bangladesh

So much has happened since I last updated that it's too overwhelming to try to catch up. I'll just start with Bangladesh, and you can refer to the team blog/ask me questions on your own if you're curious the rest of the time we spent in India. But, here are two photos I took there that I like:

We arrived in Dhaka two nights ago after spending one night in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to an overnight layover. There, we stayed far away from the bustle of the city in a hotel near the airport, where we spent the evening enjoying room service, the swimming pool and comfortable beds. I don't feel guilty about not venturing into the city because Griffin and I will spend four days there after we leave Bangladesh on the 28th, and we certainly needed to relax because for some reason, we flew four hours to KL and thenfour hours to Dhaka, instead of just cutting up through Calcutta directly.

Once we landed I was little concerned about getting my visa in the airport, but I got one without any problem for $50, much to the dismay of my teammates who paid considerably more for the service back in the states. For me though, it was relatively expensive because all I spent the whole two weeks in India was $50. We met up with someone from the Indian WaterPartners (now water.org actually, after it merged with Matt Damon's H20 Africa last week) and a representative from one of their Dhaka partner organizations, DSK, and we went to our hotel.

The traffic in Dhaka was terrible, and although we were used to the hectic driving in the country, driving in the seventh most densely populated city (according to wikitravel) was something else. Colorfully-decorated bicycle rickshaws wove in and out of traffic among pedestrians, vans like ours, cars and delapidated buses. The sidewalks were packed with people, and when we pulled up to our hotel and unloaded from the van, a crowd gathered to watch.

One sad thing was the many child beggars. Right when we first got out of our car, a few kids ran up to us and motioned that they were hungry. These kids were really persistent though. After Tarik gave them money one time, whenever we would leave the hotel they would rush up to us asking for more, even if their arms were full of half-full Coke bottles and Pringles cans they had just gotten from other tourists. One girl followed us on the street for several blocks, pulling on Tarik's hand and pleading with him in Bengali until someone shoo'ed her away for us. It's a complicated issue because it's one thing to say that you shouldn't give money to beggars, with movies like Slumdog Millionaire giving evidence of what might really be going on behind the scenes. But it's another thing to say no to a poor woman holding a skinny baby, tapping on your car window and bring her hand to her mouth to motion for food. Especially when you are staying in a hotel with a rooftop pool.

In our one full day in the city, we spent the morning visiting a slum. There, we watched a presentation from female leaders in the community about how DSK introduces their programs into slum communities. It was all in Bengali though, with sparse translation, so it was really hard for me to pay attention, especially since it was ridiculously hot and humid. Also, there were tons of children peeking into the structure we were sitting in, so that was distracting too. After the presentation we walked around the slum and saw the water connections they had built there, and I added to my already-large collection of photos of cute little kids.

Also, I may or may not have stepped in poop while we were walking around (there is no space/money/foundation to build toilets there so "open defecation" is still the way to go), but I like to tell myself that it was just mud. All I know is that after I did, the kids in our posse kept pointing at my feet and saying things in Bengali, and one ran to a nearby water pump, filled up a bucket and poured it over my feet to rinse them off. After the slum, we interviewed the man in charge of DSK and then crashed in our hotel, exhausted from the 35 degrees celsius weather.

This morning we checked out of our hotel and drove outside of the city to the headquarters of another of water.org's partners, the Village Education Resource Center (VERC). We're spending the night here tonight, and tomorrow we are going to drive 200 km (5 hours!) to the north to a region called Tanor. The electricity there isn't 100 percent all the time and we'll have bucket baths instead of showers, so I'm excited :) We are going to stay there and visit one of their completed projects until the 25th, and then we'll return to the HQ's. We'll use this as a base to visit areas where programs are ongoing, until we fly out of Dhaka on the 28th. This post is getting very long and the computer room doesn't have air conditioning, so I am going to retreat to my room now and hopefully I'll be able to post more once we're settled in the countryside!

