All work and no play

ABBY's hardworking RA, Tania.

Wo/men

I have not quite got the rules of how men and women should or should not interact here but the gender lines are much more bold than at home. Greg and I attended a wedding and we followed our female friends blindly into the wedding hall when all of a sudden I realised Greg was the only non-Punjabi-pyjama-clad-male in a room of sharee-shining-sisters. With wide eyes and urgency in my voice, Greg quickly too realised that he had to get out and get out fast. I didn't see him until 2 hours later when I found him outside the hall waiting for me, passing the time watching a crate of chickens meat a halal kill in preparation for feeding the next round of guests. We then informed the eachother about the the groom and bride according to our own respective genders.

A few weeks later, Greg and I were invited to a friend of a friend's lovely home in Moulvibazar as part of an informal reunion among college friends. We arrived and followed our hosts into the grand living room and the men walked to the right, the women to the left of the room intentionally decorated with two separate sofa, coffee table sets-- one for men and one for women. The men sat and conversed, the women huddled and chatted, husbands and wives separated. It felt odd and Greg and I probably overcompensated by not speaking to eachother and sheepishly avoiding eachother's eye contact the rest of the day. In fact later one when the other guests went to pray during the Friday afternoon prayertime, we maintained these rules by sitting on separate sofas. A man came in and laughed and said "you can sit together now!"

Assimilating to another culture's gender rules, allows one to reflect on the gender patterns she is most familiar with. It got me thinking is this really that different from Anglo-American family gatherings with women in the kitchen and men in the den?

Urinary Analysis Preparation

ABBY's number one research assistant/ lab technician preparing urine specimens for deep freeze storage. These samples will be couriered on dry ice to the US for analysis. The National Cancer Institute will be measuring the concentrations of estrogen and androgen hormones to asses andrenarcheal and pubertal status among Bangladeshi and British girls.

Bangladeshi road sled

A Bangladeshi road sled, created and patented by my neighbours Farhan and Farhim! Made from all natural fibers and 100% organic. No batteries required (as long as your brother is around and willing to pull).

Oops!

Today I locked the keys to the lab and toilet inside the toilet and
had to seek the help of the entire medical college to retrieve the
keys from the toilet. A man had to climb up and over a wall, along
the rafters and then drop down into the toilet and throw the keys back
to me on the other side of the door.

Party!

83 collected (more than half way) and so the RAs deserve a party complete with a Mexicana meal cooked by none other than Chef Greg!

Shaheed Minar

February 21st marked Bangladeshi national language day. At first this may sound like another one of those nationally declared homage days that you only know about if you read the small print on a Hallmark calendar but here in Bangladesh it is a very special, very symbolic day. Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan (which was formerly India and at one time under British rule) gained its Independence from Pakistan in 1971. The fight for liberation started with the fight for a people's mother tongue. When Pakistan declared Urdu the national language, Bengalis protested insisting that they be able officially to speak, learn and communicate in Bangla. This fight led to blood shed and many lost their lives in the name of the Bangla language. Therefore, annually people bow their heads and lay flowers at the foot of the monuments or Shaheed Minars that pay tribute to the blood lost for Bangla the language, Bengalis the people and Bangladesh the nation.

This year we were fortunate enough to participate in the midnight ceremony at the Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College where administrators, professors, doctors, nurses, students and clerical workers all silently walked in demarcated groups to the red and white sculpture, removed their shoes and lay wreathes of orange, yellow red and white flowers. It was a short, succinct, simple ceremony. On the way home, a sense of peace and hope hung in the air.

