It was fishing day again at the pukar (pond) that’s just before our church house. So, many locals had paid to spend the day fishing at that location and lined the banks.
At Choygoria here, we decided to try attendance charts. There was no S.S. in Chakrakhali so it worked great to have extra time for getting the 30+ students’ names onto these charts.
After S.S., there is this lady that we’ve helped with medicine and her dad has been friends with Shanto’s. This lady’s husband died 4 years ago and her aging father has had a stroke… still up and about but not able to work like before… she has health issues and is not able to help bring in income.. she’s got a 14 yr old daughter that did not pass class 8 exams, they want to get her married well but Bangladesh has a backward? dowry system so they don’t have much hope of being able to marry her well.. this lady has an 8-10 yr old son as well. So, a household of 5 without an income to speak of. Losing their home is a real fear
We agreed to go with her to her home as we didn’t have the 2nd S.S. to attend
We wound our way along the canal on a narrow foot path, behind the men that were spending the day fishing.
Arriving at her home I was very pleasantly surprised.. very cleanly swept dirt yard and home. It was also more spacious than a lot of village homes that we’ve been in..
typical mud floor home built up about 2 ft
But this one was very open with a walkway all along the front. Neighboring S.S. children hung around with us there…coming in for a drink…by this time it had started lightly raining which it kept up the rest of the morning… one of the girls led us to the wash room behind the house.. it was very clean and tidy also~a built up mud foundation outhouse with squat pot with an A-frame roof and a burlap cloth to let down when in use…On the far end of the house in the cooking area, the wrinkled little old grandma was squatting in front of a wok over the fire, just finishing cooking up a mess of greens. The lady said her daughter was there on the bed in the bedroom but in the dimness of the bedroom I could not see her under the mosquito netting. She called her 14 yr old daughter out then so we could meet her. She, like many other young people, was using a using a smart phone. These villagers often do not have much but it is not strange to see them with a smart phone.
The children were all playing a game outside and my girls were game to play with them but the language barrier.. Maddie says,”I am not getting what the rules are”😏 in hindsight I would’ve had Kobid help them out with translating as he was with us since we had come straight from S.S.
When we took our leave, the lady and her 2 children came with us, taking us by a few more homes of her family where we were invited in, told to sit. The next house was nice in that it was concrete but not the level of cleanliness that we’d just experienced.. here they brought us palm fruit that had a nice texture and mildly sweet flavor..
Back past all the men spending the day fishing
By time we got home, we were all quite damp from the fine rain and the dirt paths that we’d been walking on had been turning to slippery mud…
Lunch
Littles down for naps
I tried my hand at making dudh cha(milk tea)… in my efforts I ended up with a couple pots of hot tea while trying to get it right..I did get a satisfactory product but still not sure if it was authentic
3:00 Lewis’s came for doctrine class
I told them about trying to learn how to make dudh cha and wondered if Purnima would come into the kitchen and give me a demo. She made it a spiced dudh cha with cardamom seeds and cinnamon. One of the things that I’d been wondering for sure on was how to do the milk. So she helped me perfect it. I’d figured out that I needed to scald the milk 1st before adding it to the tea to get that desired texture with the gloopies from the scalded milk 😜 also learning that there are as many ways to make dudh cha “as there are cooks”. Purnima asked for Horlicks which is a powder of some sort that I didn’t have and Lewis says it’s best with a little instant coffee yet, too!! So I guess I have a few more versions of dudh cha to try. I thought I didn’t like dudh cha for our 1st whole year here cause probably within our 1st week in the country we were served dudh cha made with powdered milk and who knows, maybe if I’d try it like that again by now, it might set a little better than that 1st experience.?.
4:00 service…Shanto and Espondant were there in addition to Lewis’s, Liton, and Kobid. But Shotti was at home sick still. They’ve been having fevers, etc. it sounds like Shotti has been quite out of commission.. her parents left for a week? But plan to be back..
I put a load of laundry in and we started preparations for going in to Dhaka tomorrow
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