This blog is moving!

Accessing my blogger account has become almost impossible. First time I manage to get in in the past five days, and I don't even have all the features available. So, I created a new blog on WordPress. Please, join me there. The background and title of the blog might be different, but the content will still be about the things I'm passionate about : writing, our uprooted and globe-trotting life, expat issues, multicultural themes, bridging the world, traveling, mothering two TCKs - not necessarily in that order...

Here is the link : www.katianovetsaintlot.wordpress.com

It make take a few days to go live, as I'm still playing/struggling around with the new format.

Thank you to all who read my posts, and offered their comments, over the past four years. I hope to see you over at the new blog.

On feeling far, far, far from Holi.

Today is Holi, in India, or rather for Hindus all over the world. If not for Facebook, and the friends from /in India whom I'm in touch with via this social media tool, the day would have gone without my having the slightest notion that a mere 45 minutes (lucky birds) away from where I live, people are happily throwing colored powders at each other, and by the end of the day, millions of men, women, and children in India, young and old, rich and poor, will look as if they all plunged into a gigantic tub of multicolored paints.

Here I am, and my older daughter is the one
drenched in paint, on the left.
Holi 2010

As I sat at the diplomatic warehouse where expatriates buy their liquor (unlawful in Bangladesh), waiting for the clerk there to enter the items in his computer, I noticed pictures of Hindu gods under the glass top of his desk. Dare I ask him whether he's Hindu ? He might have been siting at someone else's desk. But then, I saw a red thread wrapped around his wrist.
"Is this your desk?" I finally asked.
"Yes," he answered, looking up at me, clearly puzzled by my question.
"Are you Hindu?"
This time, he seemed astonished. "Yes, I am."
I gave him my brightest smile. "Happy Holi."
There was a long silence. "How do you know about Holi?" he asked after a few seconds. I'd had time to sign my cheque.
When I told him, he relaxed, visibly, and told me that they celebrated Holi yesterday, at some open area close to the airport. But his hair had no trace of colors, nor did his skin. Quite different from India, where you see people with purple, bright pink or green hair or patches of skin for up to two weeks, afterward.

My younger daughter with one of her friends - Holi 2010

Still, I felt happy to have connected with someone who knows about Holi. On the way back, I was caught in the usual traffic, and I was trying to think of ways we could celebrate Holi with the girls. But where? I don't imagine our landlord or the people working in our building, all Muslims, would like it if we started throwing colored powders at each other, my daughters and I, in the narrow patch of grass in front of our building. I was thinking I could welcome them each with powders in my hands, and spread some on their faces when they walk in, this afternoon. Or maybe we could hold a Holi session locked in a bathroom. Mm...

For a crash course in playing Holi, or just a walk down memory lane, here is the link to my post, last year.

HAPPY HOLI EVERYONE, whether you're in India or not...

Have bicycle, will ride it in the streets of Dhaka

 So, I was a blogger gone mute, these past few months. I'd like to think I'm slowly extricating myself from this dark spell, and one way to do that is to shed my own bit of spotlight over an event I participated in, this past Friday.

Yes, it involved bicycles. And women. And a movement launched by an active and passionate young Bangladeshi woman.

AROHI:Pedaling the path to empowerment. 

Arohi means "rider" in Bengali, but the Sanskrit root "Aarohana" means ascendance. And the goal of this young initiative is to give women more mobility by encouraging them to use bicycles as their means of transportation.

The objective of this first ride through the Dhanmondi neighborhood was to get a feel about how women on wheels are perceived, in Dhaka.

Dhaka is plagued with one of the worst traffic situations I have ever encountered. Lagos, Nigeria, was pretty bad, too, but Dhaka will really stretch anyone's patience to its extreme limits. Spending fifteen, twenty minutes in a spot, without moving an inch, is routine. And of course, it's not exactly safe. To give you an idea, our car got into an accident, only today. An auto-rickshaw towing another auto-rickshaw, the driver totally heedless of the fact that the machine attached to his was going right and left, bumped into our car, parked on the side of the street, of course tried to continue without stopping, and the second auto caught our fender and tore it from our vehicle. Routine.  

