Opposites Attract

“Right then,” I said to the attentive Grade Eights “Today we shall look at magnetism. And I have some magnets right here to show you.”

This was a moment of some excitement for both the students and myself, I have to say. In the course of the two years I have spent at LAMB. Most of the subjects I have taught have been science related. Not bad for someone who qualified as a musician and has spent most of the last eighteen years teaching music. Although my teaching qualification qualifies me to teach “any subject” to “any age group” there are some subjects I am not likely to try my hand at.

Physical Education, for instance.

Anyone who really knows me will need no telling what a disaster it would be if I was left in charge of a bunch of teenagers to use what I consider to be illegal weapons in the form of cricket bats, balls and that most deadly of weapon, the skipping rope. Even worse if it was my Fourth Grade class who sit attentively for me in our science class but, I suspect, would become as stealthy and lethal as Ninja dwarves if allowed anywhere near shuttlecocks and racquets. And then there is hockey. The thought of me controlling (just not possible) a group of teenage girls playing that particular form of abuse does not bear thinking about. I suspect I would find myself in hospital as much as most of the losing team (and a fair number of the winning side too).

Similarly, despite great artistic skill buried deep, deep within my soul, I think that teaching art could only result in either a new wave of artistic expression that would leave the Dadaists speechless or a disaster in the classroom of epic proportions which would result in the cleaning ayah not speaking to me for the rest of my (presumably short) life.

Still, most other subjects I have taught from time to time and I very nearly went down the maths/science route for my own career before choosing music so this is a reasonably safe area for me to teach. Except for one area.

Practicals.

Now, it is a well-established rule in the science world (at least in the one involved with education) that if an experiment can go wrong it will go wrong. I regularly suggest to my students that if they do an experiment that actually goes right then they must take care not to damage the universe further as when an experiment goes right the whole universe is destroyed and instantly replaced with an identical one (who says I can’t screw with their minds at least a little bit). We would never know it has happened, but it is just damned annoying to know that it has.

On a more realistic plane, I do have the very real fear that if I am responsible for an experiment I could be responsible for a whole range of deaths and disfigurements. Electrocution, acid burns, poisoning, glass shards ripping out eyes, hearing loss, fingers trapped in contraptions and (most heinous of all) tea spilt on the teacher’s laptop. I have not heard of a single school in the UK that has not had some kind of accident usually resulting in a trip to the hospital. Of course, the staff there will have been fully trained and experienced, they themselves having conducted hundreds of experiments so that when it goes wrong (and it will) they know they did everything right. I don’t think I could ever be entirely sure.

So, I will teach theory up to any level of complexity but I do not do experiments. Instead I spend hours downloading videos from the internet (legally, I hope) of others doing experiments to show the kids instead. Generally, this works well but, well, it must be said, it can be boring. I’ve not yet fallen both asleep and off my stool whilst actually talking and teaching but I have come close. I am reminded of the teacher at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter stories who died during a break time and didn’t realise it, so has carried on teaching ever since. That could be me one day.

Some of my students (not many, I’ll admit) tell me I am more interesting than other teachers who are all boring and this is nice to hear, even if it is that when talking to said ‘other’ teachers it transpires the same kids said the same thing to them except with order of teachers reversed! Still, I would hate you to think that I was deadly boring. But even I sometimes think an experiment or two wouldn’t go amiss.

So, it was for all this reasoning that there was great excitement that I had got a bunch of magnets out for the Grade eight science class. Magnets, I thought, are perfectly safe short of flinging one into someone’s eye. Even I, with my lack of practical experience, can handle magnets. Though playing with magnets would seem a simple and boring thing to do in a UK high school, here in the Dinajpur region of Bangladesh the resources we have are very limited though they increase with every coming year thanks to helpful donations from many supporters all over the world. And the fact that ‘Uncle Ken’ does not normally touch anything he is suspicious of being ‘scientific’ in purpose (let alone ‘sportslike’) meant that this was a special occasion.

I had just been teaching static electricity and putting forward the concept that opposites attract and like charges repel. We had drawn up diagrams of magnets with North and South poles and how the magnetic fields point towards or away from each other depending on the polarity. I took out two magnets with their poles clearly indicated.

“So, let’s make sure that you have all been paying attention.” I said with that smug air of a teacher who knows he is on safe ground “If I move the North pole of this magnet towards the North pole of the other, what will happen?”

“They will repel, Uncle”

I confirmed that I considered this a most excellent answer and proceeded, slowly to push the two north ends together demonstrating in practice the wisdom of my teaching.

Kerchink went the magnets as both North ends stuck themselves together with such satisfying speed as to leave no one in any doubt that, far from repelling, they had in fact shown every indication of being attracted.

I doubt I could have been more embarrassed had I come to school and too late realised I had forgotten to put any clothes on (well, ok – maybe that one would top it) and the class (including another teacher who was observing me teach to ‘learn’ how I do it) burst into laughter. I, in true Basil Fawlty manner then did it again and again, putting South and South together, watching North and South repel and so on in some vague hope that somehow the result would change. It didn’t.

Having gone from the heights of excitement and confidence, I now plummeted to Eeyorelike depths and realised that my hopes of demonstrating controlled nuclear fusion in the science lab before I leave were irrevocably and permanently put on hold. I could not make even the simple laws of magnetism work in the classroom.

In truth, it was funny and I quickly did what any self-respecting teacher would do. I blamed someone else.

“Oh.” I said. “Someone must have written N and S the wrong way round.” True enough, though one magnet had the letters etched, the other had them written by hand in pen and must have been written in error. The class was pacified and we moved swiftly on. The class departed at the end of the lesson and I was left to ruminate on what had happened.

This, I thought, is why I do not do experiments.

Still, it could have been worse. I could have been teaching hockey to girls.

I Have A Dog

“I once had a dog,

Or should I say,

He once had me.”

With apologies to John Lennon but I could not resist opening with that paraphrase which neatly sums up my situation at the moment here at LAMB.

Bardy is a stray dog who, for some reason known only to him, has decided that our home and family are to be his home and family. This decision of his has not come without problems as well as joys and has left me ruminating over the meaning of pets and the relationship of animals with Bangladeshis.

