Shadowing Elizabeth

I am beginning this post while I sit in on Elizabeth’s weekly Bangla tutoring class.  She initially had three months of intensive language training and now has weekly one-on-one tutorials. Bangla is a derivation of Sanskrit so you can only imagine.  Having been traveling with Elizabeth for the past few days I can say that her Bengali is good enough to get her around.  She can converse, give and ask for directions, order food and – most importantly – negotiate for prices!  In many stores, items are not priced so one has to negotiate.  Vendors always give foreigners prices that are at least twice what they should be so it requires some serious haggling to get them down to a reasonable price and Elizabeth seems to be quite good at that!

Yesterday we went to a village in the Bangladesh countryside at the invitation of a woman named Maleka who Elizabeth is interviewing for her “Woman Warriors” project.  It was about a 3 hour ride – not sure the distance probably about 50 km (30 miles) but there is lots of traffic and the roads got increasingly narrow and bad the further from Dhaka that we went.  The roads to the village were lined with small three-sided structures that are shops, each with two or three men sitting.  In between these small village centers are long stretches of fields – mostly rice paddies – people do sustenance farming. All the work is done by hand with minimal assistance from some cows – no farm equipment anywhere. 

The village home of Maleka belonged to her husband’s parents. Because he was an only child, she is now responsible for maintaining this home.  It was very rustic- some electricity, no plumbing.  She lives mostly in Dhaka where she was a social worker, working primarily with women who were traumatized during the Liberation War 40 years ago.  Fortunately, she spoke quite good English so I could be involved in the conversation and understand her great stories.  She made a classic Bangladeshi lunch for us, which included rice that was harvested from a field nearby, daal, potatoes and vegetables from her garden.  Lunch was eaten with our fingers! 

Elizabeth and I are planning a trip to the beach in Thailand.  More to come on that adventure!