Data Collection Day

Bristi and ABBY participant

Maternal Mortality and Nusrat

On the global health stage, the United Nations set the Millennium Development Goals and MDG 4 and 5 calls to reduce infant and improve maternal health. While Bangladesh has effectively reduced infant mortality, unfortunately women are still dying during child birth. One approach to reducing the maternal mortality rate is to get women to give birth in the hospital rather than at home. I discussed this problem with some employees of the medical college that I am working from while here in Sylhet and to guide my comments I drew from books I had read about the use of birth attendants and community helathworkers. It was a text booky macro public health discussion. Then I met baby Nusrat.
While attending a friends wedding here, I met 2 sisters who were kind enough to recognize that I was alone (Greg was with the men, see upcoming Wo/men post) and greeted me in English. I instantly felt the warmth of their genuine hearts . A wide-eyed smiling baby bounced back and forth between their laps and I started to coo and ca along with them. Between the wedding feast and photo session, my new friends revealed that 11 month Nusrat was motherless. He mother died while giving birth. Her mother did not go to the hospital because the elder son was taking exams, but the more deep seeded reason was that she feared the doctors and hospital and so gave birth to Nusrat at home. Suddenly that MDG #4 came crashing down to the personal level. “Her life will be full of sorrow”, one sister explained. I, drawing from my American optimist side, offered an alternative perspective, “Well now she has 3 mothers as you, your sister and mother care and love for Nusrat.” “Not 3 mothers, 3 sisters,” she corrected me “but she has brought new life into our family as my father died 3 months before she was born.” In Nusrat's case the the wide-spanning Bangladeshi family will support her but not all babies will be so fortunate.
Nusrat's story can teach the MDG #5 a valuable lesson. Yes, getting women to the hospital is important but understanding why they are not going is the first step in achieving this. Why are women scared of the hospital? What can doctors do to be more welcoming? It is not a simply matter of educating the uneducated as so many top down approaches preach. Nusrat's mother's fear was very real whether justified or not and being educated does not erase fear. Many of my friends have been or are recently pregnant and even for them, despite the technology and infrastructure of the British/ American health care systems, fear is part of pregnancy. We should not be afraid from learning about this fear from women themselves in order to reducing maternal mortality.

White

My RA tells me that her family says she has been getting brighter (read whiter) since working with me. They wondered if I rubbed off on her each time we hugged goodbye? If this is the case then I am hoping her lovely brown skin would rub off on me too. Obviously this is not case but face cream to become a lighter whiter beauty are advertised widely here. Popular brands such as Garnier and Ponds pitch the ability of such creams to lighten dark spots. You can even measure the effectiveness of the lightening process by comparing your skin to the skin colour scale provided in the box. Its like choosing a skin color from a paint sample in the Home depot.
I was shocked when I first saw these advertisements, but really it exposes the other side of the same coin. Is lightening one's skin really that different from using bronzer or spray tan. One would argue that these are not as harmful as bleaching ones skin (as some women instead of getting whiter, kinda go a pinker colour where the chemical has burned her skin ) but what about baking under the sun's rays to achieve that desired glowing tan at the risk of skin cancer? It seems that the grass is always greener: As the west burn to be blacker, the east peels to be whiter.

Earthquake!

I was enjoying a relaxing Friday evening watching Mad Men when all of a sudden the room started shaking. "What's happening I yelled as I quickly wrapped a scarf round my shoulders and slipped my leggings on under my dress (always the anthropologist making sure I am culturally appropriate, even in life and death situations!). I could hear screams and booms from doors opening then slamming closed could from the hotel hallway and so I ran out and down the spiraling staircase. I remember glimpses, like photos passing too quickly in slideshow, of women dressed in yellow, pink and gold and an employee carrying a naked baby. I gathered on the hotel steps with the other guests including a rather fat man who stood there on the dusty dirt road in his blue plaid boxer shorts and belly hanging over the loose elasticized waistband (he, unlike me, didn't bother taking the time to put more clothes on.) His face was a mixture of embarrassment and fear, the latter justifying the former. I was still unsure what exactly was happening: is it a bomb, an earthquake, is there more to come? Failing to find the Bangla words to ask these specific questions Greg, put his hands in the air and with a puzzling tilt of his head and asked the waiters (whom we have come to know quite well during our extended hotel stay) "What happened?" They kinda just laughed. We saw the manager of the hotel on his cell phone and waited to ask him; he said it was an earthquake, probably 6 on the Richter scale. He explained that we are situated right on a fault line here , 100 years ago there was a large devastating earthquake, and the last few year s they have been happening more frequently. "We are due for another big one", he said while laughing. Still scoffing, he said "Life is nothing." Thanks. I thought, for the comforting thoughts. I forced myself to eat dinner despite me loss of appetite and after packing an emergency bag in case another one hit that night, I surprisingly fell asleep quite easily dreaming of Don Draper in his boxer shorts.