Encouraging people to use bicycles would seem like a great idea, and a good way to reduce the number of cars circulating, but also, maybe, to reduce the number of buses. I will have to write a post about the buses that transport people, in this city. There again, I had never see anything like that. Not in India. Not in Nigeria. Nowhere in my travels. It would also give women more independence. It's certainly an ambitious goal. 

We started the ride in a quiet area,  but the itinerary took us along some busy avenues, and across some chaotic intersections. We had to deal with the traffic, and that included swarms of rickshaws coming at us from every which way. At some stage, I thought I'd lost the group. I was stuck behind several rickshaws, with no way through. Thankfully, one of the riders in our group was wearing a bright red scarf, and I was able to spot it, and follow it from afar - and eventually, to catch up. 

I could give you some funny details about how a fellow rider suddenly caught up with me and said : "it looks like you have a flat tire." And indeed, the rear tire was flat. Thankfully, it was not punctured. Or how I realized, after a few uncomfortable minutes, that I had taken my daughter's bicycle instead of mine (they are the exact same model, but of course my daughter being smaller, the seat was lower). As the organizers had thought of involving a mechanic, the tire and seat situations were promptly resolved. 

We had a car riding along with us, several photographers, and even a young woman in a rickshaw carrying  her two-weeks-old daughter in a baby sling - the little darling slept peacefully through the whole ride, I may add.

Below are some pictures that may give an idea of the kind of bedlam we found ourselves in. Add the noise, the pollution, the frequent stops to allow the whole group to remain together (not an easy feat). This was no peaceful ride in the countryside. But I enjoyed it. And I hope to do it again.

One year since the earthquake in Haiti

Almost three months since my last post. I'm almost through with a deadline, and I know I must again carve the time to keep my blog alive, but the main reason I'm writing today is that it is the first anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. One year, already.

My husband spent again almost three weeks there in December, called again by UNICEF to help curb the terrible cholera outbreak that's claimed some 3500 lives, so far. And my niece, yesterday, posted a bleak, heartbreaking status on her Facebook page, lamenting the fact that nothing has really been done in the past year. It's easy to be engulfed by feelings of despair when it comes to the reality of the situation, there. And she, a child of 13, is smack in the middle of it. She saw one of her school friends die of cholera, in class, a few weeks back. 

There are many articles in the press, today, some lashing out at the UN, others trying to look for the positive and shreds of hope in the middle of all the misery. Yes, it seems that very little was done. Yes, people are still living in horrendous conditions, under tents or tarpaulins. Yes, indeed, where is all the money that came pouring out in the days and weeks that followed the earthquake ? What happened to all the promises made by so many governments across the world ? And I'm not even going to mention the political crisis with the recent disastrous presidential elections. 

And yet, there are also countless stories of uplifting displays of courage. The work of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) since the earthquake, and during the ongoing cholera crisis - to point out only one - is nothing short of heroic. Everywhere, people are doing little or big things, helping out. 

http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=1477497

In the mist of all the press, good and bad, today, I would like to highlight a statement by the UNICEF head executive, Tony Lake, published in the Miami Herald, and an uplifting story printed in the New York Times. The Marché en fer rising again from the rubble and singing its freshly-painted bright colors in the sky of Port-au-Prince could be such a symbol of hope for a new Haiti...

And where do you think my children have lived all their young years?

Never would it occur to me to carry anything on my head. It doesn't matter that I have also lived the past ten years (and counting) between Nigeria, India and now Bangladesh, where this is the normal way of carrying most anything. But for them, it is the most natural thing to do.

