mosquito nets, squat toilets, and bucket showers...

I've been hanging out in a small village in Tangail district for the past five days, and lots of special things happened. Two other interns- Tiffany and Lisa, our translator Russell, and I left by bus on Saturday morning. We got to the branch office, chatted with the branch manager, and met all of the people that worked at the branch office/branch managers apartment, which was above the branch office. It's really common here for there to be lots of staff working at people's houses, we had a cook and another guy working at the branch managers apartment, where we were staying. The bugs were ridiculous- we saw a ton of huge cockroaches and a bunch of other weird bugs that definitely don't exist in the U.S. I was so glad that we had mosquito nets, especially when we woke up in the morning and saw approx a million bugs hanging out on the outside of the net. It was my first experience using a squat toilet- which would have been completely fine except for the fact that I saw a huge roach crawling across the toilet "seat" when I went in to pee for the first time. 

We ate the same thing for EVERY SINGLE MEAL. Except for breakfast, which was basically white bread. Every single day, lunch and dinner was rice, some sketchy meat, dal (lentil "soup"), and some way overcooked mixed vegetables. Since I'm not trying to get sick, I avoided the meat, and thus, the only things I have eaten for the past 5 days are rice, veggies, bread, and mangos. I literally never want to eat rice again (good thing I'm living in China for 4 months). 

We spent most of our time chatting with borrowers, going to center meetings, and interviewing other people who worked for Grameen. I felt like we got most of our questions answered after being there for a few days, so we got pretty bored towards the end of our trip. Everything moves a little slower here, and since it's so hot in the middle of the day, everyone literally does nothing from about 11 to 3, so we spent a lot of time doing a lot of nothing. All of the people that we talked to were really successful, which made me feel like this trip was a long commercial for Grameen, but I probably should have been expecting that. Our interpreter didn't work for Grameen (he had just graduated from university), but he does LOVE grameen bank so it was hard to get a straight answer out of him too. 

So the electricity is pretty spare in most of rural Bangladesh, apparently the infrastructure just can't handle all of the people that want power, so the power in some villages just gets shut off for hours at a time so another village can have power. We lost power for a few hours every day, mostly at night, because that's when the demand for electricity is the highest. We struggled to entertain ourselves at night sans power, so some of our night time activities included teaching Russell, our interpreter, the electric slide, and trying to get the branch manager and Russell to do the robot while we used our flash lights as strobe lights. They loved us.

Some of our other special activities included playing cricket with some children, husking rice (which basically involved banging a bundle of rice against this barrel thing, I don't know exactly what we were accomplishing though), and singing American songs to a couple of middle-school aged girls who were skipping school to buy make up. They tried to put black lip liner on me- not a fan. Also, we went to see a woman who has a hand loom business (making sharis), and I asked her and her sister to tie one on me. It took about 20 minutes for her to tie it on- I didn't realize how difficult they were to wear! 

We tried to go to the market/bazar and walk around, but the villagers literally formed a swarm around us and made it impossible to go anywhere. Most of them had never seen foreigners- at one point, our translator told us that he heard a kid yelling "COME LOOK, FOREIGNERS!!" to another group of kids. It's really creepy to look up and realize that everyone is staring at you. When we had attracted a crowd at the train station this morning, I asked our interpreter to translate "take a picture, it will last longer," but for some reason he thought that would be inappropriate, I don't know why.

The national fruit of Bangladesh is called a jackfruit, and they grow on trees all over the place in the villages. They are unlike any other fruit that I have ever seen- they're huge and heavy but they have little spikes on them. The inside is a bunch of huge seats with this pulpy fruit stuff on the outside- we bought one at the market, and eating it was one of the strangest experienced of my life. The "fruit" is the consistency of bread dough but it sort of tastes like a banana. Lisa got really sick while we were there, and we're pretty confident that it had something to do with the jackfruit. 

Dhaka is SO overwhelming after being in the middle of nowhere for almost a week. I definitely did not miss the rank smell and pollution. We're going to the bank tomorrow to meet with our coordinators and figure out what we'll be doing with our lives for the next few weeks.

P.S. I heard that there was a cyclone here? We were completely shut off from the world. Didn't know what was up.