Bardy himself is something of an unwanted dog. Even his name is not right. Apparently it was said to be his name as a joke by a kid from the school who actually gave another kid’s nickname. Somehow the word got around and it stuck. He is just the most incredibly affectionate and friendly dog who loves the kids at the school and is really pleased to see anyone. Unfortunately, he also goes where there is food and that means hospital areas and the school at snack break time. Though Bardy himself is as soft as anything, where there is one stray dog others are sure to follow and they certainly do.

Bardy’s friendliness to humans becomes submission to other dogs and as a result he gets ‘chewed out’ literally and this means a lot of barking, fighting, growling and teeth baring that scares children and adults alike. And that’s where it all goes wrong and gets confused. Scared people means complaints, complaints mean there is a problem and where there is a problem – at least as far as strays are concerned – it means removal by the only means likely to work. As a dog-lover that scenario upsets me. Bardy is, in a very real sense, living on Death Row. He doesn’t know it, but he could find that one day he wakes up and it is his last - well before his time.

Of course, that is a last resort but the clock is ticking as options continue to run out. No one wants to do the job of getting rid of the strays but at the same time most people want ‘someone’ to do it. As long as it is not them. So I continue to feed Bardy, give him limited shelter if he wants it in the form of our porch which I keep open at night so he can sleep safely, I keep other dogs away and I train him in the hope that deshis here will see that these animals are intelligent and capable. But he is not mine and I can’t protect him all the time. Sometimes, he has turned up bleeding all over from wounds inflicted by other dogs or by men who have beaten him.

I saw him kicked the other day before I could tell the person to stop because he was ‘my dog’ (To say the truth, that I belong to the dog, would just be way too confusing). Interestingly, Bardy barely moved. Didn’t growl, didn’t run away. He just acknowledged he had been kicked and carried on barking at the stray dog that had appeared in the noisy manner that had elicited the kicking in the first place. I found myself comparing this to the lot of many women here – especially the poor ones – who are often beaten, punished, scolded, starved or otherwise harmed by husbands or (as often as not) mothers-in-law. Usually the response, when asked why they put up with it, is the same. “Why would I not? I am poor. I am a woman. This is what happens.” Bardy seemed to say the same thing. “I am kicked. I am a dog. This happens.”

You may well be upset that I have just compared women to dogs but please don’t misunderstand me. Very often the value of a woman is about the same as a dog and certainly less than the value of a cow. A cow for a village man produces milk and meat that can be sold or used by the family. A woman produces nothing. In our first day of living in Bangladesh we were taken to the Language school in Banani where we would spend 3 months learning the language. The woman who was the head there led us into her office. As we spoke I noticed the poster behind her on the wall. In Bangla it said “My wife does nothing” and the picture was of a traditionally dressed married woman with around 20 arms coming out of her, each doing a different task – cooking, cleaning, washing children, milking the cow, cutting corn in the field and so on. But she does nothing. A far cry from the men we often see huddled together by the bank of a river playing cards and gossiping for hours on end.

Our own ayah (who is, in my opinion, one of the most important women I have ever had the honour of knowing and learning from), works with incredible efficiency and speed in our house, often second-guessing what we are thinking of when we forget to actually ask her for some lunch and so on. She goes home after a full day’s work and then does all the work for her own house. On her day off, she tells us she does even more work there and that, in some ways, coming to our house to work is more like a chuti (holiday). We have been to her house many times and it is beautifully kept and maintained despite the difficulties of living in a house made of mud and a country that is wet for most of the time. But I digress.

Life, as you may imagine, out in Dinajpur (in the Northwest of Bangladesh) can be pretty hard for all – man or woman – and working in a hospital environment where people often only come as a last resort (and therefore dying), means that we see it at its worst. Many of the Bideshis (foreigners) here struggle with what they see, working all hours and emotionally being drained of energy. But we only see it and get involved in trying to help. It is the deshis who actually suffer the diseases, the poverty, the malnutrition and the abuse. They do so, usually, stoically and with great honour and though I can never empathise with their plight (to suggest I could would be an insult), I feel proud to have served these amazing people.

Yet, (and please read what I have written again to weigh what I say next properly) of all the things we have seen in two years, all the pain as well as joy, the one image that sticks in my mind and heart is not one of people. This article is about dogs remember.

Whilst still in our 3 months training in Dhaka, my wife and I were walking to the Language school one early morning as the dokanders were setting up their shops on the streets. Suddenly we heard a yapping from the other side of a street. This cute little puppy was waddling around obviously excited by everything it was seeing and running up to anyone who came near the stall that had been set up. We assumed the puppy belonged to the dokander as it seemed very healthy and not mangy and thin like strays normally look here. I can only describe it as looking and acting like the Andrex puppy off the adverts back in the UK. We carried on walking but we were both moved (in truth, Vikki had melted). A little further on we turned back to look at the little thing waddling across the street to a nicely dressed man on the other side who was passing by.

“I wonder if it belongs to anyone” Said Vikki “it’s so cute”.

I thought it must have belonged to someone – the stall owner at least – but we never found out. At that point, the well dressed man, who was grinning but obviously irritated by the animal, started to kick it gently and push it back into the street with his foot. At just that moment a car drove slowly by and he pushed the puppy with his foot straight under the car’s front wheel. Time seemed to freeze as we watched, horrified as the body lay motionless after the car had passed. There was no commotion. Just the young man kicked the body with his foot to make sure it was dead and carried on with his walk to work. I don’t think he had intended to kill the animal, just get rid of it. He still grinned but now with a sheepish “oops” kind of a look.  But he didn’t care either way and nor did any of the dozen or so people milling around at the time who saw what happened. We, however, felt sick in the stomach and though we went to the school for our studies, we could not concentrate. Even now, I feel ill to remember what happened.

When I see Bardy (or any animal) I am reminded of that incident and the strange relationship that Bangladeshis have with animals. Cows and chickens, of course, have great value along with many other animals that provide meat, milk and hide that can be used. Cats and dogs tend not to be valued, but even here in Dinajpur, many poor people keep both and look after them with care and attention. We were once told that Bangladeshis hate cats and certainly one of our friends is terrified of them. But the person who told us was a Bideshi who doesn’t like animals themselves and we have quickly realised that in this country you see what you want to see and you interpret things according to your own values. I’ve heard a lot of rubbish from NGO workers here. The ones I trust, ones who have been here for many, many years and are almost more Bangladeshi than of their own country – they are the ones who will tell you more truthfully that the longer they live here the less they know with certainty. It’s a complex place.