Buying plants

We entered our apartment one week after our shipment was scheduled to be delivered, and five weeks after we left the neighboring country of India. Almost one month later, and we're still camping.  As it turns out, the ship with our container did make it to the local port, but the person in charge of all the paperwork was much too busy drinking to have the time and/or clarity of mind to do this work. For the past three weeks, he's been telling us all sorts of tales about why the delivery of the container was delayed, when in fact, he hadn't even begun to work on the process. This, by the way, in a Muslim country where alcohol is forbidden. We are now told that it will be delivered next Thursday, but by now, I carefully avoid thinking about it too much as it only makes things worse. If it comes, great. If it doesn't come, we'll go on camping out and try to be reasonably gracious about it ... Hm ! In the meantime, we do our best to try and fill out the empty space so it feels a little less like a transition hall, and more like a home. I bought some cushions. This week-end, we went in search of plants.

There are several nurseries along the road, not far from where we live, and no sooner had we stopped that men approached us eagerly. Except that one of them was not a man at all, but a young 10 year old boy. At first, I thought he was the son of one of the sellers. But he seemed so earnest, he was so fast to run into the masses of plants to lift them out - including some pretty heavy ones -and show them to us, that I started to wonder. As it turned out, he works there all day, is paid 1500 Bangladesh Thaka per month for his work (that's about 21 US Dollars) and goes to school in the evenings.

When he saw my camera, he took a pose, and said: "camera action !"

In the meantime, a crowd of people had gathered on the road and the sidewalk. Some were rickshaw wallahs hoping we might need their services. The rest were just watching us, passing the time, always curious to observe foreigners as they go about their lives.

As it turned out, two of these rickshaw men were right to have waited patiently, because they carried each a big plant  for us, after carefully tying them to the sides of the rickshaw with a piece of cloth (not sure if I would call it an orna, which is is the equivalent of the Indian dupatta.)

Our car looked like a jungle, but at least, now, we have a few heart-warming touches of green in the apartment.

The Virtual Tour for Kelly Starling Lyon's "One Million Men and Me"

A few weeks back, Kelly Starling Lyons sent me an email asking if I would like to participate in her virtual tour on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Million Man March (October 16) - which was the inspiration for her picture book, One Million Men and Me. I was thrilled, of course. Not only do I like Kelly and her writing, this also falls perfectly into my continuing commitment to bridge the world.

We had to overcome a few challenges : first, I needed to get the book, and as I'm told that postal services cannot be trusted, here, it meant asking a friend at UNICEF headquarters in New York to send it by the pouch, and hope it would get here on time... Which it did.  But when I opened the envelope, the book inside was wet and quite damaged. I had to very slowly peel off the pages glued together and set them under the fan to dry (my hair dryer is in the container, with the rest of our personal effects). The bottom of many of Peter Ambush's expressive illustrations had suffered, but at least, the text was complete.

I had also hoped to involve the library at the American International School of Dhaka, but it proved impossible - this I found out only a few days before my post was due. In the end, I invited our daughters' new friends, and we read the book together in our empty, very echoing apartment.

The group was composed of girls aged 6 to 10, all from mixed backgrounds (France, Haiti, Indonesia and the US), and kids who've all already lived in at least two countries, spanning several continents. We talked about the beautiful illustration on the cover, and the Million Man March. After I read the book, we looked at pictures of the March on the Internet, and also discussed the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs, on August 28, 1963, the civil rights struggle, and Martin Luther King Junior's historical speech. It was the perfect end to an extremely gloomy, rainy day in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

When I asked the girls what they had preferred in the book, they all mentioned the illustration with the African princess. One of them also said : "the first page, when the cousin said that no girls can go, but her daddy took her anyway." And she nodded, as if to say : there.

One Million Men and Me takes us back to that magical day, allowing us to experience it through the eyes of young Nia. We feel her pride, and we feel her joy, as she shares this very special moment with her father. She will never forget it, and nor will all the girls who read the book, I bet.

