bow tie

One week in March, travelling by trains and buses from Chittagong to Bogra to Rajshahi to Dhaka to Srimongol and back to Chittagong, I made a bow tie over the map of Bangladesh.

My spring break a couple of weeks ago began with a trip to Bogra with AUW footing the bills. Alyssa and I had been asked to help administer the entrance exam and interview prospective students for next year's Access Academy. I'm estimating a total of 500 eligible applicants from Bangladesh have sat for the admission exam. These are the 500 whose original applications deemed them eligible. However, we can only accept 25 Bangladeshi students for the upcoming year in which we'll accept 100 new students from the 12 or so different countries represented at AUW. According to our charter under the Bangladeshi Parliament, at least 25% of our student body must be Bangladeshi.

So the interviews were meant to help us make the difficult decision of which 5% of Bangladeshi interviewees to accept. The Bogra site only had 38 students turn out to interview. I can't imagine having to see all 500 of the students at once and know how many of them will be turned away.

Seeing the type of school where my students are coming from was a great experience. It made me so grateful for our well lit classrooms, our circular seating, our white boards with multi-colored markers, and our fairly dependable technology.



From Bogra, the three of us - Alyssa, Tomomi (an Anthropology professor from AUW), and I - travelled up to Rajshahi for a very short night, at which point I got to see my parents' unfinished flat. Early the next morning we all took the Silk City train to Dhaka where one more colleague joined our growing company. The more the merrier they say. The next morning, Mom, Dad, Tomomi, Jim, Alyssa, and I went on from Dhaka up to the tea gardens in Srimangol, near Sylhet.

I won't go into description of those glorious few days in nature. The photos below cover the tea gardens and the wetlands of northeastern Bangladesh. I'll just say that for three days I was back in my natural habitat. Away from the city, breathing clean air, walking and walking, bicycling for the first time since last summer, blissing out with the birds and flowers and cows...

Nature is made to conspire with Spirit to emancipate us.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

...Well said, Ralph.

In sum, it was so good to get away, and no sooner had I arrived back at the Chittagong train station, than Alyssa and I were already planning the next long weekend escapes to the sea and the hills.

At the same time though, it was good to be back in this place that is daily becoming more familiar and endearing. Chittagong - Chotogram - translates as "little village." Well, I saw some nice little villages up north... even got lost in one, and Chittagong is anything but that. It's home, though. And I renewed my contract, so it'll be home till at least July 2012!