So I can’t tell you if Bangladeshis love animals as pets or not. Some do, some don’t. Some at LAMB are terrified of them and complain asking for them to be ‘got rid of’ in some unspoken manner. Others tell us that they think the Bideshi way of treating them is inhumane and immoral. “They are a life.” one deshi told me “how can I destroy a life?” In an environment set up to save and support life I am surprised more don’t agree. But then I am British. I am an animal lover. Pets are part of my life and always have been. That’s probably why I was so affected by that puppy. It’s probably why Bardy has had such an affect on me here. I left my own dog back in the UK to come here and he was, in some ways, the hardest sacrifice despite leaving home, comfort, family, money, friends and a 100 other things. I left a life behind. I am not sure I can leave this one defenceless.

Bardy, of course, is totally oblivious to all of this and can cause trouble. Another stray dog attempted to get into the church building just before the service a few days ago and, for once, Bardy went crazy. The two bawling animals literally fell into the church causing screams from children, women and men alike. Neither dog was hurt and neither attempted any violence towards a human being but, as the expression goes, the bark was worse than the bite and people were scared. Bardy fully focussed on the other dog who was, without doubt, the enemy. In the end, I went and sorted it out, without violence, with a bucket of water. It is my usual weapon against dogs and always works in driving them from my home, the school and now the church. My hope is that people come to realise that you can get them to go away without hurting them at all. But Bardy’s unusual anger has not helped his own plight.

“Stupid dog” I said to him as I locked up for the night leaving him sleeping on the veranda. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

And then, proving who really is the more stupid, I turned, smiled at him and patted him on the head.

“Goodnight Pal.” I said “See you in the morning. I hope.”

Two Tribes

A moralistic tale of two cultures. He who has ears...

Once upon a time there was a tribe of people who could only look to the left and another tribe of people who could only look to the right.

The tribe of ‘Right-lookers’ found that by standing opposite each other on each other’s right side they could see each other clearly. This worked really well as they got a clear view of each other’s face, meaning they got to know each other really well. They could see all things whether right or wrong and were able to help each other with problems in this way. Alas, over time, the idea of standing opposite each other meant that some began to think that opposite thinking was the best way. So, increasingly, criticism of each other took place and it became normal that problems were solved by arguing with each other for many hours until decisions were made. It took a long time and sometimes people got hurt - but progress was made.

The tribe of ‘Left-lookers’ found a different solution to dealing with each other. They decided to stand side by side facing the same way together, united in their goals and direction. However, it did mean they only ever got to see the back of each other’s head. This made it harder to know a person directly but that was okay as they were so united in their ideas that it was natural just to call everyone ‘brother’ or ‘aunty’ and other family names. Individuals didn’t matter a great deal. They developed huge communities that worked well together in times of crisis and trouble and they worked and walked side by side. However, just as they avoided looking directly at each other’s faces (which was considered very rude and disrespectful) so they never criticised each other directly. Instead they would tell others, who would tell others who would tell the person being criticised. Sometimes this was good because, if a brother was doing something wrong, three or four others would come to tell him and, while they were there, they would help him fix it too. Solving problems though, took a long time and sometimes people got hurt – but progress was made.

Now the two tribes knew about each other but just looked enviously at each other’s societies. Over many years, the Right tribe had better land whilst the Left tribe struggled with bad weather and many disasters but were much cleverer as a result of having to fix things. Also, they started having little fights with each other and stealing from one another. But the Right tribe had better resources and by stealing good, clever and beautiful things from the Left people gained the advantage. Eventually the Right tribe took over the Left tribe.

Unfortunately, in the Right tribe’s language, there was no difference between “Right” and “Correct” and so they came to view all things ‘righty’ as being the only true way to do things. They could not understand the Left tribe’s ‘leftiness’ and their silly adherence to this way. It infuriated the Right people that Left people could not do anything directly and always took a difficult route to do… well, anything really. The Right people struggled with the Left people’s land which was hot and often dangerous. They could not persuade the Left people to become Right like them and all the time the Left people had the ridiculous notion that they could look after themselves and all Right people did was take their valuables. ‘What nonsense,’ thought the Right people ‘Right is Might and we are mighty. Left is best left behind. If they must be Left then they deserve to have us take their things and use them the Right way.’

Over time though, the views of the Right people began to change. They got tired of telling Left people what to do and all the trouble the Left people caused. Some of them began to doubt that Right really did mean correct and the word spread. When they nearly got taken over by Up people they really began to re-think how they viewed others. Soon, no Right person believed they were right at all and they left the land of the Left tribe and went back to their own land. Of course, they didn’t give back anything they had stolen or help with the damage they had caused. Nor did they help with any of the problems that Left people had to deal with all the time anyway – like the weather. They just left the Lefts.

Many years later the Rights continued to prosper from all the things they had taken long ago but the Lefts never really recovered. Soon, Left people began to come to the land of the Rights to ask for help in their land. They needed food, clothes, medicine, education and so much more. So some of the kinder Right people began to organise ways to come over and help.

This could have been a great time of healing and understanding between these two great tribes but, alas, the Right people still really did not understand how the Left people did things and, because they were so brash and abrupt, the Left people were easily offended by some of the things Right people did even when trying to help.

Some Right people were so ashamed of their own tribe that they tried to become ‘lefty’ and wore the same clothes as Left people and even walked backwards so they would walk with a Left person in a Left way – side by side. Unfortunately, this just looked silly to everyone and instead of building relationships just embarrassed other Right people and their own Left friends. Some Right people tried to tell Left people how to behave and how to do things and how they must do things in the old traditional Left way, even though many Left people liked some of the Right ways and thought that they might just be…well, right.

And so, the same old confused communications took place. Many Left people just didn’t want Right people there at all and others wanted to give up being Left and just be exactly like Right people. No Right person believed they should rule the Left people again but a lot of them despaired of how Left people could just not get it Right. Others tried to stop any help given to the Lefts because it might make them more Right and that was wrong – even if it meant leaving the Lefts in trouble and despair. At least it was Left trouble and despair.

