A Trip Upon Your Magic Swirling Ship

This morning I left directly from the house to our Lalbag field office, a 20 minute rickshaw ride. As the rickshaw started moving the rickshaw wallah said, "It'll be 40 taka." "That is way too much. Stop, I'm getting off!" The rickshaw braked hard, throwing me out of the rickshaw, head first into a mud puddle. I picked my self up, my kameez torn, my purse muddy, my foot sprained. "I'm not going with you" I growled at the rickshaw wallah, as I hobbled away, back to my house to change. It was my first serious fall from a rickshaw in all the time I've been here.

A change of clothes, a light rain shower and 25 taka later I arrived at the Lalbag office. Visiting Lalbag is fun. The staff are chatty. Which team to you support for the World Cup? (Well, Brazil will win, but I'm also rooting for Spain and Mexico) How was your trip to your country? I told them how much fun everyone in my country had dressing up in the clothes of Bangladesh. We laughed about how I made Bangladeshi food and made my family eat it with their fingers. My little brother Jesse didn't want to at first, but then had the leftovers later, and ate them with his fingers. We Bangladeshi's know that food tastes better when we eat with our hands! I spent a few hours helping Lucky, my adolescent educator, with her impact monitoring and went back to the office.

I love the rickshaw ride back. Rickshaw riding is one of my favorite Bangladesh experiences. The tinkle of rickshaw bells, the perfect 80 degree weather, the bustle of people going places. It is exotic and perfectly normal at the same time.

The layers and layers of clothes I'm wearing take on a life of their own. My orna flies up, exposing my "feminine bits". As I pull it back down where it belongs, my kameez flips back up into my lap. I tuck it firmly under my knees to keep it down, but that hikes up my shalwar, exposing my ankles. By the time I've got that sorted my orna has slipped all the way to one side, flying out behind the moving rickshaw, and again uncovering my chest. Eventually I am clutching at all my clothes in an attempt to keep them where they belong.

The rickshaw pass the bazaar with all it's luscious exotic fruit. We get stuck in a rickshaw jam outside the best primary school in Dhaka. Little kids in the other rickshaws stare at me, pointing me out to their parent. I stare and point back and we both laugh. The joy of traveling by rickshaw