Closer in Bangladesh

Just another day at the office, Ferdoushi and I ducked onto a bus to Netragona. We quickly finished our work at the partner NGO SUS in Netragona, and had some time to check out the NGO’s handicraft store. Neither one of us knew where the store was, nor did our rickshaw wallah. Two rickshaw trips later, and twenty questions of “where is SUS’s store?” finally unearthed the store. We looked through shalvar camis, sharis, and panjabis, before heading back to the bus station for Mymensingh. Mid-way through our slightly frightening, but normal Bangladeshi bus ride, we saw a bus rolled over into the rice field. One boy had died, and the rest of the passengers were in the hospital. Then we found out that it was a Netragona-Mymensingh bus. It was the very bus that had left before ours. If we hadn’t gotten lost, we would have been on that bus.

Tuesday afternoon Bita, Abir, and I were riding a bus back from our partner NGO, Charity Foundation, in Agailjhara. We were a half an hour away from Dhaka when it began to rain. Soon the rain was pounding the buses so hard that we had to pull over and stop. Water was rushing in through the windows, and the bus started to shake. Hail was falling from the sky, and trees were falling down. I asked people if they had ever experienced anything like this, and when they said no, I started to wish I knew the emergency procedure for cyclones.

Friday afternoon we were struggling through the sticky mud in the Shunderbans (the largest mangrove forest in the world) as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the wild life. We found a less muddy path, and then began to see regular tiger paw prints. This was good; we were finally going to see a tiger in the wild. Then our guides started coughing loudly and yelling. We passed a section where you could still smell where the tiger had marked its territory. Our guides started yelling more loudly. They knew a tiger was watching us, but if our aim was to see a tiger why were they chasing it away?