This is how it is today. It is sad really because all the bad things about being Right - like arguing and fighting and stealing and confrontation - are happening in Left land whilst the Right people are losing any sense of friendship, or family or working together which the Left people are just brilliant at. The Left land is still short of resources and is beaten by the terrible weather whilst the Right land still contains all the resources the Left people need. Some Right people still think they know better than Left people how to run Left land and some Left people see the Right land with all its riches and think “I need to be Right and do the Right man’s things. Then I will be rich like him”.

Very few Right people come to Left land happy in their own Righty natures but glad to learn some Leftiness from Left people too. They come to help where the Left person tells them they need help and they have realised that if they walk on the Left person’s side they can see them comfortably the way they are used to in their own land, but at the same time can walk side by side the way the Left person needs to be comfortable too. Both have to learn to do this and cope with a new way of doing things, but they enjoy working and learning together.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Right and Left people laugh at them and say “How silly and how simple. It’ll never last”.

I am Left thinking they may be Right…

Of Socks and Cucumbers

I live in a world where food tastes of socks, where men demand kisses from other men, where some worship belly buttons and cucumbers are known to ride three-wheeled bicycles.

Have I been imbibing some alcoholic beverage? Am I hallucinating? Is my beloved Bangladesh a den of iniquity and filled with mind-altering drugs or has the heat finally got to me and I have lost the plot?

Actually, none of the above (well, those who know me well may debate the last one). Instead, I live in the kind of world that is experienced wherever people from different cultures and languages meet. It is a wonderful place because those who are best in this world (such as myself – a definite expert in this area) are really the most incompetent. We excel because we fail - and in doing so are able to provide some humour, some ray of hope, some sunshine on an otherwise grey day for others to enjoy.

It is, of course, the world of communication (or, more accurately, miscommunication). It is a happy world because, in the very attempt to make contact with fellow brothers and sisters from a different culture to ours, we fail so miserably that the humour it creates actually makes a stronger bond than that which any correct communication would have achieved in the first place. In other words, everyone loves a guy who makes an ass of himself.

I could bore you with lots of examples of my own pratfalls here in Bangladesh, but if you know me you may well have heard them before and, over time I have picked up a few from others that make some of my errors just look amateurish. I share with you now – for your amusement and sage reflection – some recent ones I have heard as well as some classics. Almost all of them are from here in Bangladesh and, bar one, come from firsthand accounts.

Our own first attempts at Bangla were, of course, pretty awful. In a country where respect and honour are so very important, we did not ingratiate ourselves with our first ayah by constantly telling her that the food she gave us tasted of socks. There was all the difference, it seemed, between mOja (socks) and moja (tasty). In much the same way, I regularly used to imply to shopkeepers that their establishment had killed me (ami shesh) instead of informing them that my shopping was finished (amar shesh) and I was ready to pay.

A friend of ours here at our NGO went one better by asking her ayah if her clothes (hanging on the washing line) were pigs. Confused, the ayah tried to clarify the situation but the conversation took quite some time until both realised that the confusion lay over the words for pig (Shukor) and dry (shukna).

That same ayah, who is a good friend of ours, then made her own faux pas in the English language with us, a few weeks later when she kept asking us to squeeze her. Not that I would have minded actually but it is not the culturally done thing so it was mildly surprising from a young married Bangladeshi woman until it quickly dawned on us that “Squeeze me” was actually meant to be “Excuse me”. I’m so glad I resisted the British urge to please even when really not sure of what someone is asking and refrained from giving a bear hug.

Still, such small differences are easy to miss and all cultures have their little ways about them. The South-Asian ‘head wobble’ is one such mannerism that causes confusion. To us Brits it looks like “I’m saying yes but I’m not happy and don’t really want to do it”. To the Bangladeshi it can mean…well anything you want it to mean really! Usually it means yes, but don’t get on a Rickshaw on the strength of the head wobble and assume you won’t get a massive argument over the price when you reach your destination.

For this reason, one foreign couple came to a row of CNG’s (motorised scooters that, along with Rickshaws are the main forms of transport in Dhaka) and asked the one at the front if the driver would take them to a certain part of town. The driver appeared to say he didn’t really want to so, being good polite Westerners they moved to the next driver who also signalled that he wasn’t interested. And so they moved to the next and so on all the way along the line and eventually walked there instead. It was only afterwards that they came to realise they had misread the head wobble and all the drivers had been perfectly happy to take them. Still, the exercise probably did them good.

It is not just us beginners who make mistakes though. Nerves can attack anyone. One friend of ours who has lived here many, many years and speaks Bangla fluently attempted to give a talk to a crowded church about Jesus the Last Old Testament Belly button. Alas, our friend had not appreciated the similarity in sound of prophet (nobi) and belly button (nabhi) though Bangladeshis delighted in pointing out his error afterwards.

Children, of course, will make many errors and my son loves to babble away in Bangla bewildering our ayahs who look at him in much the same way that English friends do when he babbles just as bizarrely in English. He speaks well, but his mind is often on another planet – proof, if I needed it, that he is most certainly my son. No such excuse for our daughter who is older yet still aged her best friend by 10 years when wishing her a happy 23^rd birthday (teish) instead of 13^th (tero) recently.

I should stop at this point and make clear that I don’t pick on any particular type of person. We can all get it wrong and it is good that we do. When I first began teaching I was told a personal tale by my tutor of a teacher from France who came over to the UK to teach French there. Though able to speak English, she was nervous about using the language and made careful preparations. On her first day her class were standing outside her room waiting to be told to come in to the class in an orderly fashion and stand behind their chairs before being told to sit. Instead she greeted the class with “Good morning, pleeze sit down!”

Being a good class they promptly did. The horror on her face was a picture.

“No, no, no what are you doing you naughty children? Get up, get up!”

Bewildered, but obedient, the class returned to their feet.

“Thank you. Now. Pleeze sit down”

Well you can imagine the scene as an increasingly bemused class and angry teacher repeated this several times more, the French teacher becoming more and more flustered, until a kindly colleague, hearing the fuss and realising what was going on, stepped up to her and whispered in her ear that perhaps she had confused her carefully practised commands of “line up” for outside the class and “sit down” for in. Red-faced, embarrassed but now considerably wiser, she hurried the class indoors.

And I guess that is the point. Whilst we make these great gaffs, we are learning about ourselves and about others as well as picking up the subtleties of the language in a way that keeps us humble (always a good thing). In becoming wiser we also become more accepted. When people make mistakes which are harmless and funny, you cannot help but warm to them. Your enemy cannot seem threatening to you when they have just landed (metaphorically or otherwise) on their backside.

