The village life

For the past couple weekends, I've had the opportunity to visit the village. Last weekend I went to my host brother Pintu's village and the weekend before was my Boudi's village. While my family lives in Bogra town, they all come from the village, which is common for city dwellers. They come to the big towns for work or education, but their real home is out in the countryside. I do like the village. Life is more relaxed, the air is fresh and the people are friendly.

Pintu's village is about a 4 hour commute from Bogra. It probably isn't more than 100 km away, but the various modes of transportation required make it much longer. We took 3 different buses, a rickshaw and a funny little homemade looking tractor (you see them a lot here). The local buses are always an experience. They're crammed with way too many people. There are probably 45 seats with a further 30 people standing in a vehicle about half the size of a Canadian school bus. There are often a dozen or so on the roof. I think if the bus would've rolled over, more people would die of suffocation than anything else. When I'm traveling in these buses, either way I go (sitting or standing) I'm too big to be comfortable. The seats are squeezed really tightly together so my legs don't fit and the ceiling is too low for me to stand up straight. I'm not even that tall.

When we arrived, we changed into our lungis and walked around. This is mainly what one does on a visit to the village; walk around in your lungi talking to people. (By the way, a lungi is a tube-skirt type garment worn by pretty much every Bangladeshi male.)

Another thing to do in the village is eat ridiculous amounts of food. This mainly applies to visitors (i.e. me). As is Bangladeshi custom, hospitality is best shown be seeing how much food your guest can put away. This is one of my least favourite aspects of Bangladeshi culture. For example, yesterday, by the time noon came around, I had eaten 8 mangoes. This is because we had been walking around visiting people and the logical thing to do this time of year is to give your guests mangoes. To refuse would be rude. My host brother had also eaten this many mangoes, and he got a little tired of them so I was given an out. Of course we also ate heroic amounts of rice.

I stayed in a two storey house made entirely of mud, cow dung and bamboo. They are quite amazing constructions with walls that are sometimes a couple feet thick. They can last for up to 100 years.

We came back much the same way we went, this time foregoing two buses for a long tempo ride (a tempo is a little three-wheeled, two-stroke vehicle with bench seats in the back). Again, a bit too small for my comfort, but whatever, I'm used to it now.

So that's about it. On a side note, the Bangladesh government has temporarily banned Facebook. Apparently some caricatures of political leaders and Mohammed were found there and deemed unsuitable for the greater population. If you need to communicate with me and would usually use Facebook, feel free to e-mail me instead at ben.reesor@gmail.com.

Ben

8,000 words

I'm hot.

You're not.

Unfortunately, I don't think any of us are particularly pleased.

Work

I guess I've been keeping you in the dark a bit about what I've been working on for the past six months. Some of you are probably interested, so I'll try to enlighten you. There have been three main things I've been working on: Agriculture research, the constructed wetland and the Analog Forestry Database.

Basically when I came, my boss Mokhles said that they were interested in testing methods of intensive farming, particularly vertical and urban gardening. My job was pretty open-ended. The previous SALTer had done some stuff with that, although I didn't really know much of what he did. So I did a bunch of reading and research and designed some experiments of my own. One of my main experiments was growing potatoes vertically. I planted potatoes in cardboard boxes and old tires and as the plants grew, I added soil around the stems. When necessary, I built the boxes higher. This may sound weird, but its been known to work. The theory is, once the plant matures, tubers will form along the buried stem. My first attempt didn't work out so great. The plants ended up dying before they could reach maturity, so I only harvested some tiny new potatoes. Aref, another crop researcher here, is interested in trying this method again next year. I wrote up a fairly detailed report on my hypotheses of why it didn't work this time and things that he should try next year. The main reason seems to be that the variety we used was early season, when ideally we would have planted a late season variety. Hopefully next year will be better.

Back in November, I talked about the constructed wetland at the AKB. Since then I've learned a lot about natural systems of water purification from further reading and research I've done. A few months ago, we did proper tests on the water. The system we have doesn't seem to be doing a good job at removing nitrogen, with the concentration of nitrate increasing as the water moves along the system (opposite of what should happen). I hypothesized that this was because we don't have a proper living environment for the aerobic bacteria required to break down ammonia in the dirty water. We decided to test this and so I designed a reedbed that should provide a better environment for those bacteria. The reedbed is in a barrel and consists of layers of brick shards, medium gravel, fine gravel and sand. The "common reed" (the kind you would find in swamps) is planted in the sand. We built the bed a week ago, but we don't have reeds yet. Apparently, they should be available next month when the rain starts in earnest. The reedbed we made isn't big enough to handle all the water from the house, but it should be fine for our experimental purposes.

Finally, when I'm not working on other stuff, I work on the forestry database. This basically involves entering data I find from books, documents, websites etc. Not really the most interesting of work. The hope is that once the database is finished, the information can be used by our partners for agroforestry, land reclamation and reforestation projects. I've recently finished going through each plant we currently have (63 in total) and exhausting all the resources I have access to on each species. I have also assembled 63 documents providing further information on each species, such as some of its common products, how to grow and harvest, some common diseases and pests and any other useful info that the database itself doesn't include. These documents will be attached to the plant profiles. Mokhles has been taking pictures of the trees as he travels around the country and I've been uploading them.

I'm down to about 2 and a half months left in Bangladesh. I've learned an incredible amount of stuff while I've been here. I've certainly fulfilled the Learning part of SALT, but I what I really hope is that I've also done the Serving part. I realize now how short a year really is. It seems so long at the beginning, but now that its winding down, I have a new scope and I can see its insignificance. If I've made any contribution to MCC program in Bangladesh, I don't know it now. The chances are I will never know, and I've accepted that.

The field at the AKB as it looks now

The reedbed with the wetland in the background

Take 'er easy,

Ben