In April I spent two weeks in Phongsali (pronounced pong-sa-lee) with coworkers surveying and selecting new target villages for our project in Muang Mai. We opened a new CRWRC office there this month with 10 staff working in 12 villages. I visited five villages that were quite remote: until a few months ago, they were 1-2 days’ walk from the nearest big town. Click on the map to see a flickr map of all the photos I took there. Over the next few days I will feature some of the best photos on this blog.

I stayed in Bangladesh a few extra days to visit my friend Cicely, from Calvin/Harambee days. She lives in Mymensingh, a city a few hours north of Dhaka, working as an MCC volunteer in a Salesian sisters’ convent. She teaches English to the novices (younger sisters) and aspirants (girls who want to become sisters).

Mymensingh provided a welcome change of pace for me after a busy week of work visits. Although the city is larger than the capital of Laos, it feels like a small provincial capital – not unlike where I live now. We spent time walking along the river, going to mass in Bangla, eating meals with the sisters, sipping tea with Mother Superior, etc… Mymensingh even has a Taize brothers community, so I attended morning prayers there. Like at mass, the Taize community uses tabla drums and a traditional table accordion accompanied by men and women singing Bangla melodies.
I also helped Cicely with some of her normal work: teaching English class, visiting a house for disabled boys, and playing with the orphan girls at the convent (yes, we taught them to sing “Baby Shark”). When I sat in on her English class, the aspirant girls asked many questions about Laos, the DR, and all the other places I’ve visited… it turned into a geography lesson. The sisters at the convent were incredibly hospitable, first preparing me “foreigner food” but quickly adapting it to my tastes once they saw I ate mostly Bangladesh food.

The food, by the way, was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip: where else can you eat a healthy vegetarian meal three times a day? We were often served rice, dahl, chapaties (indian tortillas), curried vegetables/fish/chicken/mutton, fresh fruit, good yogurt, and (of course) sweet, milky tea five times a day. Cicely introduced me to all the good street foods, small tea shops, and delicious breakfast places. I brought home four kinds of lentils to cook here.

The easiest way to do that is by way of photos. You can enjoy my photos from Bangladesh (in reverse order). The captions might give you an idea of what I was doing.

Here’s a quick summary: I was in Bangladesh for nearly two weeks; the first week spent visiting CRWRC’s big USAID-funded Child Survival Project. I went with three Lao colleagues, 4 people from CRWRC Cambodia, and a few Americans.

I went along because I want to learn about different approaches to community development. CRWRC Bangladesh provided an excellent learning opportunity, not only in health areas (the main focus of this exchange visit) but also in their general way of working with communities. Although the cultural context differs from Laos, many of the things I observed can be adapted to work here. Above all, the trip got me excited about what good community development can look like after ten or twelve years. I’m grateful to CRWRC for making this great learning exchange visit possible. I love my job!

Rickshaws

Originally uploaded by James Zwier.

I took this photo by accident but it turned out to be my favorite one from the whole trip. I think I was riding a rickshaw one morning from the MCC office to the convent in Mymensingh when I took this photo.

Since it was my first major holiday in Laos, it was my first time experiencing the typical Lao holiday outing, which turned out to be a lot like outings from my childhood in the Dominican Republic. We hadn’t planned anything in advance, of course, until one of our coworkers came by at 9am to rouse us into an outing. And so it was that we gathered our things, invited everyone to join us, stopped by house after house loading up a pickup truck until it was full of 19 coworkers, friends and family, went to the market to buy fruit, snacks, and things to make a meal, and eventually left town by noon.

We decided to go to the hot springs in Muang Kham, about an hour away. Riding in the back of a pickup truck with 11 people gave me a different perspective on a road that I have traveled dozens of times. Looking back instead of forward helps you see things in a new light. Once at the hot springs we lay our woven plastic mats by a cold stream and busily prepared lunch – washing vegetables in the stream, making green papaya salad, eating fruits and desserts as appetizers. We ate till we were beyond full with leftovers to spare. I took a nap in the shade with a coworker. Then we walked to the source of the hot springs, only to find that it is fenced off and piped downhill to cabins and shower rooms where you can pay to bathe in the warm water.

Leaving the hot springs, we went to a waterfall on the way back. Had I known such a beautiful place was only half an hour away from my home, I would have gone many times. We hiked down a switchbacked mountain trail for half an hour to the base of a 50-foot waterfall. I thought this was it, so I took a dip in the cool, deep water at its base. Then we climbed up a trail through the river, up stairs cut into the rock, through pools and past more cascades, over log bridges and under tree roots. It took nearly an hour to reach the top waterfall – such a beautiful hike!

If you come and visit me, we must spend a day at the falls. So far my parents and Sarah are planning to come. If you can’t afford the plane ticket, then you can look at my photos of the outing.

Besides being the administrative center of the Netherlands (and some UN offices, like the International Tribunal of Justice), The Hague is a huge cultural center, with dozens of museums and even more music venues and theatre shows. Only a few weeks and a bunch of money could do that justice. So I walked around.

In Haarlem we met with two more of our group for dinner at a small (but evidently popular) Italian restaurant. Besides walking around a beautiful town, I enjoyed being with my friends. We have great conversations about theology and worship and stuff. We headed back to Utrecht relatively early, because the trio of French delegates invited us to their room for a third night of wine and cheese. Tr�s bien!

Picture this: A canal cuts through the main shopping district, and a story below street level dozens of cafes spread their tables across brick terraces along the bank. Kayaks and pleasure boats vie for space in the narrow canal, floating along as slow as possible. It’s a sunny afternoon, and our friendly waiter who already brought us a round of coffee and another of Heineken, suggests we try the local summer favorite, a light white beer. It’s as good as he promised: light clouded yellow, a small cap of foam, and a slice of lemon to balance the hint of sweetness. Excellent conversation on quantum physics and philosophy ensues, courtesy of Elise, bound for graduate studies at Notre Dame in Philosphy of Physics. Dean reads a chapter of Fleming Rutledge, Kent digs up a great quote from Abraham Heschel, and I read two pages of Milan Kundera. Life is good.

We walked downtown for a few hours, across canals and down narrow streets with quaint three-story houses and shops. The church in downtown Utrecht is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, and less than half of it remains from a tornado a few hundred years ago.

I took a nap in the afternoon, and for lack of a watch or an alarm clock, I slept too long and was 15 minutes late to our choir rehearsal. I walked in with a sheepish grin on my face. That evening, we had an informal worship service and taught people some songs. As I walked out of the chapel, the sun was setting and so Elise Krull and I sat out on a brick wall and jammed. For the next two hours a dozen people gathered and we sang songs in English and French. It was good.

I am currently reading Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” a postmodern Czech classic. Unable to sleep, I read this morning from 3am to breakfast. Today, we have a public worship service at a church nearby; also an audience at the City Hall.