Nevertheless, there is a dangerous side to this. It is one that can give very false impressions. Thankfully, one of our foreign staff members at our NGO here a few years ago was well known when she stood up and announced she was going home to eat her husband. Much amusement, rather than shock was the response from her friends and co-workers who demanded, after the laughter had died away to know what she thought she had said in Bangla. One needs to know the difference in Bangladesh between shami (husband) and shemai (a kind of sweet wheat-like snack) if one is not in good company - and even more so if one is.

The closest to a difficult situation I know, however, came from one foreigner staying at our Guest House who turned to the cook in the kitchen and asked for a spoon from him.

“I’m sorry sir” the cook replied in Bangla “I can’t do that”.

Irritated, but aware that possibly he had been not quite properly understood, the man demanded a spoon again. Now.

“I’m sorry I won’t do that sir” said the cook.

This was the moment that things could have turned sour as the cook was most certainly not doing his job. The foreigner, raising his voice but just keeping calm said “I need a spoon from you now!”

The more sensible of the two (the Bangladeshi of course) at this point asked him what he thought he was asking for in English and the man told him again that it was a spoon. It was then that the humble cook gave this educated and highly intelligent Westerner possibly the most important lesson he would learn in Bangladesh. That a Chamoch is a spoon but a chumu (which he had repeatedly said with such certainty) was not.

It was a kiss.

Thankfully, both were able to see the funny side of it and one of them, at least, left a wiser man.

As one wise person once told me, the only way to learn to play Chess well is to lose. How true this is in all walks of life. We learn as we make mistakes. The wonderful thing about language errors when you are in the country of the language you are learning is that in making these errors we make friends along the way. Laughter always breaks the ice.

Despite this, there must be at least one Rickshaw driver in Dhaka who does not think highly of a young foreign woman we met whilst doing our language training there in the capital. She came into the language school in fits of giggles one morning. “Oh my goodness” she said, gasping for breath “I’ve just shouted at our Rickshaw wallah and called him a fruit!”

In trying to persuade him to go straight on (shoja) she had got more irate as he continued to not understand her Bangla and shouted “Shosha, shosha” all the more. Shosha, of course, is a cucumber.

Not all mistakes are good ones.

How to memorise and study properly and easily

Recently I was asked on this blog if I could provide tips to aid learning scientific information at a high level. Actually, I intend to write an E-book on the subject and have already drafted much of it to go into depth with the very techniques I teach daily here in Bangladesh.

I developed these ideas over many years and with a lot of research into the current theories around partly because of being a teacher and needing to find the best ways to cram knowledge into my students’ heads but mostly because, frankly, I have the worst memory in the world! These techniques, then, have all been used by me personally and I continue to use them daily.

I found the whole subject of memorising fascinating and have been hooked since my early days after reading (as seems obligatory these days) the incredible Use Your Head by Tony Buzan. I shamelessly add a link to it with this blog and although nowadays the information it contains is a little out of date or simplistic, it is still the ideal starting point for anyone interested in learning how memory works and how to get the most out of your brain. I will also include some other links to books I have read and derived much benefit from. Do check them out.

Despite Buzan’s wonderful work his, and all other books I have read, really do not look at studying holistically and pragmatically from the student’s point of view. Rather they teach a technique (or techniques) and leave it up to the reader to work out how to put it all together for their own study. Few give decent lists of information to get on with practising memorising. If I am a student I probably want to know how to memorise historical dates or chemical formulae, not the wine lists of Bordeaux! Whilst those of us (sad as we are) may thoroughly love doing such memory work for the sheer pleasure of knowing we can bore the pants of someone at a party with our astounding trivial knowledge, the fact is, it is not very useful.

So, the system I have developed (and yes, it is adapted from many previous memory aids) is aimed primarily at students but anyone who wants to use their memory better will benefit. The big problem we have in schools both in the UK and Bangladesh is that how to study and memorise really is not taught properly. They are getting there but we are far from being ready. At my school here I insist on one lesson a week just dedicated to teaching students how to study. We need children learning these techniques as early as possible because the success of this system relies on it becoming a habit. For many this will seem odd, difficult and a lot of efforts but, like anything, it needs practice. Eventually, it becomes totally automatic.

Follow these methods and practise them and you will see a significant improvement to how well you hold information. It should also be much more fun! This being a blog I cannot give an awful lot of information, nor spruce it up in a fancy way but here is my quick guide to studying and memorizing along with some of the thinking behind it and some examples of the kind of studying myself or my students are doing at the moment:

The 10 point system

Before you begin

1)      Have a banana and drink regularly – Bananas more than other fruit give slow release energy and are better than coffee or tea to stimulate your mind. You need to be alert and fresh when beginning any study session. Likewise, when you feel yourself flagging go get a drink of water. Make yourself get it. That way you move, giving yourself exercise, refresh yourself with water which will help you concentrate better and is healthy for you and you will get a short natural break.

2)      Short, medium and long term memory - (learn, practise, revise) – The basic science from the psychologists says that our brains process new information by putting it into ‘short’ memory slots. This lets you remember a 5 digit number for a few minutes but quickly disappears. This is the Learning stage.

To move it into ‘medium’ memory it needs repetition so that it can be held for longer, like for a day or just long enough so you get through that exam at the end of the week. But, once the practice stops, it is swiftly forgotten. A year later and you can’t remember any of it. This is the Practise stage.

To enter permanent or ‘long term’ memory you need to have gone over the new information many, many times over a long period of time. The steps to follow, then, mirror this way the brain works. It means that if you want to know your stuff with confidence before that exam, you need to be getting on with the process of committing it to memory now rather than wait until ‘exam leave’. The sooner you begin, the more practice you get and the more information is stored in your long term memory. You may feel you won’t need that knowledge once that exam is passed but by committing it so deeply it means recall is almost instantaneous giving you both time to spare (for checking) and confidence in exams. This is the Revise stage.

Learn

3)      Short burst activity – it has taken me all day to write this short article but in that time I have also studied some Hebrew, Bangla, read several chapters from four different books, practised the Tobla and Piano, prepared my next lessons, answered 10 important and long emails and finished the draft for a feature for my hometown local newspaper. Ok, ok, I know. I am an obsessive short-burst activity fan but that is because it has become a habit for me. I’ve been working like this for 25 years and not once ever contemplated a better system.