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india update

Sorry to leave this un-updated for so long. I landed safely in Tiruchirapalli on July 4 after a few long days of traveling and we've been busy here ever since. We're staying in a small village about 1 hour away from Tiruchy at the Gramalaya training center, and it's beautiful out here!
Internet access is limited, but as a team we're updating a blog about production here. We're writing posts for each day and posting pictures on it too, so you can check that to see what I'm up to on a day-to-day basis. Right now it says I wrote all the posts but really, I just wrote the first two. There is something that I wrote along with my teammate Abbey that the SOW organizers didn't post to the blog though, so here are some not-so-p.c. observations:

Some surprising things about India:

• The hospitality of the people. The people we’ve met have been very open to sharing their stories, whether they are showing us their toilet or letting us take pictures or demonstrating the way you grind spices for cooking. We were worried about establishing relationships across the language barrier, but that hasn’t really been a problem.
• Driving on the left side of the road. This shouldn’t really be a surprise, but it does throw you off a little bit, especially when there are also goats, mopeds, ox-carts and people on the road too, and no traffic signals.
• The food. Like I said before, we were expecting to live off of the power bars we brought, but we’ve been so stuffed from every meal we haven’t even touched them. A funny story: one morning at breakfast, Palaniyandi (a Gramalaya employee who has been accompanying us) told us that the cooks were concerned that we didn’t like the food because they thought we weren’t eating enough. Since then we've tried to step it up but with three huge, carb-y meals a day we're getting I think I'll be a little rounder for the Thai beaches. Not that I'm complaining though, home-cooked south Indian food is delish.
• Hot beverages. Whenever we go to our rooms to rest, Jaya (the lady who has been helping us feel at home here) offers to bring us tea or coffee. They serve both with milk and lots of sugar, so one time we asked if we could just have black coffee. Black indeed. Gramalaya’s black is our…white. We won’t say they were wrong – it does look black. But as far as taste goes, black it is not. We soon realized that the point where they start adding sugar is the point where we Americans typically stop. At about seven tablespoons per tea cup.
• The head wiggle. Everywhere you look, people wiggle their head from side to side, and the gesture has so many meanings it can be hard to interpret. Sometimes it means yes, sometimes hello and sometimes just general agreement. For us, it looks a little like people are shaking their heads “no” the way Americans do, when really they mean the opposite. This becomes a problem more often than one would think. For example, “Are we interviewing these people at 7 a.m.?” Head wiggle. “Do you like this saree that I want to purchase?” Head wiggle.

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nearing the end

Ok, so I think my last post was way too boring and I'm sorry for making this thing too journal-y. I took a while with this one because I wanted to think of a way to make it more interesting, but I haven't been able to so here's a list of what we've been doing, instead long paragraphs:

-Micah and I went to Be'er Sheva to visit a friend who goes to the university there. It seemed like a small, suburban place and we didn't really see much of it.

-We got in our first fight while we were there... in retrospect this is hilarious because neither of us can remember why we started fighting. But we'd been together 24/7 for a long time so it was overdue. We're good now though, don't worry.

-We sat at the Be'er Sheva bus station for four hours and became experts on the place. We talked to an IDF soldier for about an hour which was super interesting. Halfway through our convo he said that he hoped we weren't spies :P

-We traveled to Ramallah to stay with Brian Phelps, a UNC alum working at the Friends School there. Another UNC grad named Vivek was also visiting the same weekend, so we had a bit of a Carolina takeover.

-Brian took us to this fancy restaurant and I got the Mexican food I'd been craving for a while, and it wasn't too bad considering I was in Palestine and very far away from Mexico.

-We went to Hebron and Bethlehem. In Hebron, one man approached us and offered to show us a view of the whole city from his roof. Luckily Brian is really good at Arabic so when we went up he could translate for us all the things the guy was saying about what it's like to live in the West Bank and so near to Jewish settlers.

-In Bethlehem we saw the church were Jesus was born, and then we ate some falafel.

-That night we went to a debka (traditional Palestinian dancing) musical with Meera, who we met earlier in the week. It was easier to understand than the last play, even though it was still all in Arabic. Also, the play was really professionally down and they had free posters and an awesome set, which was interesting because my perception of the West Bank didn't really consider the fact that there is a culture there, and in some ways it's very similar to what I'm used to.

-Also in Ramallah, I ate what Brian thinks is the best shawerma in the middle east, got a tour of the Friends School and when to a graduation party BBQ for one of Brian's students.

-I had trouble leaving Ramallah because the Indian Embassy has my passport for my visa app and all I had was a photocopy. At first they told me I couldn't go through to Jerusalem but after I asked to speak to someone in charge, they waved me through. The soldiers running the checkpoints are all either younger than me or my age.

-When we were trying to find the bus station from East Jerusalem to the central one, a cab driver tried to convince us that there was no station and that our only option was to take his cab for 35 shekels. Once we told him we knew for a fact there was a station, his friends started laughing at him and he gave us directions to it.

