a truly amazing group of people. Unfortunately their funding is not guaranteed!

We are so impressed with so much of what this organisation is doing for the people of this land! ... more to come ...

A weekend with Firoj; The heart of Bangladesh! Part 2 Family Time

PART 2 ... Saturday (30/8/08) we went on the back roads to see Kamal (whose family call him Mostofa, we discovered on the way there!) and Masuda's families. It was just amazing country side. We saw many large trees which are used in furniture making and much jute being stripped and dried, as well as lots of bananas growing. We were so glad we went this way. Our driver did a great job even though he had never been this way before. At one stage a bridge was closed and the road forded the river. He watched a bus go through carefully before we entered the water. We bought 10 pineapples enroute, all of which were given to our various hosts!

Our first stop was Firoj's our family. We had a HUGE breakfast of rice, chicken curry and beef curry (and more!) and lots of fruit... all my favourites mango, banana and anarosh (pineapple). Firoj's family have been touch by grief as he brother died in a tragic road accident in 2006. He has 2 young children and a wife who are still an important part of Firoj's family.

When we arrived at Masuda's home we were escorted by family members on a motor bike and there was a huge welcome banner!

Both sets of parents were obviously missing their children, so it was great to be able to share photos of Masuda & Kamal and us in Australia. Kamal and Masuda followed our day closely by phone so we shared it with them too. Such a special family day!

The food was just amazing and the people so caring. I was so touched. It meant a lot that we as parents were sharing this day ...
knowing our daughters were having dinner together the next day.

We ate our lunch with both fathers, Firoj and our driver.


After we had eaten we rested while everyone else ate.
They then gave me a stunningly beautiful red Salwa Kamzee with beautiful gold beading and Stephen a goldy coloured shirt. We all changed (they put on their best saris etc) and we went for a walk to visit other family members. That was great fun. We saw Masuda fathers land
f
and chatted as we walked.
I talked to Roni and Tina who are in class 9 and Masuda's nieces/cousins
I gave them greetings from my class and youth group both of whom had asked me to say hello to children I meet.

There were MANY photos taken that day (as you can see from this Blog!) and I burned a CD for each family before we left. Everything we did was watched and it seemed EVERYONE wanted to meet us or at least check us out. Masuda's family in particular wanted us to promise to look after their daughter which we said we would do. Her father took both my hands and Stephen's hands and held them together and gave us a blessing. As a woman, men do NOT touch me here even to shake hand so to have this loving old father take my hands in this way was very special. They pray for Masuda and Kamal often and we said we too prayed for them. We have been invited to return, in the true Bangla way, which we would like to do. We have a busy schedule and Firoj (our tour guide and the main English speaker in the family) is leaving for Japan very soon so we do not know if it will be possible.

Jeanette

A weekend with Firoj; The heart of Bangladesh Part 1 BAU

Friday 29/8/08 we spent touring the Bangladesh Agriculture University (BAU) in Mymensingh. It is huge! Our friends Kamal and Masuda from Adelaide have a cousin there who hosted us (and took us to meet most their family on Saturday). We went to so many different sections of the university and met so many students and heads of departments and professors all of whom offered to do anything they could to help us and many of whom fed us! It is amazing that what is expected of a university is so much more basic here. Classrooms have 1 blackboard (the lucky ones get a white board too) and desks are like we see in museums. .... but the students are strongly committed to both their studies and their university! Many international universities are collaborating with BAU which is great to see.

Steve has noticed a lack of radiator caps in place in many different places. They were not on the horticulture tractor either. "That's where you put the water!" was the reply to "Why no radiator caps?". I really enjoyed the horticulture area remembering my childhood on the orchard. I was most interested in the multi-storey horticulture too. Many of the fruits we do not have in South Australia. We both quite liked something they call a big lemon. It looked like a brownish grapefruit and tasted citrusy but sort of sweet and sour.

We had lunch in Firoj's dormitory with various friends dropping by to say hi. They were interesting and had many questions for us. I wish students at home would hang on my every word like that!

The day was (theoretically) completed with a boat ride on the Brahmaputra River and hearing a solo from a friend of Firoj's. That was amazing and restful. Who would have thought a year ago I would be cruising the Brahmaputra with my own private oarsman!

Then we went to see an "auntie". Firoj had tutored many of her children for 5 years so she was very special to him. She feed us various homemade cakes. We discovered in Bangladesh cake can be savoury!

A wonderful day,however,we never really got used to being "important guests"

Jeanette

What has Jeanette been up to?

I have been working with the two ladies who are coming to Australia to share about the work of Symbiosis. I have shown them lots of photos of both Australia and Bangladesh. Apart from the phone tower and the solar panel, which were both in Bangladesh but easily could have been Australia, they had no trouble sorting them into two groups! The differences are amazing!

On my second day they were obviously very nervous and apprehensive about all they had to learn and what they were having to face. I reassured them that I felt very much the same coming here . I said they have such beautiful hearts and a passion for Symbiosis and Bangladesh and that even if their sentences were not prefect they would get the message across. I also reassured them that slower was better so that people could understand their accents. The really imporatant things like family and faith are the same in both countries!

By day 3 of working together we were hitting the keyboard big time to get our power point written. Gratefully there is someone on staff who speaks good English, knows power point well and also know lots about what symbiosis does AND is available to help tidy up all the rough edges in the power point. His English is not prefect (whose is ?) so I will still need to do some editing.

Jeanette