The point is that the brain concentrates well for around 20-25 minutes and then loses concentration rapidly. You can keep it working well by changing focus. A new and very different activity is much better than the traditional ‘taking a rest’ philosophy often taught by schools. For instance, when teaching music I have always recommended that students, rather than give up practise time when exams are nearing, they should increase it! I would recommend that after 20-30 minutes of revision they should go practise the guitar or piano or whatever for 10-15 minutes. Then they should go back to academic revision and alternate in this way for the whole revision session. This way the brain keeps active and does not ‘fall asleep’.

4)      Understand your work – It is vital when studying that you thoroughly understand the principles behind the things you are trying to learn. No point rote-learning what fuels are siphoned off in the fractional distillation of crude oil if you have no idea what fractional distillation actually is. Don’t wait for your teacher to tell you – go online and find out for yourself. The more you understand the principles underlying the work you have to remember, the easier it is to remember it.

Practice

5)      Lights, camera, action and painting by numbers – The single key secret to memorising as is recommended by all good books on memory is to make pictures in your mind. We see picture much, much better than we remember words so turn everything into a picture. The funnier, the sillier and even the ruder the better (no one will know!). Anything to help keep it in your mind. As a result you find yourself smiling or giggling a little when you remember some important fact. This is where really understanding your subject comes in as important. If you are memorising bones of the body, for instance, which are usually named with Latin words that give a clue to their position or function or are named after a person associated with them, then knowing this helps you get a strong picture.

Best of all, where possible, link pictures into stories. Narrate them in your mind and make a silly little story out of them. You don’t just make pictures but you make one flow into another.

Finally, a simple system for remembering numbers (I have a more complex but highly useful one that I will share when I complete the e-book) is to use objects that rhyme with them, thus – one = bun; two = shoe; three = tree; four = door and so on. So, putting it all together and you might get the following:

I see myself in front of a huge tower and can hear lots of bubbling inside. A pipe at the bottom has come from the sea and I can see oil pumping along it into the tower. As I climb the tower I come to a door which I open. I notice the door is creaky and needs oiling. I continue up and open the next one and see a tree with a diesel engine sticking out of it(I didn’t say it had to be sensible!). Next up is a door that reveals an old Paraffin lamp which I use to look in and notice the lamp is actually burning two shoes. Finally I go up one more level where I see a man trying to get his motor bike started. Looking in the petrol tank I see the problem is it is stuffed full of bread buns

Did you spot the numbers 1-4? They were there and this picture actually tells me the temperature for the distillation of the various substances – Lubricating oil, Diesel, Paraffin and Petrol - from crude oil and their uses. Chemistry students (or at least mine!) should be able to see how the story relates. I could tell that story to my seven year old son and know he would have it memorised with only a couple of retellings but there is no way I would expect him to learn the O level standard Chemistry! This gives you a quick example of how easy and powerful this method is.

6)      The Memory house and similar links – This idea has been around a long time and, in fact, the infamous character of Hannibal Lecter is revealed to be using this method himself to both escape into another world in his mind and to explain his vast superior memory. Here we put our memories into rooms assigned for specific subjects. A room for chemistry, another for history and so on. I have adapted this method and use many rooms and houses that are associated, for me personally, with that task.

For instance, despite now living in Bangladesh, I always picture going into my house in the UK to remember shopping lists. This is because I was living there when I first began to memorise any shopping trip (whether for a few items or more than 30) and now my front porch is forever linked with supermarket buying! Likewise, any chemistry data I have memorised is stored in my image of the science lab at my school here in Bangladesh. This is because it is where the majority of my teaching of chemistry is done so it is the logical place to hold it. I have an entire building -a church and its offices in Paris- dedicated to musical history because I spent some time there during my university days and composed one of my favourite pieces of music there. The woman running the music group was also an amazing musician, great singer and easily the best classical organist I have ever heard. I have strong musical ties to that place so I use it for my music!

Another important idea is to cross-reference ideas. Some books refer to this as being a little like the London Underground Tube map. Individual lines or circles of information that cross over or connect to others. For instance, my Chemistry room has story lines for Acid information and for Alkaline/Bases but it also has one for Ions, Metals and Non-metals. Actually often these strands coincide with each other so I make them join up physically in my head, like two streets intersecting each other and then carrying on. This is more advanced and I will give more advice on this in the e-book.

Revise

7)      Now-why-did-I-put-that-there method – It is now important that you revise what has been learnt in your study sessions. Practise is the key but it is best done in short bursts just like the learning. One excellent way is to practise your memory skills at the same time and attach random objects to your revision. So, find things you know you are going to come across regularly like pens, drinks, the toilet (!), your handbag, mp3 player and so on. For each object now picture it attached to just one set of information you have memorised (bones of the skull for instance).

So for my distillation information I might attach a bottle of coke in my fridge. I really picture the image. Now, every time I go to get a drink and I see or use that bottle I will suddenly recall that I need to revise distillation information. The aim is to do so as quickly as possible – whilst I pour the drink for instance. This is like the traditional idea of sticking post-it notes up everywhere except that with that idea you can very easily begin to no longer see them or just read from them without really concentrating because you have done it so often. This method is improved further if you try to put objects in an unusual place where you are bound to see them and think “why did I put that there?” Then you will remember you have to revise that bit of knowledge! So go put your bag in front of your bedroom door when you go to bed. Then, in the morning you will have to move it to get out and instantly know you must recall your memory aid for something. Do it as you have breakfast or clean your teeth!

8)      Short note practice – I am very against the traditional method of writing out the stuff you memorised. No point and it just wastes time. It IS useful however, to make short notes. Bullet point writing means you get the important facts down fast. This is the key point really – how fast can you recall the information? When it is near instantaneous every time you do it then you know you have reached that ultimate goal of committing it to the long term memory. This should give you the confidence to know you will go into the exam and very quickly recall the information even though you may be nervous. The shortest notes possible then and in bullet point form.

9)      Exam practice – The final test is to try doing actual exam questions, preferably in a set time if possible. Work out how long a question should take and see if you can recall the information correctly in that required time. This is the only time you should be writing information out in full as you are practising time management, trying to make sure you can answer the question within the time limit.

