August 23rd

August 23rd 2009

School has been going for about 2 and a half weeks now. I am teaching Language Arts and Social Studies to 7th graders and am assigned to 8th grade advisory, which is like a mentoring/teambuilding thing for each middle school grade. I really like our students a lot-in general they are really sweet and polite and very well behaved. They are also all so worldly and most have lived in at least 2 countries. Advisory is fun-we do a lot of team building and fun games and stuff. We also take the 8th graders on an overnight retreat in the countryside outside of Dhaka in September and to Hong Kong in the Spring, which I'm really excited about!
Our school is K through 12th grade but each school is separated. We are a very small, contained little group in the middle school. It's nice though because you really get to know the kids and we have a lot of students for both Social Studies and Language Arts. Until now, I've just kind of been aiding and helping out where necessary. Today I taught my first lesson all by myself! It went really well and I walked away feeling good about it. It's always hard when you've been kind of trying to fit into another teacher's flow and then you have to establish yourself and your own teaching style in the same classroom. I taught it on Gary Soto's "Oranges" and "Living Up the Street." The students seemed to like, although they always get restless at the end of the period if they haven't been able to get up and move around at least a little because our blocks are 85 minutes long-which is a long time to sit for anybody.
I was feeling crappy this weekend but I felt better today. Bangladesh is so hot and muggy that it's just like a festering pool of germs that just sit and accumulate. Also, being a westerner, there are a lot of things here that I've never been exposed to. Being around so many students as well bring in all kinds of germs. There have been several reports of Swine Flu in the area and the other two schools in the area closed for the day. We had our first case of swine flu reported today and it is in the middle school! Ahh! So we are having an assembly on swine flu on Wednesday haha, as if we haven't heard enough about it at this point and I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that I can stay healthy enough not to get it!
Since I last wrote, I have taken a couple rickshaw rides. I really like it-just kind of bumping along as this guy peddles around the city. You can't be going anywhere in a hurry though because it does take a while. It's also kind of scary when a car or truck comes up behind and honks to let you know they're there. I also tried driving, which is absolutely insane in this country. They drive on the other side of the road and its just a free for all and you have to use your horn to let rickshaws know you're there. You definitely can't be timid and you just have to pull out in front of oncoming traffic and make them stop for you or else you'll never get across the road. Haha. I just tried driving around Baridhara, where we live, I'm not ready for the bigger roads yet. I felt like I had a lot of power though. Donna and I drove to one of the road-side plant stands and had an interesting experience. All these men like holding up flower pots in our faces, telling us there plants were the best ones. They would order these young boys who worked there around if we even looked at a plant to climb through all these other plants and get the one we looked at and like prop it up so we could see it that much better. We wanted to get a few plants for our house to make it homier. We also wanted plants that would be hard to kill. No doubt we got ripped off in the buying of these plants but we thought they were working hard and they were still very cheap for us.
We have a 5 day break coming up at the end of September, a longer break in October, a break in November for Thanksgiving, and then 3 weeks of winter break in December. Pretty awesome. Almost everybody goes traveling during these breaks. You can find some really good deals but you have to get started early enough. My roommate, Donna, and our friends Stephanie and Kristen just booked tickets to Nepal in September and Donna and I are planning to go to Thailand and Cambodia in October. The school has an awesome travel agent that they recommend; he is the one who booked my tickets over to Bangladesh and was really helpful in the whole process. He is very speedy. He found us a great deal; tickets for little over 200 dollars to Nepal. When we looked ourselves, the cheapest flight we found was 550. He also recommended places to stay and things to do. We're going to spend two nights in Kathmandu and tour around all the temples and go shopping and stuff and then two night out in the countryside at a place called Nagarkot, which has great views of the mountains if it's clear weather. I can't wait-there is supposed to be fantastic energy in Nepal-and great shopping. My inner hippie will be very content and hopefully and I can pick up some great finds.
This weekend, Ramadan began, which of course, being a Muslim country, is huge here. It depends on each family and how seriously they take it but a lot of Muslims fast from sun-up to sun-down for a whole month. All the men wear these white hats to signify the sacrifice they are making. We do have some students who do the fast so we have to be conscientious of this and when everyone else goes to the cafeteria these students are allowed to go to the library so they don't have to be around food! The roads at this time of year are even crazier than usual, especially in the afternoon. People have long ways to go and it takes a long time to get there and they want to be home right before sun set or as it is setting because they haven't eaten anything all day and they want to be home in time for the meal that breaks the fast. At the end of the month is the Eid celebration, which is when we have our break. It is a celebration of the end of Ramadan and it's kind of like Christmas for Muslims. If your cook-bearer or driver is Muslim this is when you would give them an extra month's salary. Muslims on this day will just walk around the streets asking for money and it is customary to be pretty generous with it during this celebration. Also during this couple of days there is a mass animal slaughter to celebrate the end of the fasting. Muslim families will get there hands on any type of animal, mostly cows and sheep and chickens, and tie them up outside their houses overnight and in the early morning everyone goes outside together and slaughters their animals. This is going to be a really great day for us vegetarians. There are also all kinds of parades through the streets and things. In general, a lot of things slow down and/or cease to exist during Ramadan. The business office at school told me my air shipment is currently in the country but they are "processing" it. Ramadan will definitely slow this whole process up and I probably won't see it for at least another month. It's interesting though being in the religious minority in this country when I've been in the majority for so long.