Gone Fishing

My time in Korea and my travel in Bangladesh have both come to an end.  I have since returned to more 'normal' everyday life back in Canada, bringing a close to this blog for the time being.

I hope you enjoy the posts that are here, and I wish you much joy, wonder, and excitement in your own life.

Until next time,
~Shauna

Bangladesh MiniMiniMini-MINI Update

For those of you who aren't on facebook but are wondering where I've gotten to I am safe and sound still in Bangladesh.  I am in Rajshahi with friends, heading town-by-town south to Kuakata over the next two weeks until I have to leave on the 25th.

I haven't checked my email in some time so please don't be worried that you haven't heard from me if you have written.  I am not anywhere with good internet and it was all the patience I had to wait for this page to load to send an ALL-CLEAR broadcast so nobody was worried  :)

Things are great here, my health and happiness are fine and I am quite fine away from technology. I admit that I *have been writing on my computer to keep updated on my travel writing, and I will upload that as soon as I'm able.

I hope that life is good wherever you are, and I will upload my past week of exploits as soon as I'm able.  Much love,

S.

A Little TOO Quiet!!

After a 35 minute CNG ride there and a 30 minute wait in line I found out that my train was late. 

"Late?" I asked.  "Oh... Well, I will wait, no problem.  How late is it?" (famous last words) 

'3 hours delay miss, maybe more, maybe many more, maybe no.'
"No? No like no train?"

"No, there is train.  No now.  Maybe no later.  Maybe very later.  But train coming."

So it will come eventually?"

"Ji.  I think"

So, we determined that there was a berth available, and I bouth a ticket for the train that is now leaving at 11pm, provided it decides to come at all.  I was wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself at 5am when I arrived in Dinajpur anyway, so the universe solved the problem for me!  Thanks, Universe.

After I bought my ticket I walked away from the railway station and caught a CNG from the market stalls - THOSE people aren't trying to jack the railway passengers, so I got a metered fare again, my favourite!  Only, the CNG managed to break down about a 20 minute walk from home, so I walked the rest of the way once he pushed the thing over to the side.  And, because nobody likes to have a broken vehicle, I still tipped the man, it wasn't his fault it quit on him.

Now I'm back at the apartment for a bit longer since I didn't feel like I had the stamina for a 3 hour 1:150 people staring contest  :)  In about 15 minutes I will get dressed in "outside clothes" and make my way back to the station!
Better luck this time??   :)

P.S. - Mom, I promise I will email again as soon as I have a computer, but I know a person or two up there so all should be great!  :)  If there's no email then don't worry, I'll message from Rajshahi on Sunday, and i'll be back in Dhaka around the 13th... Love you!  Thanks for always having my back!

Calm and Quiet and On My Way North

Hello online world, and friends and family!


Things have been calm and quiet (for me) over the past few days in Bangladesh. There was a strike yesterday that kept me from travelling north, and it has now ended. There were some deaths, and many injuries, but I kept myself far removed from the situation. For me, it was a couple of days of inner retreat and reflection, I went nowhere special and did nothing special, just spent time in my own space - something easy to avoid when I fill my days with the distraction of new destinations.


Apparently yesterday there were some tornadoes in the northern side of the country, a few hours from here. They actually touched down in an area that I've planned to go to this week, so I'm relieved they went through already and the weather outlook in those areas is now much calmer. I spoke to a few friends who live in small towns nearby and they said they had similar weather in the night (as we did in Dhaka), very severe winds and crazy heavy rains, but that for them overall things were fine. I feel selfish for being relieved that people I have met that were so good to me were not hurt in the mess, when I know so many others were hurt and even died. Natural disasters happen, they're unavoidable, but they are hard on the heart I'm afraid, nobody wins.

Things like tornadoes cause much injury, death, and destruction in rural areas here because so many things are built from the land, so they give easily and quickly in the times of natural disaster, and sometimes in flood and heavy windstorms... for us in the west, our homes often hold up much better. Thatched houses don't stand up to much outside the normal day-to-day weather spectrum, and there are no basements or bathtubs to hide in.


Tonight I am headed north to Dinajpur. I will be back in Dhaka by the 14th, taking the train up tonight, and then drifting my way downward until I end up back where I started.

