Kim and I were walking around yesterday, doing some shopping, and started talking about what everybody at home would think of the things we're now accustomed. Right when this conversation began, we walked by a couple men sitting on a blanket with two piles of goat heads. The goat heads were a bit unrecognizable at first, being soaked in black oil and bodiless. We laughed and never broke our stride. That's exactly what we weren't talking about, but it qualified. The men paused mid-Eid prep to stare at us... and then kept right on with their machete business.Half an hour later, we walked through Gulshan 2 and accumulated a small tribe of followers: little beggar boys wanting food and money. They probably saw us buying cheap pearls in the nearby shop (It's a daily adjustment to live the privileged life in a third-world country, coming from middle-class America). We quickened our pace, but looking at Kim and knowing my own feelings, we were both in love with one of the boys. He was so sweet! He acted like our protector and local guide amongst the traffic (since we're so obviously NOT from here). He stopped on-coming cars and moved a man out of the way as we kept walking. He asked me things in Bangla and then translated them in perfect English when I didn't understand. I stopped to buy him and his buddy a banana apiece. WRONG MOVE KRISTA! That's when our little tribe suddenly became a big tribe of shoeless children. It was crappy to stick to my original plan and only buy two bananas, but we would've been even mauled further if we'd decided to do more in the moment.
Other [now] normal encounters on this trip out of the house included: picking up a rickshaw walla with a really red mouth (high on juicy red sheesh), riding by a man with no legs, scooting furiously at us on the road, talking about anything we want in open public because nobody understands us, and continuing to throw up furiously, as we had been the last two days, upon getting home.
These are all crazy things that we all kinda laugh about being accustomed to (better than crying), but I really think (lately) about how my view of money, complaining, and what "being poor" means. I keep thinking about my friends and family back home.... if they will understand.... if I will hate the things people say. I hate the things I mentally (and verbally) complained about. There's just no way to justly describe what it's like over here. This blog does nothing for it for sure. It's wild to teach Bible stories to my class (currently: Noah's Ark) and then see the streets of Dhaka because it's very much what I picture Bible times to have been like: beggars following people and chopped up goat heads just out in the open all the time.
I dunno. It's constant confrontation and awesome displacement for me.
