Kids understand parents

Our life is small in many ways - it mostly consists of getting food and learning Bangla.  We live in a rented apartment with a minimum of furniture, have no car and no bicycle.  Our days are simple and - at least until the kids get home - fairly quiet after walking home from class & the bazaar.  Each day also contains little pleasures - one of our chief ones is making coffee.  You can get very good coffee in Dhaka now.

Tonight, the kids were, well, being kids.   It was a bit noisy.

Exasperated, I said, "Pipe down!  It's dinner time, I need you to be quiet for a bit.  Act like grown-ups: be boring!"

I almost fell off my chair laughing when Jack grabbed his mug, and, in a monotone said, "Boy, I...sure...love....coffee...."

Only 300 Taka, for all three!

This is a pet store (it's also our balcony). Under the stool on the left is a cat and, I believe, two dogs.  The dokan owner offered them to sale for me for 300 Taka.  I opted for the Asian elephant with the pink hood - also 300Taka.

Take 2

I wrote about this once in 2011, so forgive the repetition but it is a little different this time.  In 2011 I'd never been this far from home nor for this long, and had never been homesick before.  I didn't recognize what was going on initially, then.  Even so, I knew I'd be back home soon, so I experienced it mostly as a sense of wrongness: the trees were wrong, the dappled sunlight wasn't quite the right angle, the background sounds weren't quite right, the temperature was above 2°F.

This time, I've been aware of it simmering in the background for quite a while.  Emotions have been running right next to the surface.  Generally easily kept at bay by 'counting the cost' or reflecting on vocation or just plain keeping busy ("What was that verb tense?  Do we need more cauliflower?").  But like most times when you keep busy to avoid thinking about something, it's not dealt with.  Today I was caught unexpectedly by tears after an email about the passing of a friend's mother.  I then let myself think about missing my family, my friends, folks I worked alongside.

Our kids on the the other hand don't seem to avoid it.  They are happy, excited about the new things, thinking about their new friends, school events, exams or learning cricket, but they are also absolutely aware.
This morning Jack was helping Annie get up to get ready for school.

AE: "I miss my best friend"  (Jonathan)

JT: "Yeah.  I know.  I miss my best friend too.  But at least we have each other."

And, as is so often the case, I learn from my children, rather than the other way 'round.

A few favorite words

My current three favorite words in Bangla sound like English ones:

হব Hobo - "I will become"

চিকন Chicken - "slim"

মিন্তি Minty - "porter"









Now a brief edition of "overheard in the Herman family" (things we never expected to say in our life)

walking along to road to language class
Laura: Help me remember these three things to ask our teacher...
Ben: What was that?  I almost fell in the sewer.  I missed it.


Misspeaking in Bangla - with a very subtle difference in intonation:
এখাবার মজা!  "This meal is tasty!"
এখাবার মোজা!  "This meal is socks!"



We were taught to expect to make about 1,000 mistakes a day while learning the language.  You have to get up up pretty early to get them all in, so we start early.  Honestly, though, you feel like a three-year-old much of the day.  It's a major success to both understand, "It's cloudy today and yesterday was very cold." and say, "This meal is socks!"

Daddy Brand Toys

A new farmyard playset.

note the duck swimming in the well

Also known as recycling our cardboard boxes.

It has been explained that the sheep prefers living in the hayloft

In a future post I'll show Bangladeshi recycling.

Flexibility

Completely unrelated neat picture

We were told during part of our training for this that our middle names would need to be changed to 'flexibility'.

Our visa in Bangladesh, although good for a year when it was issued, required that we leave the country every 90 days.  Interesting.  We're not sure why it's that way, but it is, for now.  It's been three months, so we are now briefly out of the country but now must extend our time here for an additional two days, unexpectedly.  It's good practice!

Murgi

Hungry?  Thinking about what to make for dinner?

Just wait an hour or so and listen for a voice down in the street crying, "Murgi! Murgi! Muuuuuuuurgiiiii!"

Then head down to the street...

The Xray that should never be.

I will keep medical posts to a minimum, but this one was worthy of relating.

One of our responsibilities in the hospital is to read X-rays ordered by the MAs.  This one caused us to run out of the office to try and locate the patient.

Some of the findings are easier to see: at the bottom of the patients left lung, the diaphragm appears flattened out, the left lung field appears larger than the right and I'll tell you the heart is shifted to right as well.  It's being pushed to the right by what's going on in the left half of the chest - a tension pneumothorax.  What this quality of image can't show is the fine line in the left lung field that shows the left lung has 'popped'.  What makes this different from a plain pneumothorax is that the hole in the lung is acting as a one-way valve, slowly pressurizing the left half of the chest.  Initially this pressure just pushes things to one side, but eventually the pressure can build to where blood return to chest (and heart!) is diminished... then it becomes very quickly life threatening as the blood pressure drops.  This should be picked up clinically - you should never makes this diagnosis on an X-ray.  This Xray should never be.

We couldn't find the patient.  He was out getting lunch!  So he couldn't be that sick.  After lunch he turned up to find out the results of his X-ray and was shuttled into the emergency hallway.  Though quite short of breath, his blood pressure was not yet low, so it hadn't progressed far enough to be immediately life threatening.  We placed a chest tube (the very tip of which can be seen on the edge of the X-ray below) which permitted the left side to decompress.  Over three days he improved and we removed the tube.  You can see the diaphragm is less flattened and the heart has shifted back its accustomed position.  He went home very happy.

Ants in the yeast

Tk30.00 is about $0.40 - this makes 2 loaves

As a family with four growing kids, we go through about a loaf of bread a day.  So we blasted through the little bit of yeast we brought with us and are now trying out local and imported brands to see which works best.  The best live yeast seems to be this local brand, but it came with a bonus feature: ants!  There were dead ants in it when we opened it - easily picked out.  It reminded me of a story one of our friends told of living here:

  He was being visited by someone from the US who purchased a sleeve of crackers.  Upon opening the sleeve he found ants!  He took it back to the shop where he purchased the crackers and spoke to the shopkeeper: 

Indignant "There are ANTS in these crackers!"

Puzzled    "Of course there are, there are ants in all the crackers!"

Speck

Smog over Lake Banani

The rails rattle under the floor and cigarette smoke swirls - we're on a train heading North through the fog: our first time traveling with no one to hold our hand.  The hospital will be short-staffed over the next week or so, so I'll be taking call and rounding.

For now though, while we study, we stay in Dhaka.  I've been mostly writing about interesting differences and beautiful things here but, believe me, I could tell you about the lack of infrastructure, the grit and dust, the open sewers, the trash, and the dead rat I stepped on.  But I won't say too much about them.  Especially about the rat.


There are days when I feel quite small.  There are more than 14 million people in Dhaka and from a rooftop, if you sit and look for a while, the density begins to press on you.  So many people.  So I mostly think about the small details of our small life.

I haven't written (yet) much about the poverty everywhere, but it is everywhere.  In every neighborhood sidewalks have families lined up living under tarps.  From the beggars outside the bazar to the whole family that lives on our street corner, you are surrounded by it.  It threatens to overwhelm you - what can one person do against this tide? I can end up ignoring beggar after beggar out of a felt need to just keep my head above water.

Disease follows poverty, and what can I do against that flood?  Very little, in truth.

But while my human nature wants to be significant, to be somebody, I'm just one person.  OK, so we are six people, but we're still just specks.  It's not a bad perspective to keep.  I am just a speck.  Speck. Speck. Speck. This small speck will do its speck best to affect the specks around it.