The week following I plan to go south, drifting downward town by town until I reach the beaches of Kuakata in the south, in the Sundurbans, where I hear I would be wise to spend a few days rather than make it a hit-and-run stop, so I will heed the advice and spend a few days down there. I am looking forward to it... the beach is on the Bay of Bengal, where you can sit to watch the sunrise and set... it is also part of the Sundurbans, one of the country's national treasures, and the Rakhine tribe is native to that area, so I will also get to check out some handicrafts and traditional life if things go according to plan.


I will leave Bangladesh on the 25th, and at this point my return is uncertain, and it is becoming unlikely.  I am working outside the box once more and tossing many of my plans up in the air thanks to the invasion of unforseen commitments from home, but I will keep a level head about it, everything has a solution.  My trip looks nothing like it did when I started, but I don't lament that in the least.


is not my picture, but is Bangladesh

 So, for now, this is just me telling you that things here for me are peaceful and quiet, and I am on my way slowly north. Enjoy your week, I will be thinking of home even if I am not at the time writing.


Hey, have you noticed that after all this time I've yet to end up travelling in the back of a pickup truck with chickens?? Ha.

Travel Delays - Hangin' Out Where it's Safest

I was planning on taking the overnight train up to Dinajpur tomorrow, but I have had a change of plans.  I'll still go, but it will have to wait a bit. 

Bangladesh is having a country-wide strike (aka 'Hartal') tomorrow.  The UN and the US government has sent out advisories that travel should be avoided. 

At the moment I am in Dhaka.  I had planned on taking the overnight train into Dinajpur, it leaves (well, it left) at 8pm and arrives at about 6am.  I like overnights because it's nicer to sleep through most of the long journey and wake up there than to have to bump around and occupy myself for 10 hours while I wait to arrive! 

However, I decided to wait.

The strike isn't happening today, so things would have been safe to travel - tomorrow most big things will shut down, no buses, most offices will close, basically it sounds like most of the city stops, and the same happens across the country.  Call me crazy, but I figured I would rather be in a city that is familiar to me when something like this was going on, rather than arriving bright and early to disarray in an unfamiliar one without knowing which areas were safe and which weren't. 

So, I wanted to know more about WHY there is a strike going on, and what exactly a "hartal" was.  As usual I googled hartal and followed a Wiki link - it suggests that hartals are employed in this end of the world (including India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan with Bangladesh) when the people don't like a decision the government has made.

This particular strike is being called for by the Islamic Law Implementation Committee (ILIC) protesting the National Women Development Policy (NWDP) 2011, and a few other things the government did back in March. 

I don't know much about Islam, about Muslim belief systems or legal systems, but being in a country that is primarily Muslim I am trying to learn.  I've actually even started reading the Qua'ran because I'd like to understand more about it all - I've read the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and a few other religious books, so why not the Qua'ran?  More on that another time perhaps.

Back to the strike.  The NWDP was started back in the late 90s attempting to give women in Bangladesh more rights - it was approved in early March of this year.   There is controversy (if I am understanding things correctly) from some of the Islamic groups because if it were law, it would interfere with Muslim family law (which I have no understanding of), and contradicts some of the teachings of the Qua'ran.  I pretend no knowledge in this area and therefore don't have an opinion yet, however, so I'm not about to go off at the mouth over it in a public forum. 

However, the part I don't understand, is that it is not LAW, it is a pledge by the government, a policy to further the rights women have in the country, so I'm not exactly sure why the strike is happening - the only thing that comes to mind is that there could be a fear for the lines of "progress" (my word, I think improving women's rights here WOULD be progress) that could be opened if indeed the government were successful in making changes that DID lead to new laws giving women more rights in the country.  In an article in the Daily Star...

"The policy upholds the rights of all women irrespective of their religions. Shirin Sharmin also said they would draw a national action plan based on this policy which will, “Provide women with full control over their right to land, earned property, health, education, training, information, inheritance, credit, technology and opportunity to earn… And enact necessary new laws to put these rights into practice."

ILIC chairman Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini...called the general strike on Mar 8 protesting the women's policy, the ban on fatwa by the High Court and the education policy."  [Full story link here]

So the issues for the ILIC are (1) the women's policy, (2) the High Court's ban on fatwa, and (3) the education policy.

"Wait a minutes, you lost me... what the heck is fatwa?" you ask?  Don't worry, I googled that too because I had no idea, so bear with me. 