-We took a bus to the main station (it was soo full and we had our huge backpacks, which was hilarious to see and very inconvenient). When we got to Tel Aviv, we were supposed to meet a friend at the station but apparantly there are two bus stations and we were at the wrong one. We fought with the taxi drivers until we got a ride for 30 shekels to his apartment.

-We spent that day taking pictures of/with graffitti and going to the beach. That night we came back to Dani's music studio and crashed for free :)

-Yesterday was Micah's last day, and we took it easy. One of Dani's bands only plays covers of like Justin Timberlake and Backstreet Boys so we rocked out to them/took a billion pictures for a while. Then we walked around and found a cute cafe, and some really cheap tank tops.

-Also yesterday, we tried all day unsuccessful to find a shower but couldn't. So, we did all of Dani's dishes and washed our hair in his sink. It was really funny at the time because if you think about it, Micah was washing my hair, in a music studio, while listening to Elliot Smith, in Israel, because we couldn't find a free real shower.

-Now, Micah just left for the airport and I'm on my own until my flight leaves Wednesday night (or actually, really early Thursday morning). I'm not really looking forward to flying 12 hours and having a 15 hour layover, but I'm going to leave the airport and hang out with Ben so that's something to look forward to at least. In the meantime I get to pick up my passport today and I think I'll go back to Jerusalem tonight, so hopefully I"ll keep busy without my other half... (Read more inside ..)

the desert

Micah and I woke up in the morning after I wrote my last post, and we caught a bus out to Ein Gedi, the nature reserve she worked at for three months. She wasn't sure if she still knew anyone who worked there to stay for free, so we carried our heavy backpacks up the mountain to get beds in the dormitory they have there. It was super hot and sweaty, but after we got a little unpacked we threw on our swim suits and snuck in through the back entrance of the reserve so we wouldn't have to pay. We were planning on hiking a little bit to get to this natural pool, but before we even started she saw her Bedouin friend, Suleyman, working in the ticket booth. We made plans to go to the Dead Sea after he got off work and then we started up the hike.

Along the way, we met this kid from Florida named Dylan who was there with his three-week fellowship program. Turns out there was someone from his group named Matt who had just graduated from UNC, and I sort of recognized him from around campus. After talking for a while we realized that we both lived on the same street! There was another guy in their group who is going to work for AEPi this next year traveling around to all the chapters, and UNC is one of his assignments, so maybe I'll run into him on campus some time. We went swimming in one of the lower pools, and it had a waterfall and it was really beautiful... the perfect way to relax after being out in the sun all day.

After we got bored of that pool, Micah wanted to go up to a higher one, but someone working at the reserve told us it was too late in the day to hike up that far. So, we had to go back to the entrance and wait for Suleyman to take us to the Dead Sea. We were right across the street from it, but walking anywhere there is so hot and uncomfortable that it was definitely worth waiting for a ride. When we got there the sun was setting, and I didn't really feel like getting all the way in the water but I put my feet in and let my shoe float for a while. Later that night we hung out with Suleyman and his brother and they made Bedouin tea for us, which is basically just tea with a ton of sugar in it... delicious!

We went to bed early-ish because we wanted to wake up and watch the sun rise over the Jordanian mountains in the morning. We woke up at 5:30 and went onto the roof of one of the buildings and watched it from there, and it was super beautiful... we took a ton of pictures. After a little power nap we went to breakfast, and there Micah started talking to this guy who was staying there who was sitting at our table. She thought she knew him from somewhere and eventually she realized that she and her friend hitchhiked with him when she lived in Israel, and when he had been there on an earlier vacation. He was really cool and lives in New York and performs in this aerial show called Fuerza Bruta, so maybe next time in NY he can hook me up with free tickets to the show :)

After breakfast, we were supposed to hike to some upper falls with Suleyman, but he had to work so two of his friends went along with us. Maybe hiking with Bedouins wasn't the best idea ever because they are used to the heat and practically run up the mountain, but they kept us going at a good pace and they carried our water. We stopped at one pool along the way and went swimming there, and it felt really awesome to jump into cool water after hiking in the desert in the summer. One time, they led us off the trail and showed us some glass tea cups they had hidden. Then they busted out a portable stove, a tea pot and tea and sugar... so we drank real Bedouin tea, Bedouin style. When we got to the top of the hike, we saw where water bubbles up out of the ground, which was pretty cool... but it was cooler to swim in it.

