OohlalaDhaka

After spending part of this morning reading about all the food being eaten in France (which, to be honest, sounds like an awful lot of food for two people--I hope you're walking A LOT in between!), I decided to go on a culinary adventure of my own: Dhaka street food. Now, I know what you're all thinking: what a bad idea for reasons from taste to sanitation to not wanting to spend the weekend (which starts on Fridays here) recovering. All good thoughts, I had them all week. But, my curiosity has been growing, and as I do brag about my iron stomach, it had to happen eventually.

We begin at a snack stand at the busy intersection about a half mile from here. A local favorite here seems to be what I can only call Bengali chex mix. I believe that it is rice that has been given a chance to dry out significant, so it's a little tougher to bite into, mixed up with onions, cilantro, chile, curry spices and a little bit of oil to make it stick together (you get to what all of this going on) and then is stuffed into a make shift bag, fashioned from freshly recycled paper; mine, for example, was someone's old recipt. And then you dig in with your hands, ensuring that your nails will be yellow for a while and smell like curry. The price for this deliciousness? a mere 5 taka (around 8 cents).

I continue on. I believe that people now stare at me a little less; my shalwar and now my snack make me look less exotic. Or, I've mastered the art of not noticing when people are staring at me. Either way, it's a lot easier to walk around now. A little harder while trying to eat rice with my (right) hand. I pass more snack stands, many with bread and short-bread like biscuit cookies (random side note: why has the sandwich not caught on everywhere in the world? How can people not see that as a truly genius food worth emulating!), but feel that after my main course of rice, what I'm really ready for is dessert. So, I deviate from my plan slightly by stopping in a dessert shop with a huge display of sweets. I walk in, find that they all look about the same, with slight variations of color and shape, and pick two of them. They are presented to me in a nice green box with a pink ribbon tied around it securely (for whatever reason, you rarely get any sort of plastic container or bag here). I pay the 40 taka it costs ($0.60, steep!) stick it in my purse for the moment.

I head back towards the BRAC office. This is the bit where there is the street food that I've been eyeing every day this week. I go for it. What I really want is something straight from the thick metal frying pan that's bubbling with oil and little dumpling-like balls of dough. Those are currently germ free. But, I point at something else on the table that resembles a samosa, and get two little ones for the road--this time in a small brown bag that looks manufactured--spending yet another 4 taka.

I proceed to eat these samosas, which turn out to still be quite warm and be filled with delicious potatoes, and walk around a little bit. My biggest issue with Dhaka is that things seem to be done in a hurry most of the time. There is no lingering over a cup of tea or a meal; people come in, eat and move on. There are no benches to sit and watch folks go by while enjoying your samosas and rather tasty desserts, whose main ingredient appears to be condensed milk (yum). But, I know that there are things to be done, so here I am, back in my office. Soon there will be someone circulating with hot cups of tea with milk and sugar for us to enjoy while we work.

Went out to a village yesterday to learn more about the TB program. Among other things, we met the health worker and talked with her patients as they took their daily medications under her supervisions (A pillar of DOTS treatment). Below are a picture of me with the Shastha Shebika, as the health worker is called and a shot of the landscape surrounding the village. This was only about a half out hour the city (considered periurban because it's outside of the "city corporation"), and next week it looks like I'm going to Manikgonj, which is a few hours by car and the birthplace of BRAC's TB program in, coincidently, 1984!