10)  When you still can’t quite remember it – At any time along the way that you find you cannot recall the information properly, fully or at speed, go back to stage 1 again begin the process again. This time is should be faster, easier and more secure. If a memory aid has not worked properly, refine it or replace it with a better one. Sometimes two or three different pictures for the same think will help reinforce each other. I memorise around 10-20 Bangla words each day but as most of them only crop occasionally in conversation, the practice time I have for them is limited. I can reasonably expect that up to 80% of them I will have forgotten within a day or two. But each time I come to a word I have forgotten and look up its meaning again, I redo stages 5 and 6 reinforcing or improving the picture further. Eventually – and usually fairly swiftly – the word will stick with little time or effort used and I can feel a sense of progress being made even as I am still learning the word.

Well that is the short guide! As I say, I hope to get an E-book out before long which will go into more detail about each step, give lots of memory examples and tips along the way. The basic ideas here can be applied to most kinds of study – even learning an instrument or drawing! The key benefits to this method are:

·        The process is very swift and gets faster the more you use it.

·        It requires very little or no writing down other than the initial notes you made in lessons or from textbooks (and if you make this a well used habit, then in years to come I see no reason why you could not do away with making any notes at all – many have succeeded in doing this and can recall facts, figures or discussions from meetings held long ago with perfect recall despite not having photographic memories)

·        It makes learning fun (or at least bearable).

·        It enables you to link ideas together in a meaningful way helping you not just memorise but also really understand your subject.

·        It provides an easy approach to revision (in fact, by effectively revising all the time you should not find that before the exam you feel under any pressure to do extra ‘cramming’ at all) and builds itself up as you use it repeatedly.

·        You can learn multiple subjects at the same time without feeling like your heading is ‘bursting’ and it is all ‘falling out’ – a common problem for students who try to ‘cram’ information in. In fact, step 3 indicates that the more (and different) subjects you have, the better!

Maybe you have your own techniques for memorising? Feel free to share a comment about them here. Good luck with your own studying and I hope these tips give you the edge you need to pass that exam!

Thinking Aloud: The Widow’s Cry

Thinking Aloud: The Widow’s Cry

This is a link to the blog for the school I work at:

http://www.lambschoolbangladesh.blogspot.com

The Widow’s Cry

The monsoon rains had, thankfully, fallen heavily that morning so the heat was not as sweltering as it often can be on an August day. Bangladesh doesn’t do ‘drizzle’ so when rains come they usually fall as though the heavens themselves are angry, throwing the water like a weapon and growling in the clouds. This morning had been no different and somehow it seemed a fitting response from above for what had happened overnight.

We wandered around the maze or roads and paths until we finally found the village where the funeral was taking place. Bina was there already and said she had noticed us coming from a distance and came to greet us. In fact, I suspect she had been waiting anxiously for our arrival. We had, by accident of being there at the time, become somewhat important in this event because without us her mama, her uncle would not have been returned. No one likes taking dead bodies in a car or a vangari, so they all charge crazy amounts. For us, it was affordable. For Bina it was a few months wages.

Bina leading the way, we entered through the mud doorway into the shared courtyard area where two or three mud dwellings shared the same outdoor space for cooking and cleaning. Usually there would be various utensils and benches scattered around but now all the household items had been replaced by just one large bed, draped in white cloth. I was surprised when I saw just how many people were here and I felt S. squeeze my hand tighter as he too registered that there must have been close to two hundred people sat cramped into an area not much bigger than someone’s front room. I squeezed back to reassure him that he was safe. He doesn’t startle easily and always assumes that the entire world is his friend but sometimes I forget that he is just seven and that we ask him to deal with some heavy situations for much of the time. Just sometimes, we see a crack in his composure, but never for long.

We were led to the far side of the courtyard and to the veranda area, removing our shoes before entering and were greeted by a friend of V.’s who took us to the far end overlooking where the bed had been placed. I felt nervous as I was offered a chair, conscious that everyone else sat on the floor and that all in that area under the veranda were women. I looked to V. for confirmation that it was alright that I was here and, picking up from my face the panic that was mounting she turned to her friend and quietly spoke Bangla to her. She nodded her approval and motioned to me to sit and that all was “thik ache”. V., J. and S. had, by this point sat themselves down on a smaller bed at the end.

In all of this, there had been so little sound from all around that it came as a shock and gave a fright when suddenly a wail came from amongst the women sat before me on the veranda. Dazed by the force of the cry breaking the silence, it took me a while before I located the source, a woman who, judging by her clothes, age and look of utter anguish on her face must have been the wife of Bina’s mama. Convinced the cry was my fault I was horrified.

Oh my God, I thought, what have I done? Have I caused offence?

The widow’s cry spread like a ripple amongst the other women who, I now realised, were all on the verge of tears, holding back the distress only as long as everyone else continued to do the same. Some of the more stoic and wise older women there, having seen death countless hundreds of times before, comforted and calmed the widow but still she sobbed. Respectfully, I turned away so that she did not need to feel stared at by the strange (and solitary) white man and looked at the clean white bed in front of me.

It was then they brought the body out, cleaned, washed and dressed, laid out in white, garlanded with flowers and laid on the bed. I was now so close I could have touched his naked feet, this man whom I had only met the once and that only days ago when he came to the hospital with the very problem that was to take him ultimately. I felt an intruder, a fake. Had Bina just been polite to invite us all and really expected a polite refusal on our part? We seemed so out of our depth, with no other bideshis to look to for cultural advice. Two years here and many invites but our first funeral in a Santal village and none the wiser for all of that.

The widow broke out into another anguished scream and this time no wise comforting from friends were going to stop the floodgate of emotion that just had to gush from everyone there. Suddenly we were surrounded by dozens and dozens of women sobbing, crying out, rocking, looking to the sky as though pleading. The force of the emotion hit me every bit as hard as a wall and I found a wave of sadness overwhelming me.

As the tears filled my eyes my British reserve fought the temptation to allow even one of them to fall.

What is this? I thought. They can’t all be feeling so much pain, can they?

I heard sobbing by my shoulder and turned to look behind me. J. was streaming with tears, unable or unwilling to prevent them whilst S. leaned on his mother’s side, arms around her, looking sad but with wise understanding in his eyes that told me that he knew this was not about him, not time to play up or wriggle but to be quiet and still for others. V. herself was trying to hold back the tears but increasingly failing.