Also, they only spoke Hebrew and Arabic, so spent the whole day having no idea what was going on. I already have a really hard time with spoken Arabic, and then Bedouin Arabic is way different and they spoke really fast. But it was kind of like a one day immersion program, and by the time we were done I felt a little more confident speaking. We left for the hike at like 9:30 and got back to the bottom around 4:30, so we were out for a really long time. When we got back to the bottom we got a free ride to the city Micah used to live in, Erad, and then we caught the bus to Be'er Sheva. Between Erad and Be'er Sheva is desert, and only Bedouins live there. So, along the way we saw lots of little groupings of houses and camels and people riding horses, and we even drove past a wedding.

When we got to Be'er Sheva, we waited at the bus station for like an hour and a half, and we entertained ourself by people-watching and doodling. I made a map of everything we've done so far, and Micah tried to recreate the coexist thing using symbols for money. For some reason, all the girls there wore really ridiculous platform shoes. Eventually her friend Eran picked us up and drove us to his house in the desert. He works as a park ranger, and he had just saved a baby bird that fell out of its nest too soon, so I held the box as we drove the bumpy road to his house. Which is in a kibbutz that looks just like Dharmaville, btw. But anyway, we got in kind of late and we were tired from running up mountains all day, so we made this chicken stir fry thing, talked for a while and then went to bed. Eran went to India for a while (like a lot of Israelis do), so he had some good advice for me about that. He also tried to feed the bird a little and give it some water, but it was probably in shock or something from being in that box while we drove on those bumpy roads.

When we woke up, the bird wasn't looking so hot and he tried to feed it some sugar water, but he didn' t think it was going to make it. We were going to go hiking again, but it's sooo hot out here that we asked him to just drop us off at the pool in a nearby kibbutz. We swam for a while until the lifeguard kicked us out so he could go on his three hour lunch break. We tried to sneak into their community dining room, but we got a lot of weird looks so we found a ride back to Eran's house and now we are here resting and trying to figure out where to go next. The bad thing is his house has no a/c, and this laptop is really hot so I'm sweating right now... gross. So I'm done writing about everything; here are some pictures:

Ein Gedi waterfall

In the Dead Sea, Jordan is on the other side

Sunrise

Bedouin desert tea

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jerusalem

We arrived in Jerusalem last night and we spent the evening in, at the house of one of Micah's family friends. We, along with one of the sons in the family made this really delicious pasta sauce involving tomatoes and yogurt and eggplant... it was an experiment and I think it turned out really well.

This morning we woke up early and went to the Old City. Before we went into the Old City though, we decided to explore a little bit outside of the walls and ended up wandering into the courtyard of an Franciscan (I think?) church. While I was taking pictures, Micah peeked inside an open door because she saw a sign for a conference called "Melville and the Mediterranean." Inside we saw a table of cookies and drinks, and we heard a speaker in the next room. Since it was in English, we went to sit in the back and listen for a while... since we had eaten their cookies and all. And when we scanned the crowd of people listening, we recognized a professor we both know from UNC, Tim Marr. After the speakers finished, we went up to him and he was really surprised to see us there. Turns out he was one of the organizers of the conference, and they had been spending the past five days discussing Herman Melville's poem Clarel, which is apparently the longest poem in the English language, and following the path he took throughout Israel as he wrote it. He took us out to lunch with some of his professor friends, and it was really random and cool :)

After that we went into the Arab part of the Old City and wanderer ed through the shops for a while. We wanted to go up on the Temple Mount to see the Dome of the Rock, but we missed the tourist hours unfortunately. But I did finally get a watch, and even tried to bargain for it in Arabic. The guy said is was 15 shekels, and I said I'd give him 10, and I think he told me that it was supposed to 20 but he was already giving me a deal... but I'm not really sure. But I did need a watch and it's Carolina blue with Superman on it, so hopefully it lasts a long time.

After that we wanted to go to the Western Wall, but we were a little lost and I didn't know how to ask what it was called in Arabic to ask for it. After getting wrong directions a few times, Micah asked a person who looked like he spoke English if knew where it was. He had no idea because he was a tourist like us, but he was with his sister (they were Polish) and two Palestinian girls. His sister had studied abroad in Haifa and was back to visit, and the two girls were showing them around. After talking for a while about the best way to get to the wall, they ended up telling us that they would just go with us and show us where it was. So, we went to the Wall and it was pretty tall, but not really what I was expecting.

