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