Thank you, Kelly, for this opportunity to discover and share your (and Peter Ambush) very touching book about not only the day when "Black men made history," but also the beauty and importance of the special bond between father and daughter (two daddies attended the reading, by the way, and my husband took the pictures.)

Anyone who posts a comment, here, or on Kelly's Facebook page or her blog, will be entered in a drawing for one of three prizes - One Million Men and Me T-shirt, tote bag or signed poster. Kelly will announce the winners on the March anniversary, October 16.

And how do children get to school and back home?

I am told that the government of Bangladesh has devised a plan to enroll the numerous local children in schools : there are classes from 7 am until 12 noon, and then from 12 until 5 PM. This means that at 12, every school day, the streets fill with boys and girls in uniforms, some heading home, others about to start their school day.

And how do they commute ?

New wall.

 I found the cable to download the pictures from my camera at the bottom of one of the bags I had not yet emptied. I can now show you our new wall.

When they first came to measure it, I asked if it was necessary to protect the floor. They just smiled, and said no. It was true.

First, they drew the the main lines on the wall, with pencils: the trees, the branches, a few animals.

Then, they started painting, using only small jars of paint and very thin brushes. See how the wrist supports the hand that paints, so the lines are even?

The young boy who was with them is the son of the man, above, and they assured me that he was 16 years old, even though he does not look a day older than 12.

And here is the wall.

I love looking at all the details, like these ladies drying a sari...

So, today, I grumble and whine.

Well, I can't download the pictures of my beautiful new wall from my camera, because somewhere between the hotel, the many bags, and the move to the new empty apartment, I seem to have lost or displaced the necessary cable. And so, today, I will rant.

My husband is in India. He had to go back there for some final debriefing. They have a big country meeting, and he will see his colleagues from Hyderabad, and those from Delhi and all over India, some of whom have become good friends.

Last night, at the dinner table, my daughters commented on the fact that it was not fair that he could go to India ; they also wanted to go, see their friends, familiar faces and places.

Brace yourselves, for here come the grumbling and whining. I know this is a new adventure, bla bla bla. I'm the first one to constantly clamor that we are so very lucky to have this kind of life - traveling the world, living in different countries, discovering and sampling new cultures, forever broadening our horizons.

But you know what? Some days, it's bloody difficulty. Especially at the beginning. Or rather, after the very beginning.

When we are no longer in the hotel, and having to learn the daily ways of our new host country.

When I discover that in order for me to do any kind of shopping, I basically need to give up half a day, and out of that half day, a good two hours (sometimes more) will be spent in the car, fighting maddening traffic jams.

When I start the day thinking that I need to work, but after an hour or two seating in the very uncomfortable forty-seventh-hand couch that we bought with the option of reselling it again as soon as we receive our personal effects, my back hurts like hell, and now, what do I do? The apartment is empty. Go out? Where? To get stuck in more traffic? And anyway, kids will be back in an hour or so, which means I don't even have time to go anywhere.

When I miss my friends back in Hyderabad.

And where is my husband, who is the person whom we are trailing? In India, working, yes, but he gets to see familiar faces, and to go back to a place that feels familiar, because that's where our home was for the past few years. Even at work, here, in Bangladesh, he's met up with colleagues, friends he already knew from New York, or elsewhere, people he's worked with before. He doesn't get to start all over in quite the same way.

Do we, expat, trailing spouses and children get any credit for this? We should.

Decorating our house with local art.

When I first arrived, an expat who's been living here for a while gave me a list of shops where I could find... this, and that. One drew my attention immediately because my friend mentioned that it had many local handicrafts. I think it's one of the first shops I visited, in fact. Here is what I saw as I went up the stairs of that small building.


The pictures were taken with my phone, and there wasn't much light, so they're not very good. Still, it gives an idea.

Inside the shop, which does, indeed, carry very pretty things made locally (name of the shop is JATRA which is a popular form of Bengali theatre) there was more of this beautiful art.