I turned again to the body. Now began the smearing of the face, hands and feet with holud, a turmeric paste, starting with his widow, then daughter, then other family and important people followed by all well-wishers. I had not expected this and thinking about it led me down a much deeper path than I desired.

Why turmeric? I wondered. Normally this paste is used at wedding parties where everyone has much fun smearing others with it after the bride-to-be has been covered by as many as wish to. I’ve seen grown, dignified women chase young men, grabbing at their clothes to catch them so that they can smear this putty onto their cheeks. The normal taboos for men and women ignored as the sense of celebration and expectation takes over. Here it was being used not for a new chapter in life but for death.

But are they so different? I wondered as I watched woman after woman smear mama’s face with the holud and their tears. Surely they are just two sides of the same coin. We don’t celebrate air because it is always there, never lost. All our lives it never leaves us. But each and every one of us will face death and will probably experience it happening to those around us first. It is precious and can never be taken for granted. We can lose it in a second. And here, in this remote part of  North Bangladesh, the presence of death is felt keenly, meaning that everyone, Muslim, Hindu, Christian share a common bond – to grasp life, value it and appreciate it at every opportunity. The taking of life makes the giving all the more important. I do not know the religious meaning behind the holud. But for me I cannot put it on another’s face again at a wedding without some part of me thinking this is not just fun. This is not just rejoicing. It means much, much more than that.

A wretched cry tore me away from my thoughts. This was not the same voice as before. It was not the widow this time but Rupali her daughter who had struggled through her time of applying the holud. Something had snapped and she had rushed back through the crowd standing, staring around the bed. Caught just in time by one of the men leading the ceremony as she attempted to fling herself upon the body, instead she was grabbed by another man and a woman who both held her and held her back as her body crumpled in grief.

This was too much. I could hear J. sobbing behind me now and suspected I could hear V. sniffing. I turned and saw that S., ever the empath, had seen one of our young friends breaking down and had gone over to her, sat with her and just held her as she wept on his shoulder. I wondered if we should go. Was this too much to ask my young children to bear? Yet it was fascinating, not just because of how different the ceremony was, with the body uncovered and pawed by so many people but also because the depth of emotion that was just so totally foreign to me.

The British in me was appalled. The cynic in me was doubtful. This is not, I thought, how the dignified behave. Such theatrics are for the TV, not a funeral. Almost as soon as I thought these words, unbelievable guilt rose up inside and I felt ashamed. This was no fake display. These people were feeling the most incredible grief. You could see disbelief in every face. “How could this have happened?” they seemed to say. Every cry of the widow or her daughter was one that seemed to realise, as if for the first time, that the man in their life was not coming home anymore.

I could not help but ask myself why did I not feel this for my own father? He had died only last December and not a day had gone past that I had not thought of him, not a week gone by when I had not played music I knew he loved and remembered who he was. Yet, at the funeral itself I did not feel this intensity of emotion. There was no holding back the tears as I was now doing for this man I never knew before. I was, of course, deeply sad that the man I had known and loved as ‘Dad’ for nearly forty years was gone but there was no surging grief the like I was seeing here in this tiny village scene.

Was it perhaps because I could see others I know and care about – like Bina – being so overtly devastated? Teachers, ayahs, guards, children, shopkeepers – many I know well and who are special to me. Ordinary people who normally don’t mess around when there is a crisis but face it and deal with it calmly. To see a woman, normally dealing with problems with a stony face, now red-eyed and with quivering lips holding back such sorrow - yes, maybe there was something in this.

But another thought now occurred to me as men were raising the body and lifting it into a wooden casket in preparation to take it away and bury the coffin. As the crying and wailing arose, not just from wife and daughter but from all around as the pall-bearers left with the coffin the emotion physically hit me again. I was winded by the force, by the rush of grief. I suddenly realized the significance.

This man, husband, father, uncle, friend to many, had only died yesterday .Last night.

My father, by contrast, had been battling cancer for years. He had nearly died a year earlier. We had said our goodbyes and made our peace with him over anything that mattered long ago. When he died, there was nothing I wished I had said to him, nothing I regretted not getting out into the open. I’d even told him I loved him several times – the hardest thing for a British man to tell his father. Here was a man who was certain of his fate and where he was going and knew that all who were special to him would continue without him and in peace. He died trusting in the rightness of things.

But Bina’s mama had trusted that he would live. A worm, it was thought, nothing more. A simple operation and he would be just right. But when he went elsewhere for the surgery, he was refused. The previous diagnosis was rejected. Tests were done all over again and precious time was lost but doctors at that hospital would not commit themselves. Two days later and he was dead. Maybe he would have died anyway but that wasn’t the point. His family expected him to return home alive and free from the illness which had bloated his belly and turned his skin yellow. He didn’t.

Just hours later, they were burying him. It took over a week to bury my father. In that time I had composed a speech and a piano piece which I performed at the funeral. All the time in the world to come to terms with my loss, my way. And the no one was going to suffer materially when my Dad died, but here, who was going to look after his wife now? Who was going to pay for his daughter’s education? Who was going to provide them a wage when his wife had no schooling and no skills.

Slowly, we withdrew from the crowd as they moved to the cemetery area and left them to bury the dead in peace. Along the road we said nothing for a while, each of us reflecting quietly on what they had seen and heard and felt. Eventually, as we reached the busy main road where all the shops do their trade and vehicles thunder past, some sense of returning to normality came to us all. S. almost shook himself as if out of a strange malaise and ran off back to the house. V. and I discussed about what we had just experienced.

Deep inside I felt a sadness that something was missing from my own culture. In securing a ‘bright new future’ where we expect everyone to be safe and our loved ones to return home each day as our right, we have lost the urge to celebrate life as it is. Instead, we always seek more and struggle with discontent in our own lives. Day by day as our dreams become bigger and harder to achieve our lives seem to dwindle into a kind of passive ‘existence’. I envied the ones I had witnessed and their grief. I was jealous of their ability to ‘feel’ intently.

But in thinking of this I heard that widow’s cry and saw her anguish again in my mind’s eye and I thought of the very real troubles that are to confront her from now on; the overwhelming difficulty of being alive but also needing to ‘exist’. I can honestly say I have no idea which of us is more truly alive.