The Refugee Scar

(caption: jackfruit- the natural version of banana laffy-taffy)

Father Lawrence who is a lawyer happened to mention to me that he was a refugee to India when the war of liberation was going on. He told me he remembered very well when he returned home to Bangladesh, and it was a free country. There was nothing to celebrate though. The country and the people had been ravaged and raped. They had no food, and the government could not help everyone. He was only six years old, and he and his younger brother were the only ones in his family who were not bedridden with illness. Consequently, they had to find food for his mother and sisters, but there was none to be found. They resorted to eating the stalks of banana trees and any plant they could find. He mentioned his brother later in the conversation, so I know that he lived through it. I did not ask about the rest. The people of his generation are permanently scarred by starvation. The situation is very different now, but still people starve and from the sound and crack of his voice it is very apparent that this scar still aches.

Religion Smidgeon

MAY 26

We have finally settled in our new home for the next six weeks. For the last 36 hours we have constantly been on the move: visiting, greeting, celebrating, and exlporing. We left our two friends Sean and Jim at Pergacha, and we have moved into our room at Jalchatra. We will start teaching tomorrow which I know will be challenging. I am nervous, but this journal entry is dedicated to recapping the last 36 hours.

Our visit to Notre Dame College was marked by beautiful songs and dances (video posted of one of the dances) from the children at the literacy school, broken English speeches from the teachers, and a tour of the campus. We then joined the Fathers in their evening prayer. Praying with priests somehow reminded me of the exorcisms that you see in movies. When they recite a prayer they don’t just melodramatically rattle of the words or stumble aimlessly through the lines. When these priests prayed, it seemed as if they were commanding the words to rise off the page and take form. There was a certain power in their voice, a certain authority that made the prayer seem much more moving despite the actual lack of content and excessively flowery language.

Moments into the prayer, almost as if in response to heavenly declarations, the loud speaker from the mosques nearby began blaring out the evening call to prayer for the Muslim citizens. I felt my heart grow heavy like some type of gravity was pulling it all inward, crumpling my heart like a withering leaf. I felt the way you would, if you were watching two friends compete ferociously for some goal and you knew tragically that no matter what, they would really both be losing. This pain was not a pain for me, or even for a friend for that matter, but simply a pain for mankind in general. It seemed disheartening and actually ridiculous that there could exist so much dissension and so much hate between people of these two religions in the world when at that moment I was absolutely sure that we were all praying to the same God. Who cares about the means by which we do it? Spirituality is spirituality no matter what way you dress it up or what form it takes. We all worship. We all give thanks. We all seek to understand this higher Being. What does it matter what name we give it? “God is but one, known to man by many names” – Mahatma Ghandi

I coincidentally am reading the book Life of Pi about a young Hindu boy in which the author writes, “Hindus, in their capacity for love, are indeed hairless Christains, just as Muslims, in the way they see God in everything, are bearded Hindus, and Christians in their devotion to God are hat wearing Muslims.”

The problem most certainly is ignorance. People fear what they do not understand. Fear breads dissension and dissension breads hate. It’s a vicious cycle broken only by learning, learning about others and their beliefs. Taking a giant leap over that gap of knowledge and hopefully outstretching a hand from the other side so others will follow. It seems disheartening and actually ridiculous, but for now all I can do is pray as I’m sure some young boy of another religion will do somewhere else in the world. Time for sleep.

My First Night in Bangladesh

MAY 23

Ding…Scrape…Thud

Ding…Scrape…Thud

As I lay in bed on my first night in Dhaka, this curious noise seemed to echo through the walls of my room. John lay fast asleep oblivious to the noise that seemed to be slowly making its way into our domain. Half expecting someone to appear in our window, I lay terrified, silent, and still, protected only by my draping bed net which acted as my imagined cocoon of safety. It was about ten minutes before I gained the courage and/or the energy to search out the source of this perpetual scraping. As I peered out the window, I made out the silhouette of two young boys hard at work shoveling gravel with the Ding of the metal shovel the Scrape of the rocks against its surface and the Thud as they were dropped into the foundation of the apartment building being constructed. In the city of Dhaka they are always building; there is never enough room for the 15 million people that crowd the streets everyday. These young boys could be no older than twelve years old. I found out later that they work at night because it’s the only time the trucks can avoid the chaotic traffic to make it into the city and dump the gravel. My curiosity, however, lie with the reason these young boys were working. Maybe they had to help support their families. Maybe they had dropped out of school. Maybe they were enslaved economically. Maybe they were just trying to eat. There’s certainly a different set of priorities for people here.

As I arose in the morning to the songs of birds, the glimmer of the light coming up over the tops of the rugged apartment buildings, and the smell of the market fish and sewage wafting in the air, there lay the two boys snuggled next to each other under a mosquito net on the ground where they had been slaving away all night. They looked very peaceful. I was forced to realize that no child that age in America would even dream of working through the night like that. However, they lay there with their hands just barely touching, as if to show some sort of kinship to each other through it all. I would guess they were brothers, but regardless it was a touching companionship to witness. My brief glimpse into their life just made me wonder more: Where was there home? Did they have parents? Why weren’t they in school? I guess I’m really not in America anymore.

Traditional Bengali Dance

My Brief Stint with Insanity

MAY 22

I thought I should write about my brief but treacherous encounter with insanity. Yeah sure a doctor would probably say I was claustrophobic, but personally I just felt like I was going crazy. Anyways, enjoy…

As I sat on the plane in the middle seat of the 74^th row of the AirBus380 on flight EK582, it suddenly seemed that my seat was shrinking by the second. Now I’m not sure about the definition of insanity or if it still counts if you realize that your losing your mind, but all of the sudden I became very aware of the fact that I was suffering from claustrophobia. The uncomfortable-ness of my situation was heightened by an awareness of my vulnerable position stranded over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with no escape from the steel trap in which I would certainly go crazy.

Of course it was nighttime, so no one was awake and able to share in my plight. Furthermore, the soundly sleeping middle-aged man to my right was barring any possible flight to the aisle that could have alleviated my mental state. With the confines of my leather entrapment still tightening and squeezing my innards, I suddenly became conscious of how uncomfortable my left arm was. It seemed that the armrest had been built slightly too low, and if it simply had been designed a foot higher all of my troubles would be alleviated. I contortioned my body into some twenty different positions attempting to find one which could rid my arm of its uncomfortable state of being. At this point my arm had ceased to feel like a normal functioning human appendage and instead existed as a separate entity which was plaguing my body with insurmountable anguish. As my mind searched for any possible solution to my problem, it became perfectly clear that the only answer was to amputate my entire left arm. Completely aware of my insanity but unable to control it I searched for a tool to perform the impending operation. Fortunately for me and for my left arm, all sharp objects had been removed from the crazy person seat of row 74 of the AirBus380 on flight EK582. Distraught and defeated I feel into a deep slumber and did not awake again until morning to the sound of the flight attendant cart rolling by.

As the sun beamed through the small airplane window and breakfast was pushed into my lap, I could only laugh as I held up the shiny silver butter knife from the tray in front of me.