Research assistant training with 5 amazing women from Shahjalal University including 2 sociology, 2 anthropology and one English student.

Wash Day

Friday is my new Sunday. It is quite hard to adjust to this new time schedule now living in an Islamic country where Friday is the day of mosque and rest. I don’t complain on Thursday when my work week ends early, but come Sunday which is now the new Tuesday with me heading off to the weeks second work day , I am definitely jealous thinking of my US/UK counterparts recovering from their Saturday night haunts with a full day of rest ahead. Nevertheless I try to make the most out of my new Weekend and this past Friday, Greg and I went for a long walk along the river.

As we walked along the busy roads we followed the smelly, murky, trash lined tributaries wondering if they were actually run offs of the river or just open sewers, maybe both. At times there are sidewalks and I am instantly thankful for the safe demarcation from the rickshaw-motorcycle-car-truck-cow-goat-traffic but ever so often there is a gap in the sidewalk and that illusion of a safety sidewalk is actually hovering over a 10ft drop straight above the sewer tributary. I tense up and detour away from the edge every time I walk past a gap with the fear that I may slip of my bedazzled new culturally appropriate wedge flip flops and fall straight into the sludge. But then again can the water be that bad when you see boys wading through, treasure hunting for items that they can redeem for money to eat? It is bad and smelly and I would never want that job even if it meant I didn't have to work on Fridays or Sundays.

We reached the river and besides the interruption in the city skyline of blue sky, green banks and stretch of tan-green water, the sight of men washing themselves and women washing their clothes bring a patchwork of colour to an otherwise muted landscape. A red saree lays out in a perfect rectangle along the concrete bank which slopes from the path down to the bank. Orange baggy trousers and purple/turquoise plaid lunghis lie nearby. The dryer (Sun 365) is at work, beaming down rays and slowly wrinkling the cotton as the river water evaporates from the cloth. A group of men are washing their bodies, with wet heavy lunghis clings to their bums as they voices reach pre-pubertal pitches as they submerged themselves in the cold waters of the river. One man from the opposite bank wades into the water calmly stirring up the mud and leaving a swirling trail behind him. It is Friday--while the devout are praying and while the rich are attending weddings, for others it is washday.

Worms

One of the driving hypothesis of my research here is that girls experience of puberty will be different based on their exposure to pathogens, specifically helminths and in layman's term WORMS. And yesterday confirmed that yes in fact there are worms here in Bangladesh. Greg and I were speaking with one of the postgrad students here and told us a most horrifyingly squeamish story. He remembers sharing a bed with his cousin and waking up to feel a wet squishy thing near his ear. He looked over and a worm had crawled out of his sleeping cousin's mouth, across the cousin's cheek leaving a slimy trail and then migrated over to my friend's own body making its way into his ear! I was horrified, how gross I exclaimed. My friend calmly concluded, "Yes , here we are friends with the helminths." It wont be long until I meet these friend's; hopefully in the stool samples I collect rather than my own loo!

My bangs are on the fringe here

I arrived in Dhaka about a week and a half ago and tomorrow it has been a week since I came to Sylhet. Already, I wish my bangs were longer, parted in the middle like the women I see here. The trendy haristyles of east London look absurd here, especially with my dupata wrapped around my shoulders keeping me warm but most of all acting as a cultural marker letting me blend in. When I first visited Bangladesh almost 4 years ago I was shocked at how quickly I adpated to wanting to wear the scarf around my chest, shoulders and at especially at night covering my head. I remember riding a rickshaw through the busy city centre as night fell and being so thankful that I could hide myself beneath my magenta and lime scarf (they way of contrasting colours here in one's wardrobe is amazing although to some it may be more of a clash than a contrast). In anticipation of this upcoming trip I relayed this story to a British friend and she used the word shield-- how empowering I thought, yes I chose to shield myself not hide. And yet I am quite the awkward white fool fumbling with my dupata (scarf) here. Try as I might to fit in with my culturally appropriate wardrobe (My dear friend Stacy has warned me to remember that it is not culturally appropriate everywhere) I still have not mastered the elegant ease one can drape their dupata around their shoulders or shift from covering their shoulders to head when displaying respect and reverance to people you meet. You can take a girl out of the west, but can she dress in the East?