"Watch this!!" (or, "How to part w/ your possessions in two easy steps...")

Hello everyone! Just a quick update to let everyone know that I was robbed the day before yesterday in Dhaka. I'm OK and maybe the word "robbery" is too interactive for what actually happened, but it certainly was the result! I was a on a rickshaw (if you're not sure, Google it!), heading to the bus terminal to catch the inter-city bus to Bogra. I had my larger bag on the floor beside me and my smaller bag on my lap. I even had a hand on it so it wouldn't fall or anything. Well, the "anything" is what happened - two guys on a motorcycle slowed beside us just long enough for the back guy to snatch the backpack off my lap. They sped away as the rickshaw driver and I looked on in shock! You can't catch a motorcycle with a rickshaw, so I quickly had to swallow the fact that my laptop, cell phone, flip video camera, keys, flash drive, dollar store sunglasses (hey, they were my favorite dollar store sunglasses), and around $70 (5,000 taka!) - were gone!! The whole thing happened in the blink of an eye!

Of course, I'm lucky. I wasn't "mugged" in the traditional sense - no harm done to me or the rickshaw driver. It was difficult to see my things speeding away, but as I thought about it on the long trip to Bogra, how important are those things, really? Most of it can be replaced. A few things, like my monthly financial report, the receipts, some documents and video clips are irreplaceable, but all in all I came out of it not too badly. And it made me consider anew just how attached we can be to things. Especially electronic things. (If you're not sure of this, just consider NOT using your computer at all for 48 hours...I think most of us couldn't do it!)

Well, enough of THAT - on to "Watch THIS!!"...

Two days before the robbery, I was in a toy shop, looking for a gift for Piash, the 2-year old and only child at my host family house. We were having a good time looking around at the odd assortment of goodies in the store, including snow globes, greeting cards w/ odd usages of the English language, and even an Eiffel tower w/ a hidden dagger inside! Anyway, I finally found something I thought he might like - a roll-up dart board w/ magnetic darts - the kind that won't hurt anybody or anything. Or so we thought. The store manager encouraged Phil and I to try it out, so we divided up the darts and got to it!! Phil hit the bull's eye on his first shot, so I was pretty bummed and decided to do a trick shot for my last throw. After pronouncing the infamous "Watch this!", I proceeded to throw my last shot underhanded, like I had done so many times growing up.

[I'd like to interject here that while growing up we had a REAL dart board with REAL "kill the kids" type darts, not these silly magnetic things! Our dart board, surrounded by a thousand tiny holes in the wall (mostly the attempts of my two siblings at playing the game...!!), was located in the "ping pong room". The "ping pong room" also housed the washer and dryer, so the ping pong table that my dad made served a double purpose. Come to think of it, so did the ping pong paddles, but that's another story...]

... Since the magnetic dart was rather lightweight, it sailed clear over the top of the dart board towards the back of the store. Apparently, it was NOT as "lightweight" as we thought, though, because it managed to bring two glass shelves filled with the snow globes and ceramic nick-knacks crashing to the floor! There was water, glass, and fake snow everywhere!! We all gasped simultaneously, not sure whether or laugh or cry. The short of it is that, a half-hour and 3,300 taka later, we were freed and could properly have a good laugh about it. As an after note, I've agreed to be more careful in situations involving the phrase "watch this!", but I think Phil still plans to carry plenty of cash with us, just in case! (Thanks for bailing me out, Phil, and for splitting the losses - I owe you one!)

So, all in all, it was an exciting week in Dhaka, with three meetings as well! If anyone would like the exciting details of the meetings, please write me separately. Thanks.

In the meantime, if anybody wants to contribute to the "Larry Jones Robbery & Green Dart Catastrophe Fund", please send a check with "LJR & GDCF" on the memo line to Varina Church of the Nazarene (look it up!). The treasurer there is a good friend of mine and knows how to get the money to me.

(Sorry, no video for this posting! Nor the video I took of Eid, where the goats and cows are slaughtered right in the street. Nor the videos from the host family house... (shaking my head sadly...))

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!! --Larry

PS - Bangla lessons are going well: Oi khelnar dokan ajke khub lav koreyeche!

Translation: "That toy store made a good profit today!"

