Lunch

The other day Roshid, the cook at the office, was in a particularly good mood and I took the opportunity to take pictures of how our meals are made.

This is the kitchen at the office. Roshid is on the right and an assistant is on the left. The curved iron things are what they use to chop all of the vegetables. I know that the edge facing up is sharp, but beyond that I do not understand how they manage to use it to chop everything into even little pieces.

Yes, they prepare all of the food on the floor and, yes, they are barefoot! (I am pretty sure they are instructed to cook barefoot so that they don't get street crud on the floor where they are going to put the food). Here is Roshid displaying the fish he is going to cook (he was really enthusiastic about the photo shoot).

And here is the final product:

There was rice, daal (lentils), homemade mango chutney, laal shak (a red "leafy green vegetable"),

mishti comra (pumpkin),

mach (fish),

and shorsha (cucumber).

It was delicious!

Anthropometry

In an exciting turn of events, I was taken along to the field the other day as the photographer for an anthropometry training session. Anthropometry is the measurement of people, and doing it in a way that is accurate and standardized is a key piece of measuring growth as part of a study. This session involved our  interviewers practicing all of the different measurements on volunteer kids. I promised at the outset that I would not post pictures from the training online, because they are confidential and study property and such. Still, I thought I would write about it briefly because I really am trying to keep my blog updated with what goes on here and because it was a fun and extremely demanding day of photography. The office where the training took place was small with dim lighting and kids move constantly, especially when you are trying to measure them, so I have hundreds of  blurry pictures of children. Still, the 30-some pictures where I managed to get the focus and shutter speed right are tremendously exciting and the whole day gave me the push I needed to take off the training wheels and switch to using full manual mode.

To keep the post from being too dull, here is a picture I really like from the training session day of a kid who had nothing to do with the study.

Walks in Gaibandha

This is just a quick post to share some of the photos I have taken over the last few weeks. Things have gotten quite busy here, which has cut into my photography time and my blogging time. Still, I have taken my camera on a few walks around Gaibandha and managed to catch pictures of some interesting things. There is a new album called "Gaibandha Walks" in Picasa that has more pictures from the last few weeks.

To begin with, these are my walking buddies, the other ladies who live in the faculty house.

The pack of spectators following us is pretty typical. As we walk we tend to have a group of 10-20 kids walking with us that turns over as some kids reach what I assume is the boundary of their play area and other kids notice the bideshis and join the parade.

Here are a few pictures of the scenery.

These are baris (households) that are pretty typical of our study area and the region.

This is a brick factory, which is a really common sight in the parts of the country I have seen.

This is a kid using a tubewell, a manual water pump that pumps from below the surface water and  is responsible for the reasonably low rate of water-borne illness here.

These are my absolute favorite. This man was selling fish by the side of the road. When he realized I was taking pictures he posed like this, displaying the fish.

I am optimistic that this weekend will include time for more photography, perhaps in the main Gaibandha City market, so check back soon for new posts.

Bee

This is just a quick post to share a picture of this crazy-looking bee that I saw in the stairwell the other day. Check out the shape of it and the amazing pattern on it's body! (Thanks to my 18-135 mm lens I was able to keep a safe distance from the thing while I took the picture).

Gaibandha City

Saturday morning I took a long walk through Gaibandha City with my camera. It was nice and cool out that day because it had just rained. Short bursts of rain here leave the air unbearably humid, but prolonged rain actually leaves the air cooler and dryer. It rained all Friday night so Saturday morning when I woke up it was still wonderfully cool out.

Unfortunately the rain also created huge puddles along the sides of the main road, constricting the available travel space for the cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, rickshaw, animals and pedestrians that share the two-lane road. This made for a somewhat stressful walk, without much time for framing pictures and thinking about all the little buttons I have to work with, but I still managed to capture some of the interesting things one sees on a daily basis in Gaibandha. Here are a few and there are more in the Picasa album titled "Gaibandha City".

