Hospitality, music and tea fields

Aside from the bloodshed of Eid, I've had a lovely week here in Bangladesh. Somehow, a lovely week for me tends to be associated with a trip outside of Dhaka, and indeed I got out of Dhaka twice last week!

On Monday I travelled to Kushtia with Nahid, the other local Gender Consultant who is working with me. We were there to interview the Pourashava (Municipal Government) about their experiences with the gender components of the project that we will be carrying out in other Pourashavas. Don't worry, I won't bore you with all the details.

Being a guest of a Pourashava is quite an experience. I found the idea that I have been considered a guest on all my Pourashava visits quite ridiculous to begin with. After all, I was the one who had asked to come and take up people's time asking all sorts of annoying questions about gender, essentially so I could then be critical of their progress. But in Bangladesh, hospitality reigns supreme, and even a pest like me is treated as a guest.

In most places, this might mean you are offered a cup of coffee, or taken on a tour of the Municipal offices. Not here. Here, they turn the town fountain on for you. That's right. When I first visited Narayanganj Pourashava, I approached from the main road with a colleague who explained to me, without any hint of incredulity in his voice, that the fountain I was looking at (the only one in the whole town) normally never runs and that my visit was the reason it had been turned on. Obviously no one there understood how unimportant I am!

In Tongi Pourashava, after a long meeting with the Mayor, who served us the required tea, water, fruit, singara (like a samosa, kind of) and biscuits, my colleague explained to me that we should try to finish our interviews as quickly as possible because, as guests of the Pourashava, the Mayor was not able to leave to attend to other business as long as we were there. I tried my best to get through the interviews as quickly as possible, but a large delay was forced upon us when the Female Ward Councilor and the Pourashava CEO insisted on driving to the next town to take us to lunch at its best Bengali-Chinese-Thai (a popular combo here...) restaurant.

In Kushtia, everyone including the Mayor was extremely welcoming and generous with their time. One Female Ward Councilor in particular put up with 2 hours of interview, then accompanied us to a slum at 7pm where we interviewed their Community Development Committee, and then took us to Kushtia's top tourist destination: a shrine to the Bengali poet and philosopher Lalon Shah. Lalon heavily influenced the culture and music of bauls, "a spiritual sect of musical minstrels" who in turn heavily influenced the work of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

In celebration of the music of Lalon and the bauls that followed him, a group of musicians hangs around the shrine, ready to perform concerts for visitors. A row of chairs was set up for us in front of a mat where 10-12 musicians sat with a variety of instruments: a one stringed ektara, a violin, a bamboo flute, a set of tablas, a tambourine and a harmonium. But the most beautiful instruments of all were the extraordinary voices that sang to us. Each performance -

first two young girls, then two older men, then a young man with a voice that filled the sky - was incredibly emotive, and the notes reached a place far deeper than my inner ear.

The next day, after arguing with the Mayor about who should pay our hotel bill (we won, but not without a fight), we headed back to Dhaka, stopping on the way to visit Kuthibari, one of Tagore's homes where he penned some of his greatest masterpieces. Like any Bangladeshi museum, it was a bit run down. But I enjoyed pouring over the incredible old photographs of Tagore with other great thinkers like Einstein (Einestine) and Gandhi. If only photographs could speak...

We took a stroll around the nearby pukur (pond) and tasted one of the local specialities: kolfi. Essentially, kolfi is the Bangladeshi version of ice cream. The kolfi-wallah brought his large metal tub down from atop his head and served us 'special' kolfi on banana leaves. I'd had it before, but never had it been so delicious! I had seconds before we got back on the road and returned to dodging the canopied rickshaw vans special to that area.

It's harvest time, and again Bangladesh is being shorn down to its soft brown stubble and the rice hay being laid out to dry covers the roads. Men jog through rice fields and along highways under the weight of two huge sheafs of rice on either end of a bamboo pole. If you get close enough you can hear the special swishing sound that it makes as they go by.

Last weekend, I travelled to Srimangal for the second time. Famous for its tea plantations

, Srimangal is one of Bangladesh's only real tourist destinations. And even at that, it only has one 'resort' that appears to have had its last renovation in the 1970s. Regardless, the bungalows at the Tea Board Estate are roomy and feature lovely verandas looking out onto, well, nothing. Just lush greenery, a heavenly luxury for most of us who live in Dhaka. I was tempted to sit around and stare at the nothingness all day, but I wasn't there to rest, I was there to bike. My Saturday biking group had organized this weekend so that we could explore the area on wheels and the trunks of the two vehicles we brought up were full of bikes waiting to be put to use.

Six of us geared up and headed out around 11:30am, following our trusty GPS and a set of weigh points sent to us by someone who had already biked the area. We biked through the national forest, and although I didn't spot any of its resident Gibbons monkeys, I did see another kind of monkey swing across the road above me. The forest opened up into rice paddies that led into a village and out into more rice paddies, which is where I got my first flat tire. My second flat tire was in the next village, where after a crowd of onlookers and a friendly mechanic helped us fix my tire, they then offered to give me their spanner for free so that I would be prepared for future flats. Bangladeshis astound me with their kindness sometimes.

Our ride led us out to more rice paddies, then into the lush green tea plantations. It's hard to describe a tea plantation in a way that communicates how beautiful they are... Essentially they are lots of little hills and valleys covered in an even carpet of tea bushes, shaded by tall trees. But that doesn't even begin to convey their esthetic quality.

After 50km of the most varied and incredibly beautiful scenery anyone could ever ask for, we stopped for a cup of 'world-famous' five-layer tea. A perfectly sweet and mysterious way to end the day.

The next day we only managed to ride 35km, as we stopped too often to take photos of the incredible scenery and incredible people. We also had a few time-consuming mishaps in a small jungle we ended up in, despite the fact that a group of concerned tea pickers tried to discourage us from taking that particular path. Two bikers fell over edges hidden by vines and a variety of other jungly plants, but fortunately no one was hurt.

The most amazing thing about our adventures in Srimangal, was the amount of time we spent in places where there were no people. I don't think I've ever been anywhere outdoors where there hasn't been at least a small crowd of Bangladeshis around to stare, ask about my country or invite me for tea. In Srimangal, we managed to sit down to a picnic for a good 45 minutes in total peace and quiet. If I have learned one thing in Bangladesh, it is to appreciate the beauty and peace of nature.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures... shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

~Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali