losing their religion..

sunday, the 23rd, we took a boat to the school across the sunderbans, the site for pg#4. after a relaxing two and a half hour boat ride, broken by an occasional coastal village, waving children and adults and river dolphins, we reach our destination.

the entire village, including children as little as 5, helps us unload the lumber we had on our trawler. ben and louisa play with the kids and are, subsequently, the pied pipers.

after a quick lunch, its back to work again. we start painting wood, which is, by far, my favorite thing to do (besides using the hand planer ;) after about 2 hours of painting and scrubbing wood, i am back on the trawler to go back "home" (bari) with ben, louisa and rajeeb, our landlord's son, also our translator.

an hour into the ride, the trawler stops and i am jolted up from my nap. in the middle of nowhere, we are out of fuel! so we get off, walk through the mud, and village roads, for a good half hour, before stopping at a roadside stall to have a drink and snacks, while rajeeb secures two motorbikes to get us back home. half an hour later, we are back home having dinner and retiring for the night after what seemed like a long day!

marc, our operations director, landed up in a fairly remote village one hot afternoon, 3 days ago. people in the school seemed exceptionally withdrawn and wary of him. later he finds out from rajeeb that they thought he was there to give them injections to convert them to Christianity.
it startles me, confuses me, humbles me, amuses me and yet saddens me but most of all, it makes me be thankful for my life,

on one playground install, someone asked us what we were there for. someone tried explaining to build a playground. how do you explain what a playground is to someone who has never been outside their village, doesn't have tv or a computer or books to even imagine what a see-saw/teeter-totter or a swing is. playground to them is the same ground they sleep on, work on and walk on. there's no separate space to play.
a simple thing such as a frisbee, a soft toy amuses the entire village for a few hours, i can only imagine what the sight of a colorful playground will.

i feel particularly blessed and fortunate to have seen two different worlds and to have grown in both of them, not only in age but life experiences.
for someone who was born and raised in a third world country, and then migrated to the US, it gives me a wider perspective to things. but at the same time, it puts me in the space in between. i don't fit in in either place completely..

there is such a huge world out there and yet, most of us might never know about it. there's still so much unseen and untold - not necessarily good or bad but just different.. one lifetime can certainly not be enough.