The local bus station. Men are continuing to board this bus 

as it drives away.

Men traveling on the roof and hanging 

out of the door of a bus.

A vehicle made from the ubiquitous 

Chinese diesel engine. A single engine 

will be used for plowing, harvesting, 

irrigation and transportation.

A group of photocopy shops near the faculty house. As it 

was early in the day, only two of the shops were open, but 

in the evening there are easily 6 or 8 copy machines set up 

in front of shops along this block.

A man transporting bushels of bananas 

by bicycle cart.

A small shop along the main road built on stilts. The color 

of this man's hair is quite common here, as older men will 

continue to color their hair with henna after it has turned 

gray or white, leaving it this wild orange color.

Two men painting a house suspended from bamboo scaffolding

Finally, I turned off the main road and walked through a more peaceful residential section of Gaibandha before taking a rickshaw home. Here are a couple of pictures from the less chaotic part of the city. To see more pictures from the day, click on the albums link in the right panel.

A man constructing a tin roof.

A man and his grandson sitting in front 

of their house.

Coconuts

The other day when I got home from work, there was a whole coconut picking and juicing operation underway in the garden. The coconut was delicious, though I am not a fan of the coconut water. I was also able to resolve my most pressing question about coconuts, which is: how are the big green ones that coconut water comes from related to the fuzzy brown ones that you eat? As you can see in this picture, the big green coconuts actually have the fuzzy brown coconuts inside! Still to be resolved: where does coconut milk come from?

The operation proceeded like this: This man attached a very small board to a coconut tree with rope and then climbed onto the board to cut down the coconuts.

Here are the coconuts he had cut down up to this point.

Akram,  who takes care of the house, cut the tops off of the coconuts and poked a hole to get to the water, which Jahangir, our cook, poured into glasses. 

 

And finally, here is Muzi enjoying her coconut water in the garden.

Birthday "fruit cake"

As promised, here are some pictures from my birthday. Muzi made a fruit salad "cake" complete with decorative fruit animals and a candle. She and Neelu sang Happy Birthday to me and made me blow out the candle and everything. It was so sweet! I had an idea that Muzi had something up her sleeve but I had no idea what! Keeping it a surprise turned out to be especially hard here because everyone seemed to want to tell me about it right away. Jahangir, our cook, was super involved in the whole process and even made sketches of the project once Muzi explained her plan to him. Even so, as soon as the "cake" was completed he tried to show it to me. Muzi had made me promise not to look in the fridge all day, though, so I didn't let him spoil the surprise. Here are a couple of pictures of the "cake" and there are more in an album (click the link on the top of the right side panel).

The photography is nothing fancy - I switched it to auto because the dining room has really dingy lighting and stray glasses/plates/salt shakers managed to make it into pretty much every picture - but I still wanted to share the pictures.

First photos of Gaibandha

Here are some pictures from my first adventure with my camera in Gaibandha. The district where I am living is called Gaibandha, and this part of the district is the most urban so people call it "Gaibandha City". It's urban in that the market here is quite large, including several multi-level shopping centers and some furniture and appliance stores in addition to the usual fruit and vegetable venders, tea stands, etc. and the houses are fairly densely packed without rice paddies in between them. Pictures of the city part will come soon, hopefully this weekend.

The house where I am staying is at the edge of the more densely populated area and this first set of pictures is from a walk in the opposite direction, away from town, where the scenery starts to look like a typical village almost immediately. Here are a couple of pictures to give you a sense of what the area looks like.

This set of pictures represents my first attempt to get the hang of aperture. Here are a few of my favorite shots from the day. You can tell when I got the aperture right in the portraits because the person is crisp and stands out from the blurred background. It's something that's hard to see on the camera screen while you are out shooting but that's very satisfying to see you've gotten right when you get home and upload the pictures to the computer.

Feel free to check out the whole album from that day by clicking on the albums link on the right side of the screen.