The Interfaith group

I've been going to this "Interfaith" group, which is a discussion group composed of people of different religions (such as Muslim, Christian, and Baha'i) and also people who don't necessarily subscribe to any organized religion but are interested in spirituality. Anyway, the group discussions are really interesting. We've discussed all kinds of topics over the past few months, such as what it means to live an examined life, the relationship between science and religion, politics and religion, spirituality and religion, and patriarchy/sexism and religion, the meaning of "equality," and the concept of universal education. As you can see, we've covered quite a lot of ground! Some of the folks in group are leaving Bangladesh, so we took a group photo last week before they left. Anyway, here we are (there are more people in the group, but these are the only ones who showed up that day)!

Birthday Parties Galore!

We just celebrated two birthdays in a row: Jasra's second birthday was in May, and Audry's tenth birthday was in June. We had fun partyin' and dancin' and eating cake! In fact, that's how I broke my camera--I was dancing and taking pictures at the same time, and somebody ran into me a bit too hard and the camera went flying. Oops! Anyway, there's more birthday fun to come--in about three weeks Salma will celebrate her second birthday...so stay tuned!

Azfar on TV again

Here's a shot of one of Azfar's TV programs--for this one, he was talking about one of his favorite books. He did this "book of the day" program for a couple of months, in which he discussed one of his favorite books each day of the week. That quickly added up to a lot of books!

Meeting up with Anwar, an old friend

We met up with our old friend Anwar the other day! We went to Washington State University together, and we used to get together with him and his wife Lois to have some real Bengali food. (Anwar is a fabulous cook!) And he made some delicious curry for our wedding dinner. Anyway, he came back to Dhaka last week for his brother's wedding, and he looked us up. Here's a photo we took with him at the wedding. It was so nice to see him after such a long time!

Camera is fixed!

Yay, my camera is finally fixed! So I'll post some more photos of our life here in Bangladesh soon.

And Yet More Crazy Rain

Ok, so yesterday Dhaka got 4 inches of rain in 6 hours. It was insane. I borrowed this photo from the Daily Star website. This is on Mirpur Road, which is on the way to Azfar's parents' house. This is the same spot we had to drive through on Thursday night when we were trying to get to their house--it was flooded then too. Yesterday, alot of the streets in Dhaka looked more like canals than streets. In front of our apartment, there was at least two feet of water in the road, and we watched cars trying to plow through and getting their engines flooded. I didn't feel brave enough to go through the flooded street to class, so I cancelled my classes yesterday. The thing is that when the street is flooded, you can't see where the potholes are! Many of the streets have huge uncovered potholes and it would really suck if your rickshaw hit one or if you fell into one. So I decided not to chance it. Anyway, there's a cyclone storm over the Bay of Bengal that caused the heavy rain. We're supposed to get more rain like this for the next few days. Today it rained pretty hard, but not like yesterday. The streets are clear again now. Let's see what tomorrow brings...

Monsoon rain and flooded streets

The other day we had some crazy monsoon rain in Dhaka. The streets were flooded. We happened to have quite a dramatic experience this time, because we were trying to get home while the streets were flooded. Our friend was giving us a ride home. There was at least 3 feet of water in the road. And the water started coming into the car--we had about 5 inches of water seeping into the car under our feet! It was quite a scary experience. I was amazed that the engine didn't flood and the car didn't die because at times it felt like we were literally floating down the street instead of driving. Many of the cars around us were dying and the poor drivers were trying to push them out of the street in the massive flood. And when busses went by, they created waves that would wash up against the car. It was like nothing I've ever seen before, although I know flooding like this happens on a regular basis in Bangladesh. Anyway, since my camera has broken, I borrowed a few images of the flooded streets from some other websites. By now the water has gone down and the streets are clear again, but we're supposed to have monsoon rains for the next 5 days, so they may get flooded again.