Yesterday I went to visit some friends who live only a couple houses away from the house our family lived in for the whole time we lived in Bangladesh. It is quite far from where I am staying, in an area of town called Mohammedpur. Wow, had the area changed in 20 years! Our house was three stories when we lived there on the ground floor. It is now five stories and is a school. Almost all of the rest of the houses all the way down the street have been torn down and replaced by 5-6 story apartment buildings. There used to be gardens around the houses, but now there is only about ten feet between each of the apartment buildings which each take up the entire lot. Across from our house was an open field where the kids used to play and cows grazed; now it has a ten foot brick and iron fence around it and there was no one in it. It was all really quite sad, but this is the reality all over the city as the population booms and more and more space is needed to house all of people.
After walking past our old house, my friend Missy, her small daughter, and I were looking in a shop in the neighborhood when her husband called and told us that they were having hail in the town just up the road and that we should head home. Nothing much seemed to be happening outside, so we kept shopping. As Missy was making her purchase she was telling the people in the store what her husband had said, then she turned and looked out the window and said, "Look at that. We better go." The air was brown from all the dirt swirling around in a very strong wind. We headed out the door, Missy picked up her daughter, and we ran! Fortunately, we didn't have far to go. We had dust in our hair, our eyes, and our mouths, and then the rain started. It started gently at first, then quickly started pouring. We arrived at their building only a little wet, got inside and had to walk up the steps to their fifth floor apartment because the electricity was off (a daily occurrence in Dhaka). As we got into the apartment, the hail started - hail the size of grapes! My friends have quite large windows and the wind was causing the hail to hit them hard. I was sure they would break any minute, but after a pretty loud 20 minutes the hail stopped and the windows were safe.
I remember having these kinds of storms near the end of winter when we were here. If they come before the mango blossoms set, they are wonderful because the mango trees get some badly needed moisture after several months of no rain. But, if the mango trees have already blossomed, the hail knocks the blossoms off and the mango crop for the whole year is decreased. I don't know which is the case this year, but of course I am hoping it is the former. One thing for sure; after the rain the air felt and smelled incredibly fresh and the brown film of dust that had covered the leaves of all the trees had been washed off and they were once again green and beautiful.
I visited a class that is taught by what is called a Peer Educator. These are young people who are trained to teach sixty lessons to youth their own age on topics ranging from self-esteem to forced early marriage to AIDS to saving money. Boys and girls meet separately, but study the same lessons and it takes them about three years for each group to work through the cycle of lessons. We rode a bicycle rickshaw from the Field Office to the slum where the youth live and take the classes. We walked through dark alleys that were only about a foot and a half wide between houses made of corrugated tin and woven bamboo to a small room where these girls were having their class. They introduced themselves and we observed their class after which we asked some questions to evaluate how effective the classes are in their lives. It was obvious that they had indeed learned alot and were also passing what they learned on to family and friends. 