After we looked at it for a while, we stuck with those four and went to go eat. The two girls go to school right in that area, so they were showing us where they like to hang out and where they go to school and teaching us Arabic phrases. After we saw their school, they took us to a theatre where a lot of their friends were hanging out. They said there was a play that night, and at first we thought we couldn't go because it was sold out, but I guess that didn't really mean anything because they let us buy tickets anyway, and went into the show. It was all in Arabic and I didn't really understand anything, but one of the girls tried to explain as things went along. From what she said, I think it was about the struggle for Palestine but I'm sure it went much deeper than that. But we were probably the only Americans in there and it was really cool to see a show that only the people who live there know about.

When the play was over, we split up from them, but not before making plans to go to a debka (sp?) dance with them on Friday. We got a little lost trying to find a bus back to the house where we're staying and we were super tired after being out walking for almost ten hours, but eventually we got back. Now we're going to bed early because tomorrow we are planning to go to Ein Gedi, which is a nature reserve where Micah used to work near the Dead Sea. It has waterfalls, so I can't wait! (Read more inside ..)

photos from tel aviv

Sunset on the beach

At a roof pool party with Micah's friend from camp and his friend

Our cheap matching soccer jerseys by a Turkish travel agency


Light painting of my name in Hebrew


The studio we stayed at... you can see me resting on our futon/bed

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tel aviv again

I've been in Tel Aviv with Micah for almost two days now, and we've been getting in to all sorts of adventures. After I met her at the airport the other day, we went to a youth hostel she used to stay at when she lived here. But once we got there, we decided it was too expensive for us and she called a friend who said we could stay at his music studio. After running around the city with our heavy backpacks, we finally found his studio and we think it used to be a bomb shelter because it's in the basement of an apartment building and the door is really thick. But it's decorated all musically, and during the day bands come here to practice and it has a really good vibe, despite the fact that it doesn't have a shower.

Today we walked around an artist market they have here every Tuesday and Friday. All these local artists set up stalls displaying their art, like jewelry or photos or whatever, and sell it there. We didn't buy anything, but I talked to one photographer who told me that he has been working with his father on a photo project about the Western Wall since 1987. They have been just going back and taking awesome pictures, and soon they are going to publish them into a book, and it's going to have a foreword by Elie Wiesel. I asked him for his business card so I could follow along his project, and he gave me one of his photos on a postcard for free :)

Then we took a bus over to Yafo because that is the Arab part of Tel Aviv and I wanted to practice. I looked around for a wooden camel for my brother, and I found one in this flea market that was made of leather and bargained the price down from 100 shekels to 30, but I didn't end up buying it because it was kind of weird. And the shopkeeper was really forceful and was blocking the doorway so I couldn't get out when I said I didn't want to buy it. But at another place Micah and I got crazy matching sunglasses, and we bought a pair as a thank-you gift for her friend for letting us stay at his studio.

After that we wanted to go find some Arabs, and we wandered into this produce shop and started talking to the owner. We ended up finding out that he lived in New York and that he speaks Hebrew and Spanish (like Micah) and Arabic (like me, sort of) and English too. He was very friendly and invited us over to his house so we can practice speaking our languages with his kids, but we had to come back to Tel Aviv because we are going to another friend's house to stay tonight. But he gave us his phone number and said that he is going to call us to see that we are doing ok, being away from home and all that, and he said if we needed anything at all we should call him and he would love to help us out. He even asked if we were doing ok with money! Micah has been in Turkey for the last five weeks and she said that there, if you talk to any shopkeeper they will invite you inside for tea and are very hospitable, so it was nice to find a similar experience here.

I also decided that I wanted to buy a soccer jersey here, and when we were walking around we found this street with all these really cheap shops with big piles of clothes outside. One had a bunch of sporting clothes and Micah and I found matching red jerseys that we think are from some high school team, but we both put them on and got a lot of attention on the street because people want to know what team we're supporting, but we have no idea. We just look cool, and it was only 30 shekels for both of them, which is around $7.50.

Right now we are packing up our stuff and saying goodbye to this alternative music studio because the next friend we are going to stay with is coming to pick us up soon. Hopefully we'll have wi fi at this next place so I can borrow Micah's laptop to post again :) (Read more inside ..)