Down the Meghna

A few weeks ago I chaperoned the IB Group 4 project for my school. I'm slowly picking up the IB jargon, so in July I would have thought "oh no, chaperoning..." but it's September so I know better, and Group 4 project means another boat trip! All Seniors taking a science class have to participate in this project analyzing water quality on Dhaka's rivers. Four teachers, twenty-five students, and boat! We traveled East of Dhaka, and met a boat on the Meghna river. Here we are, taxiing out to the boat (at dusk, so sorry for the blurry picture).


We ate dinner and went to bed so we could do experiments early the next day. You know you have good students when you tell them to wake up at 5:30am and no one complains. Since it's Ramadan, the muslim students had to wake up at 4:30am for Suhoor (the pre-dawn meal) anyway, so I think that put things in perspective for everyone. The hundreds of ants in my bunk-bed respectfully stayed below my knees, which I greatly appreciated.

We got up bright and early and the kids started experimenting. We made six stops along the trip, traveling down the Meghna river, and then up the Buriganga.


And the teachers posed for pictures.


We also had a little boat for experiments near the shore at each stop.


For a few of the stops I was feeling adventurous and got on the little boat. There are some beautiful bugs here! This dragonfly visited us while we did experiments at the shore.


Also, every time the little boat approached the shore we had an audience. It's hard to explain, because it's not like they see us coming and yell "hey everyone look at these people doing experiments in a boat!!" They just stop what they're doing and and watch, even if we stay for twenty minutes. This is after a good fifteen minutes anchored near the shore of the Meghna.


I also got to spend some quality time with two guys from the boat crew, Juyal and Kaosar during the two days on the boat.


They seemed almost unable to comprehend the fact that I could speak Bangla and Hindi. They both spoke Bangla, and Kaosar could speak Hindi too, so they kept testing me to see if I could understand what they were saying to me. For them, it was just chillin' during downtime on the boat, but it was great practice for me. At some point they found out that I could read and write Bangla and Hindi too, and after writing their names in both languages, they went nuts. In the afternoon, while the students were doing work, we sat at the front of the boat reading the billboards and signs along the shore.

It was great to get out of the city, because even though the rivers are busy, traffic on a river doesn't have the same sensory overload that traffic on a street does. Other than the boat engines, the only noise that I heard were the sound of garment factories along the shore running their looms, which went late into the evening. I leave you with some pictures of the boats and people that we passed along the way.

I'm Teaching!

I realized that I haven't been talking about my job at all. I'm teaching at an international school, which means that it caters mostly to children who are from out of town. The school is way expensive, but when employees get sent overseas to work, they usually get an extensive benefits package, which includes education for their children at these private schools. There are some Bangladeshis, but their parents are probably loaded up the wazoo.

My job is going really well. The school hasn't had intern teachers before, so intially they were puzzled about what Sara, Beckley and I were supposed to do. In less than a week, teachers had figured out how helpful we could be, and were scrambling to get us in their classrooms. Right now I'm working with the High School Biology teacher, and I sometimes teach lessons in her IB Biology classes. I also run a half-hour seminar on modern Indian history in an IB History class. Basically, since we're not lazy, we're allowed to do whatever kind of work we want. Not a bad deal.

(photo credit: Asavari)

As you can see from the picture above, I'm the kind of teacher you probably thought I'd be. I puzzled for a couple of days how I could look more like a teacher, since I had gotten carded within the last 6 months at a rated R movie (i.e. there were doubts that I was 17 and capable of seeing Harold and Kumar without parental guidance). Moreover, I needed to look like a science teacher. Take note of my solution: tucked-in-plaid-shirts. Problem solved.