Nabagram Village (3 day visit)

Namaskar! (greetings)

We've just arrived back in the city of Dhaka after 3 days in the village of Nabagram. We couldn't have been further from home, weaving through teeny tiny roads carved from clay and surrounded by lush green rice paddies.

We were escorted by Zach's teacher Dupak and his younger sister Tooku. Zach, Renee and Derrick came too which made the trip 100% easier for our kids. This picture is of Courtney and Renee helping to dry the rice on the clay ground. The rice is still in a shuck and the villages spread it with their feet to dry before collecting it in bags and taking it to the mill to separate the shuck from the rice grain. We ate this rice later with curried fish, pork, chicken and prawn.

There are many ponds interspersed with the roads and paddies. Villagers build bamboo bridges that are literally long shafts of 4 inch diameter bamboo laid across the pond with a smaller one as a railing. The kids decided to cross one to visit a rice mill. I thought I was going to be too heavy as I'm an Amazon compared to the small villagers. But just as I was worried a small woman with a 70 pound sack of rice skipped across the bridge to the mill without hesitation or delay!

This village was a 7 hour drive SW of Dhaka. There were small communities (cul de sac like) of families each with a dining/cooking area, sleeping area, barn, latrine and wash area. All the dwellings were made with tin (with wooden or cement structure).

It was a priviledge and honor to be welcomed wholeheartedly into the village with smiles and hugs. Everywhere we walked people invited us into their home for tea and chatting. We gave the kids soccer balls and scarves to the women in return for their hospitality. All was well received.

Night time was the most difficult. Cockroaches were by Courtney and my bed and you could hear the rats scrambling on the rooftops and the cats hunting them. The latrine (which is called a squatty potty, aka hole in the ground) had spiders with leg spans of 5-6 inches, I kid you not.

We slept on boards with mosquito netting around us. Courtney and I were panicking the first night that we'd never make it. But we did, of course, as this is the way of life for so many. Rusty points out that in contrast to our night time spooks, we felt like we were in a 5 star campout...our meals were prepared, served and cleaned up, our beds were turned down and mosquito netting set up each night and made each morning. The hospitality was generously poured out to us. We were so grateful each morning as we were greeted with smiles, red with beetle-nut chew (a habit of all the natives, a red nut wrapped in beetle tree leaf and stuffing in the lip like snuf).

The village was an adventure we'll never forget. I could write so much more about the school we visited and the parade of girls surrounding each of the children, leading them everywhere to show them their school. The children climbing to the tops of coconut trees to bring down the fruit to share "dab" is the raw milk from the unripened coconut (not yet sweet). We played cricket at one community, but mostly sang or exchanged stories. We thanked them by giving them scarves, socks for the older men and soccer balls for the children...

Oh and yes...Rusty did wear a skirt (lungi: loon guee).