Fatwa is an Islamic religious ruling (scholarly opinion, some would say) that is pronounced by recognized religious authorities in Islam.  It is not a law, as I understand it, but is meant to be read/heard and considered, and then you are to choose whether or not you support it/follow it or not as a Muslim, a follower of Islam.  It is your personal choice.

Sometimes they can be extremist in nature (like when Salmon Rushdie wrote Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Kohmeini (Iran's highest ranking political and religious authority at the time) issued a fatwa that actually ordered Rushdie and everyone associated with the book to be killed - you can look it up, I'm not trying to start any fights here; I was shocked by it myself because I had no idea there were public orders to KILL people - naive, naive, naive. 

[Read the wiki article here and decide for yourself what you think - there are lots of additional sources at the bottom of the article if you're interested.]

The fatwa remains in place today... The Iranian government supported the fatwa for almost 10 years before the President spoke against it, and it's apparently here to stay since the Ayatollah who issued it died.  Rushdie's translators in different countries were hurt of killed in response: craziness for this girl, that just all blew me away!!! Perhaps because the book was written in '88 and the fatwa issued in '89 and I was 12 at the time I didn't know any of this went on, but I'm making up for it now with the shock value... wow...

I want to note... I want so much to share the things I love about this country, to put into the light things that people never hear about in news stories, things that would make hearts glad and spirits smile, but tonight I'm in heartbreak about many things, so many sad things that continue to happen even today in the country, things that I just can't make room to understand or even begin to justify.

Bangladesh's government declared fatwas to be illegal last year (yay Bangladesh!), but there is another law, Islamic Sharia law (I am very confused and have had overload and will not be looking up anymore tonight) that people still use to make these more extremist fatwa pronouncements.  I dont' understand the system, so I can only speak to my dismay at their outcomes, their consequences, and I cannot speak to their cause or origin.

In looking for more information on all of this tonight I just read a story where in a 14-year old girl who was raped by her 40-year old married cousin was sentenced by fatwa (in February of this year) to a public lashing: 100 whip lashes - the victim, a child, ordered punished, and she died in hospital from the severity of her injuries before the punishment was finished; her rapist was sentenced to the same, but he "escaped to parts unknown." 

Truly, I want to throw up.  

I don't know if it was widely known at the time because I wasn't here.  I don't know if anyone tried to stop it from happening before it did.  I don't know if the whole country knew about it, or if they didn't hear about it until after it happened, I don't understand Sharia.  I don't know if anyone tried to save her, and I can't help but cry now for her. 

The Bangladeshi High Court is apparently looking to punish the people responsible, but I have yet to find out what came of it.  Kassandra said she was aware of it at the time, but I didn't ask for details, she said only that it was awful.  It is still awful.

Some things make me more grateful than others to have been born into the country, family, and ideological systems that I was.  So grateful.

Ok, attempting to move on... I got carried away because I was so shocked about the Rushdie ruling, and then worse by the child who died because of a community's fatwa, but I meant only to explain what it was.

It seems when I looked it up that most often fatwas seem to be religious opinions meant to govern how to live your life as a Muslim best in accordance with the Qu'aran, and they're not public death warrants on people.  The thing is that it seems that since the High Court in Bangladesh banned fatwas not everyone is happy about that. 

There is an AWFUL lot to learn being in a Muslim country...


So, what I started the night wanting to tell you was only that I am in Dhaka, I am safe and sound in the diplomatic area, happy and chilling out in my apartment.  I had a great day today thanks to 2 super friends at home and away, and tomorrow you will find me far from any news that is unlikely to even hit the fan internationally tomorrow.


In the event that there IS something about it on the news, you can just know I've kept myself safe and sound far from the "action," if there is any... the farthest I'll be going tomorrow is to the grocery store for some snacks on the train the next day - no worries!


PS - See, I make decisions in the interest of my safety, not just in the interest of my curiosity and my desire to move around and see stuff!

The Latest "Plan"

Okay.  So it should be obvious to anyone who has been reading my blog to this point that me and travel itineraries don't really live on the same plane of existence.  One word: PENCIL - I can only write them in pencil!!  However, that being said, some want to know what the heck I'm doing with myself so here you go...

