Bangladeshi’s love fish. I can’t really emphasize that enough. I mean I love food, but there’s other things I think about. In Bangladesh sometimes it seems like the only to think about. Rice and lentils are the staple and on special occasions you get to eat meat as well. It’s becoming less common, but you still get asked as a greeting, “bhat kayechen?” which means “have you eating rice?” Food is a big priority, and people seem to sound a bit more excited when they start to talk about fish.

There was this one time, during rainy season, it rained… Imagine that… However in all seriousness, the north west of Bangladesh doesn’t get nearly as much rain as the rest of the country. I thought rainy season should be more of an event, but the first two I experienced in Bangladesh were sort of disappointing. This summer it was more of a proper rainy season. The thing that you have to understand about Bangladesh is that there really is no rock to speak of. It’s silt the whole way down, which is part of the reason it’s so flat. If there’s high ground, chances are somebody made it that way. So when it rains you get a lot of standing water. Everything is a business in Bangladesh and fishing rights always need to be negotiated, but after a rain, flooding creates a lot of areas which are sort of common and thus able to be fished by anyone, so roads and drainage ditches alike become a place to find fish.

After a few days of rain in early August our front yard was relatively flooded, and people started to fish in our front yard. The fish they are after are really small, maybe only 2 inches long; “Chotto mach” as they say in “amader bangla basha.” They fry them up in as a curry, bones and all. I tend to think of fishing as with rods and hooks, but a net is the most common fishing method in Bangladesh. Our neighbors Momina and her children Momin and Masuda set up a net where there was a lot of water running across our driveway and waited for the fish. They caught quite a few too. Other villagers came out and joined them, standing with rain beating down on their umbrellas while the children fished. And there stand I, out in the rain, in a flooded front yard, watching this catching of fish. Food and fun is where you find it.

It seems so long ago that I first bought a EDGE/HSDPA modem so I could work on the train between Durham and Lancaster.  Linux was my OS of choice at the time and I used wvdial to control EDGE/HSDPA Modems. These days WWAN connections seem more common and I was very happy to see NetworkManager add support. Even thought it was a little clunky I would still periodically use wvdial for headless machines where I needed to script connections from the command line.  Recently I’ve been doing some work with a beagleboard which has an ARM processor; wvdial is currently broken on ARM architecture and ppp was giving me a headache.  After numerous emails trying to find a work around, I learned that nmcli has gives you control from the command line, and if you have the keyfile plugin enabled in NetworkManager.conf, global connections are written out .ini-style in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/

e.g. /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/GrammeenPhone

[connection]
id=GrameenPhone
uuid=b68882db-7e97-4fa3-a811-9234f64098f6
type=gsm
autoconnect=false
timestamp=1316411329

[ipv4]
method=auto

[serial]
baud=115200

[gsm]
number=*99#
apn=gpinternet

The end result is that it’s possible to connect with a simple command

#nmcli con up id GrameenPhone

Some time ago I went for a walk along some village trails I hadn’t walked before. Bangladeshis will often ask questions to Bideshis, but on this particular trip I was struck by how many started with “Kothay geyechen?” meaning “Where did you go?” I thought it was sort of an odd place to start. In Bangladesh the first question to a stranger is generally “What is your country?” “How are you?” or maybe “Any problem?” often followed by, “What are you doing here?” I get these sorts of questions on partner visits while with someone who is known to the community. The context of this particular walk was perhaps a little different. These villagers might have known about the local Bideshis so they might have had some context, but to ask the the question “Where did you go,” is to ask a question that focuses on history. There are a lot of interesting assumptions and givens in that starting place. This is maybe a question that comes from a rooted lifestyle. The questions of “who are you?” and “where are you going?” are perhaps meaningless in communities where one has spent enough time that for everybody encountered is known. Thus you wouldn’t even think about asking them when finally presented with a stranger.

That rootedness is a bit of an illusion though. I think I’ve mentioned how little rock Bangladesh has. It sits on a delta and is silt a long way down. I may be crazy, but I think that this contributes to a sense of instability at some level. Last week there was an earthquake in Sikkim and all the buildings in Dhaka wobbled. I was on the 7th story of a building close to the MCC office in Dhaka at the time and the rattling made me pretty nervous. People ran out of their buildings and were scared to return. Earthquakes are a problem that is in the back of many peoples minds. There have been big earthquakes in Bangladesh’s past, and if a large one ever hits again, all previous disasters in Bangladesh are going to pale in comparison. Unfortunately like so many issues here, nothing has really been done about it because there are more immediate problems.

I find myself thinking a lot about stability, especially now that after 3 years, my term in Bangladesh is quickly winding down and I’m not sure what’s next. I’m waxing nostalgic about where I went and how long that journey has been. There have been times of deep contentment and also pain. In a little while I will return to the US and hope to reconnect, but I will find you at a different point in your life. With this in mind, I ask the question, as you sit back and think about the last 3 years, Kothay Geyechen? Where did you go?