Part 21: Sometimes There's Trouble; Sometimes There's Sorrow

February 25, 2023

Choyghoria, Batiaghata

District Khulna, Bangladesh

February began with revivals. Neil and Ang Brubaker, our field secretary, came from Ohio; and Carl and Judith Giesprecht, our CSI overseer, came from California. We had the pleasure of hosting them for four days before revivals. From Khulna, they visited the two outposts as well as CSI’s eye clinic. Neil’s brought their almost-15-year-old daughter, so Whitney was glad to have someone to play with.

Gopalgonj hosted revivals again, same as last year. It was pretty much the same song, second verse. Everyone met for breakfast at the church, then preaching service, cha break, lunch, rest, evening service, supper, then go home. They squished visits and member’s meetings in-between, and in true Bangladesh style, nothing was ever on time. The cooks did a terrific job feeding a large crowd three times a day.

It felt a little strange being in such an empty van on the way home. Since my family came to visit on January 7, we had had less than a week without guests at our house. It was awesome having company, but we all felt a need to get back to normal life.

Side note: Greg (Lisa’s older brother) and Anita Shetler and their two children, just arrived from Kidron yesterday. They seem like a grand time! Brock and Brandi are very thrilled to finally have their cousins here. _________

One day, when Shanto had come to Sunday school, he asked me what they could feed me. He said that they wanted to have us over for a meal before I leave, and they wondered what I wanted to eat. My favorite thing to eat here is chicken or catfish. I was just about to suggest one of these things when I suddenly remembered something: soybeans.

Then, one day, when waiting at Proshan’s dokan, I saw a bag of something that looked very much like dog food. I inquired about them and was informed very enthusiastically that they were soybeans! “We prepare them just like you eat your meat, in curry,” Rothin had explained. It’s apparently a very affordable food, and very common among the Hindus since many Hindus are vegetarians.

After that, I had asked Sister Shathi if she ever made them. “Oh yes, it’s very common food!” she had said. She had insisted that she make them for me. That had been my first time eating them, and I was in love.

Now, standing on the school porch with Brother Shanto, I suddenly forgot chicken, catfish, mutton, beef, and even shrimp. “I want soybeans again,” I said with an increasingly hungry belly.

“Ok, we will make you soybeans.” he had assured me that day. But I assumed it would be a few weeks before my going. Instead, Hridoy told us the next week that his family wanted to have us over for soybeans!

I think I ate more than everyone else that night. I ate and I ate and I ate some more. I stuffed myself to my heart’s content without caring what anyone thought of me. We had soybean curry, egg curry, vegetables, and dal. For dessert, they brought out my all-time favorite, doi. After we were done, I could hardly get up off the floor.

Usually, we all sit in a circle on the floor in the middle room of their house. Shathi and Nupor usually sit in the middle of the circle and serve everyone, waiting to eat until we have finished. Tonight, however, everyone ate together in the tiny bedroom where they usually eat when it’s just their family. It felt really nice to eat together. It felt like we were one big, happy family. _______

One day last week, the kids and I were just going in from recess when a lady with just her eyes showing appeared at the gate. She had a baby in her hands, and I knew that she had come for milk. The baby was so small that I thought he must be a newborn. I love fawning over new little brown babies, so I went into the shed where Tulshi was weighing the baby. I took one look, and my heart broke.

Weeks before, Trevor had showed us a picture of a baby who had come into the clinic. There was, in simple words, a hole in his face. Where his eyes should have been were two slits. Tears come from those slits when he cries, they said. From the middle of his eyes to his bottom jaw was a gaping hole. To feed the baby, they put milk in a little dropper and drop it into the hole in his face. A little nubbin hung down from the middle of his eyebrows, just about a half inch long. Was that supposed to be a nose? I couldn't look at the picture very long. Nobody had thought the baby would live.

But, weeks later, here that baby was. He was almost five months old. Even though it had been hard for me to look at the picture, I couldn’t stop staring at him in person. He had grown bigger, and I could see more details on his face. His soft black hair came to a point in the middle of his wide forehead. His hair had a little cowlick, and his olive brown was perfect. He squirmed as Tulshi gently took him from the padded scale and handed him back to the lady. And from the middle of his eyes to the bottom jaw, there truly is a gaping hole.

Looking closer now, I saw that the baby didn’t even have any gums in the front of his mouth. His left ear was crumpled and deformed. His right ear looked normal, except it didn't have a hole. Each of his arms only lasted until his elbows, where two fingers protruded off in different angles. The lady said his legs only went to his knees, with two toes the same as his fingers. As I touched his hands, he moved his fingers around mine.

Lisa had come, and we started asking questions. I had earlier assumed that the lady was the boy’s grandma, so I asked her. She told us she was no relation. That begged the question of how she wound up taking care of this child. She told us the whole story:

The lady lives in Sachibunia, three villages away. The baby had been born in a hospital, and when the mom saw the baby, she ran away. From what I understood, somebody from the hospital looked after him for a bit. Then one day, one of the lady’s neighbors called here and said they had found a baby in a biscuit package on the side of the road. They were scared and didn’t know what to do. She came running. She opened the bag, and inside was the child with his face to the sky. She took him home and warmed water to bathe him. She washed all the dirt off his face. Then, she ran to the neighbors and got milk for him to drink.