I bought a few pretty cups painted with the same kind of art, and as I was paying, found out that it is possible to hire the artists. It's just a matter of making an appointment, and giving your address. They then come to your home, office, school, whatever, and transform a boring wall into something brimming with life.



Three different styles are available, and the price is calculated according to how many square feet are painted.

As I type this post, I have three artists (two adults and one young boy whose age I wonder about) working right inside the apartment.

Before and After pictures to come in another post.

A visit to the slum

So, the title is bizarre. Are slums something to be visited ? Of course not. But this particular slum is located on the banks of the lake, just across the river from our hotel, and the stark contrast between our life, and the lives of the people and children living a few meters from us seems even more glaring when you have it under your nose on a daily basis.

Of course, we are used to the blue tents that pop up on all the constructions sites, in India, tents where entire families live for the duration of the work, until they move to another construction site. And of course, I am forever trying to highlight how lucky we are compared to all those who have nothing, or next to nothing. My children listen to me with that expression on their faces that's part baffled, part all-knowing-bored, so that I never quite know what they understand, and wether they even listen to me.

So when a few weeks ago (yes, we'd been here a week, or so) I received an email from a person involved with an NGO helping this particular slum, and inviting all who wanted to come and bring paper, crayons, pencils so they could organize a drawing contest, I thought this would be an opportunity to get a little closer and allow our daughters to maybe understand better what I mean with all this clumsy/sententious talk. Especially as we had seen these same children on the lake below, fetching rags and what not from the water aboard their little rafts.

I cannot say it was a success. The children were hot, bothered and maybe even a little scared by the intense proximity, the smells, etc, and they ended up leaving with their father, who knows all there is to know about slums, while I stayed a while longer, interacting with the children, and having a blast taking pictures, and showing them.

Bangles, conveniently hanging from the ceiling/roof.

At some stage, I was stuck in one room/shack with something like twelve kids. Each child had a piece of paper, and there were bags with crayons on the bed, but nobody dared touch them. We waited a bit, and as nothing happened, I suggested they take the bag of crayons, open it, and start their drawing. They were so eager to begin. 

All the children in that little room drew a house, local fruits..., and the national flag !

Shopping in a new country

The last update on my Facebook page goes : I miss Q Mart !!! Q Mart is the supermarket where we found pretty much everything we needed in terms of foods, cleaning supplies, etc, during our six years in India. It was our regular supermarket. I know. How more pathetic can it get, right? And yet...

When we arrived in Hyderabad, Q Mart was on the second floor of an ugly, small building, a little place crowded with dusty, overflowing shelves. But then, it moved across the street, and became this shiny, two floors, luminous supermarket where we found new surprises almost every week.

Adios India. Hello Bangladesh. On my first day alone, the driver took me to the places where expats do their grocery shopping. I looked around, was not overly impressed, but as we were staying at the hotel, and I was in my newcomer-eyes-wide-open-honeymoon phase, I didn't look too closely. There didn't seem to be much in terms of cheese, apart from the same old imported Cheddar, and some canned brie or camembert from Denmark, but, oh well. We'd survive.

Then, a couple of days ago, I realized that if we are to camp out in our almost empty apartment, we need cleaning supplies in order to scrub the place properly before, and once we move in. And so, here I am back at the supermarket, standing in the aisle, looking at bottles of pink, blue, green and yellow liquids with labels written in an alphabet I can't read, wondering how I will know which one is the floor cleaner, and where are the brushes, and I don't see the dishwashing sponges, and everything looks so foreign I feel a big lump in my throat. Of course, it's not a big deal.  I, the seasoned expat who's been there, done that, know that, and because I know it, I breath deeply and go in search of a basket. I can't find one, but they have small carts, the type that children love to push in supermarkets.