I have a general idea about what I'm doing:

I think I mentioned that my friend Jill has changed over her travel plan and as such we're not doing the whole big thing together that we'd planned, yah?  And I think I already mentioned that I don't want to redo some of the places I've already seen since I'll be on my own, correct? 

So, here we go.  Plan B, or C.  Or maybe it's D... something like that...

Until near the end of April when my visa runs out I am going to keep my butt in sweet, beautiful Bangladesh. 

When the government MAKEs me leave (because that's what it's going to take!), I will head to lovely (if grossly touristy and polluted) Nepal for 2 weeks. 

After that I will come back to Bangladesh for a month before heading out for a month in Sri Lanka (which I am still very excited about) and a few weeks split between Laos and Thailand, and heading back to Canada for July 31st (Mom's birthday, I promised, but liklely not a day sooner!).
That, is my approximation of a new travel plan.  No map, no sticky notes, just a rough guess to answer curiousity. 

It's kind of a "plan."
Feel free to laugh now, I won't hear you.

Unexpected Expediency in a GOVERNMENT Office

That's right, I said expediency and government in the same sentence!

So I half-decided awhile ago and truly decided for sure in Rajshahi that I would not be leaving Bangladesh at the end of the month (which happens to be now!).  Plans have changed since my lovely friend Jill has decided to luxuriate in her Turkish experience, and I have no interest in visiting many of the places we'd thought to go on my own since I've already seen them.  Remember that map I posted awhile ago?  Well, fogeddaboudit, lol... allll different now - and just how different?  I'm afraid even I can't answer that question at the moment!


Anything I say in the here and now is pure speculation, because really I don't know what will happen when the time comes to decide.  I am easily moved to change my decisions at the moment, so I'll save you from speculation.


The fact is, Bangladesh has truly taken over my heart, and I have really no interest in leaving her beautiful lands and amazing people for anywhere else.  The government is going to make me leave at some point, because after all is said and done, my tourist visa was only valid for 30 days.  BUT, I'm pretty sure I can come back after I go out for a bit, so that is likely what I will do.


The past 2 days in Dhaka I have been doing a lot of sitting, a lot of writing, and a lot of waiting - the internet is SO stinkin' SLOW!!  Blogging is actually making me crazy today because it is taking me 3 times longer to write anything when I add photos since the uploader stalls repeatedly while I sit around and wait for it to get sorted.  However, I keep writing, because even NOW I'm only still writing about the beginning of the month - that 10 days with no computer KILLED me for keeping up with writing!!  :)


While in Rajshahi I couldn't upload my photos, so my friend Rana put them all on a CD for me.  Problem I didn't forsee at the time?  My netbook doesn't have a CD drive of course!  I will ask Kassandra later if I can use her Apple to load them to my zip drive and then I can post them later... there were some amazing sights to see in my first few days in Rajshahi, and I don't want to miss out on telling you about them!!


So today I did 2 things... 1, I spent almost 2 hours at the Western Union office trying to figure out how the $^#@! to get a money transfer over to my friend so that she isn't left eating rocks with an empty bank account (it's her money, it just happens to be in my account, thank you Korea!).  At the end of the day after 2 supervisors, 3 managers and a very embarassed desk clerk they had no flipping solution, except for me to have the bank wire the money to western union in Dhaka (where they will take a percentage and my bank will charge a fee), and then wire it to Jill (where they will charge the same percentage on what's left).  In the end she'll lose nearly $1,000 doing it that way, and that is not cool, so now I'm waiting to hear back from the Royal bank at home tonight.


Second, (this is actually the part about expediency and the government), I went over to the passport office to get my visa... remember the young fathead officer that sent me the wrong way (walking through the slums) when I was looking for the computer shop?  Well, it turns out that he was actually guarding the immigration office, and I had no idea! 

I went on Tuesday to apply for a 30-day visa extension (the maximum allowed on a tourist visa), and today I went to pick it up.  I got there and when I got to the counter after waiting half hour for them to open found that I actually didn't have to go back to the office, that they had just approved my extention through the 25th in my original visit - they didn't write it in English, OR in my passport, but it's done - yay for me n' Bangladesh! I'm not sure why it isn't a full month, but whatever, what you see is what you get here so I'm over it, lol...

More soon as I figure out what on earth I'm doing - but don't get to thinking I'm coming home early, because that ain't gonna happen (sorry Mom!).  

Signin' off for now,
S.