Mosquito Maintenance

I'm with a host family now, and the mosquitoes may be a problem. I mean the mosquitoes in my room - not in the common area, of course, as I expect to get munched on while I'm dining, watching TV (emphasis on the "watching", and not necessarily understanding), chatting w/ the fam, etc. Speaking of the family, I believe there are some nine occupants in this house, which brings to mind the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares! (You can now safely guess my age. ) But they're never there at the same time, so I can't be entirely sure if the information I've been given is correct. People come and go, eat and watch TV, read the paper and prepare food, play with or (mostly) scold Piash, the brilliant but naughty two-year-old who sits in my lap in the common area or sneaks into my room to mess w/ my stuff. And it's not that I have a lot of stuff there at the house, but having a two-year-old around makes it seem like a lot more!

Anywho, he's given me an idea, that cute little Piash. What I need to do... (hey, did you notice that I used both italics AND bold on the word "need"? Would you like to know why?? I find that italics by itself just doesn't cut it, but adding bold to italics really grabs you!!) So what i need to do is visit each room at 3:00 am and figure out just who really sleeps in that house! And it would even be helpful to figure out who sleeps w/ whom, as I'm still not sure who the marrieds and who the singles are! So I've calculated that this would actually work (to sneak around at 3 in the morning), but the risk of having host family members wake up to a 6'2" white guy slowly opening a creaky door and peering through the mosquito net to see who's in there....well, that might be too much for some of them!! So I'm going to have to continue w/ the current methodology; which, though cumbersome, doesn't lead to any heart attacks.

Ah, mosquito nets...and this was the point I was starting to make. Mosquitoes are numerous and ever-persistent here. They remind me a bit of deodorant or anti-perspirant, only in a negative way. As I climbed into bed last night, I had my little battery-operated lamp with me in order to read some. As I started to read, I noticed a small, black form fly under the lamp. Sure enough, a mosquito had gotten inside the net!! As anyone knows who has ever used a mosquito net, you have to kill that one mosquito or it can surely mess up your whole night's sleep! So I watched it - they're awfully difficult to kill in mid-air - as it flew over to the side of the bed where the net rises towards the ceiling. It found a nice spot to land...in the middle of perhaps TEN other mosquitoes!!! Aughhhhh!

I just spent ten minutes looking up "mosquitos" online because the spell checker at blogspot.com doesn't like it. It prefers "mosquitoes". But two different dictionaries, including the formidable Merriam-Webster, suggest that I can use either one!! So on to the mosquitos... (stupid blogspot)

So then I did a dumb thing, I guess. I still felt like I needed to kill that one little mosquito that had flown under my lamp, so I forcefully whacked the side of the net! Well, I may have gotten him (I don't remember), but all of a sudden I had a swarm inside the net! I was surrounded! So I slipped out of the mosquito net, looking back at it, and wondered how in the world it got its name! More like "Mosquito Apartment Complex where dinner is served nightly at 10 pm"!! I guess they wouldn't sell as many that way, but it would be a major achievement for truthful advertising.

Anyway, I bunched up the net, trapping them all inside, and thought to myself, "Now, how long IS the average life span of a mosquito??" But I figured it would take them at least 24 hours to die, so I turned on the overhead fan (another way to keep the mosquitos at bay), bundled up (it's starting to get pretty cool at night here), and went to sleep!

I just looked up "mosquito life span" on the Internet. I shouldn't have. It's not good (for humans, anyway), and you learn other things about mosquitos that you really didn't want to know! It looks like I may be buying some bug spray on the way home tonight... :(

Larry

Moon Verified - Eid to begin on 17th

On the front page of today's paper, a small article declared that the National Moon Sighting Committee has verified the "Zilhaj" moon over Bangladesh, indicating that one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, Eid-ul-Azha, can start on Nov. 17 (next Wed, as predicted).

And I thought WE had a LOT of committees in North America...

Anyway, if you're interested in learning more about Eid-ul-Azha, sometimes called the "Festival of Sacrifice", look it up on Wikipedia or any other online source. Interestingly, the holiday marks Abraham's obedience and willingness to sacrifice his son, though Christians and Muslims differ on which son was offered up for sacrifice!

I'm in Dhaka next week for meetings, so I'll experience the Eid there. They say that the streets are full of slaughtered animals during these two days - not the most pleasant of sights/smells - but still an important religious holiday for Muslims the world over.

--Larry