I take it back to the aisle, return to the row of shelves, grab a bottle at random, and unscrew the tap to smell the content. Well, yes, if I'm not going to know what I'm using, at least, it's got to smell good! A few people stare at me, probably wondering why I'm spending so much time in that aisle, and what on earth am I doing, anyway, sniffing all these bottles? I start filling the small cart, and each time I touch it, some sticky stuff remains on my fingers. I wipe it on my pants, thinking I will empty the jar of antibacterial gel as soon as I reach the car. Finally, I walk to the cashier, and honestly, I'm not feeling so hot, and that's when I see a separate shelf carrying the pink bottles of Lysol that I used in India ! I take one and feel like kissing it. It's like I just got reunited with a long lost friend.

Of course, I still have to find buckets, and a broom, and a mop...

I ended up visiting a couple more shops before I got everything I needed, and you understand, now, why I say that I miss Q Mart? Who wants to spend more than two hours shopping for cleaning supplies? Then again, once I know my way around a little better, I won't waste all that time, and by then, I'll know that I'm home - meaning a place where I've lived long enough to know where to find the barest necessities.

Another kind of exploration

So, we are still waiting for shipment to arrive, still waiting for apartment to be cleaned, repainted, etc, but this may well happen before said shipment reaches us, and after a month at the hotel, the overall feeling is that time has come to move in already. Which means camping out for a couple of weeks, or so... We can do that, right?

And so, the wheels start spinning in my little, overcrowded head. What does a family of four need, absolutely, in order to camp out in a big, empty apartment for a few weeks?

- Mattresses. Fortunately, one of our new friends, here, offered to lend them to us. Check.
- Sheets, linen, pillows, towels. I brought them in one of our suitcases. Check.

- Plates, glasses, cutlery. As luck would have it, Bengladesh is a big exporter of all types of chinaware. So, this morning, I entered one of the dozens of shops you see all over town, and bought a set of Pierre Cardin plates (can't take the French out of me, entirely, ever, it seems, but what can I say? The plates were cute.) And some bowls. And glasses. All we need is forks, spoons, knives, a couple of pans, and we're all set. Check.

- We also need a table and four chairs. I can't possibly ask the kids to eat (although I bet they'd love the idea) or do their homework on the floor. And if they can, I'm the one who will not spend three weeks working on my translation (due in December, clock is ticking) while sitting on a tile floor. There again, no issue. Another new friend  (do I need to emphasize the importance of quickly establishing a network of expat friends when moving to a new country?) sent me to this market (picture left). It's on the second floor, she said. What she didn't tell me was that I would find a maze of hundreds of shops selling pretty much everything under the sun, and some more. As it turns out, we can buy a table and four chairs, and already agree on a reselling price, so that in two or three weeks times, when our shipment arrives, we can bring them back to the same shop, and get a slightly lower price for them. A bit like renting. Isn't that marvelously convenient?

Next on my list of necessities: cleaning supplies. This will be another post.

First exploration of Dhaka

Three and half weeks into the school year, and the kids have their first school break (8 days) for the long Muslim festival, Eid-ul-Fitre. It celebrates the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan. The last days before Eid, we saw what it supposed to be the worst in terms of traffic, in Dhaka. Or so we're told. We also saw the city empty itself as entire families returned to their villages. And so, the last few days were quite peaceful, and we took advantage of that to take a cruise along the Dhaleswari river (more about that in another post) and to go and visit the old Dhaka. So far, I had not seen much, except for the Gulshan area, the Baridhara embassy zone, a busy street in Banini, and the airport road.

Old Dhaka reminded us somewhat of Charminar, in Hyderabad. Small streets, cables running everywhere, and I mean, everywhere...

Cables, cables, and more cables. And to think that it works.

and all of a sudden, the remnants of what must have been a beautiful old house,






or a small mosque.








We also went to see the docks where a long line of ferries waited for the passengers they would transport back to their villages, and we watched all the action there. People coming and going, loading or unloading boats, carrying bundles or boxes on their heads, repairing sandals, selling pan, etc.