From that day on, she has cared for the baby. Now, she comes to our gate to get milk formula that CSI provides for poor families with babies. “If Allah wills it,” she told us, “He will have surgery when he is six months old.”

I don’t exactly know what kind of surgery they want for him. One nurse we know has said that she thinks they can fix his face and give him a fully functional mouth. She said they can fix the ears if he has an eardrum. But she was sad about the eyes. “I don’t think there are any eyeballs in there,” she said. She was also certain there was nothing that could be done about his hands and feet.

“But why did God let him live?” the nurse wondered aloud. “Why didn’t He let the baby die on the side of the road?” I wondered the same thing. There must be some plan for him.

“God knows,” the nurse had said. I wish he could just go to heaven, where there doesn't have to be any trouble for him and he can be perfect and surrounded by nothing but love. _________

It’s usually peaceful around here in the evenings. Usually, the same things happen after the sun goes down: the ladies finish their cooking and cleaning for the day, the men head off to the bazaar for fellowship and merry-making.

But one evening, the peace was broken by hollers and swiftly running feet. I left the badminton court to see what was happening, and quickly saw that I wasn’t the only curious one. People were fogging out of their houses and running down the road with their flashlights. The movement of the many flashlights against the trees made it look like flashing police lights. “What’s going on?” I asked someone.

“Someone stole something!” they answered breathlessly. Tulshi quickly grabbed a flashlight and checked all around the house. If there really was a thief on the loose, he could have jumped our wall and ran behind our house to hide. His search came up empty, so we all joined the mob that had gathered up the road.

Here’s what we learned: three boys, aged anywhere from 15-18 years old, had stolen a water pump from a tube well. If they had managed to sell the water pump, they would have earned anywhere from 6,000-7,000 taka. ($600-$700 USD) This was apparently the third time something had been stolen from this house, and the homeowners had resorted to installing a CCTV camera so they could catch the thieves. It had worked.

Except two of the rogues had slipped out from the village’s grasp. They had managed to catch one, however, and they were having their way with him. As Aakash explained it to me: “When someone steals something in Bangladesh, we deal with it with our hands.”

A crowd had gathered around the boy, who looked to be about seventeen. I looked at his face when they shone a light at it, and he had been drenched with water. He stood there expressionless as they hit him, screamed at him, and tossed them around. I asked Aakash what would happen to the boy, and he nonchalantly said, “They will probably tie him up and beat him, and then hand him over to the police.”

Oh, the Bangladeshis thought it was great. Many of them looked on with amusement. Some of them were taking videos for Facebook or Snapchat. All were talking excitedly about what had happened. I looked on in horrified curiosity, not being able to peel my eyes away. At 7:30, the prayer call soared up from the four surrounding mosques, adding an eerie wailing to the show. I felt like it stained everything with an immobile rigidity; a combination of two things that haven't changed in centuries.

Just like Aakash had said, they really do settle matters with their hands. Only days before, a fight had broken out right in front of our house. I was making sweet and sour chicken and had just started the stove to heat my oil. Suddenly, I heard shouting and yelling and what sounded like muffled impacts. Hridoy and Antor were over that evening, and Hridoy stopped mid-sentence and ran outside. I followed, completely forgetting my oil heating on the stove.

I stepped outside the gate to see an EZ bike loaded with ten laughing boys. We heard that they had been the ones who had started the fight. They had come from a different village, targeted a boy from our village, beat him up. The boy they beat up had been in a fight with some of their friends at one point, even breaking one of their hands in the process. After everything calmed down, there was a little gathering outside our gate while we tried to figure everything out. Everyone said that the boy from our village, the one that had gotten beat up, deserved everything he got. They said that he was the one with problems and that he was khubi kharap (very bad).

The next day, Tulshi asked me if I had heard that there was a fight beside our house. “I was here and saw it!” I told him. Then, he told me the same thing everyone else had been saying: that boy was “Khubi kharap.” Tulshi had even gotten mad at him one day after he said some nasty things to his niece. “I took him and threw him in the pond,” he said. Then I wondered: would one of my uncles throw someone in a pond for me? Surely they would. ;)

(P.S. Whitney discovered my oil- “going and going” as she said- on the stove and turned it off for me.) ________

Well, that about does it for me. Trisha and I have been told to plan to come home around the end of May or first of June. I can hardly believe that my time is nearing an end. In a way, I feel like I’m losing a life. Somedays, I cling to the things around me, refusing to believe that I won’t have them someday.

Someday, I won’t be awakened at 6:16 like clockwork every morning by an eager woodpecker at my window. Someday, I won’t hear the prayer calls soaring mournfully up and up into the heavens, summoning faithful followers of Allah to prayer. Someday, I won’t have the little children with big brown eyes surrounding me, impatiently waiting to show me their coloring picture from Sunday School.

I suppose I should think of it as having gained a life. Because someday, I will be washing dishes at a sink somewhere, and a memory will come; a memory of washing dishes in a fishpond on the side of Shanto’s yard. Someday, I will watch children at play and remember the many hours of soccer I played with the village children in the sweltering heat. Someday, I will hear a bus horn and remember all the buses that barely missed me, touching the hem of my dress as they squeezed past. And I believe that everytime I drink hot tea, I will smile as I fondly remember Emon and his big ears as he heats the water to make me a cup of cha in his family’s cha dokan on the other side of the world. I will always love Bangladesh and her people.Maybe instead of losing, I’ve gained everything...

Goodbye for now, -Kalli