Where We Have Hope

This week I stumbled across a totally random but really excellent book.
Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe by Andrew Meldrum recounts the author’s 23 years of living and working in Zimbabwe as a foreign correspondent, until he was illegally deported in 2003. Meldrum moved to Zimbabwe shortly after its independence, excited by [...]

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Back in action

My blog-writing has taken a backseat of late to the general craziness in my life. I’m getting married in a few months, and it turns out the whole wedding thing is rather time consuming. Also, my fiance is a foreign national (and not, as USCIS seems to think, an alien) and navigating the visa [...]

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You too Bangla can talk

One of the tricky aspects of Bangla (once you get past the alphabet – one friend says it looks like Klingon) is that they use Subject-Object-Verb construction. I hadn’t really thought about it, but English is Subject-Verb-Object form. Essentially, this means in Bangla you talk like Yoda.
It is surprisingly difficult to think [...]

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In Defense of Food

As you’ve seen, I generally like to wait until I’ve worked my way through a bunch of books to give you my two sentence, take-it-or-leave-it recommendations. However, I’ve just finished reading a book that I think just might be important enough to warrant a change of policy.
The book is In Defense of Food by [...]

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Bangladesh and the New 7 Wonders of Nature

In case you weren’t sold already, there are two more reasons to visit Bangladesh: it hosts two of the 7 “New Wonders of Nature”! (As determined by an online poll…) In Reuters today:
Southeastern Cox’s Bazar beach — believed by many to be the world’s longest natural sandy stretch — beat out 200 other nominations [...]

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Update on Cyclone Sidr

The BBC posted a radio documentary today about the effects of Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh and the effort to rebuild. Click here.

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Do something good today :)

Americans use 380 billion plastic bags a year! They’re super hard to recycle and they never really biodegrade – they just break down into smaller bits of plastic. Many plastic bags end up in the ocean, where they kill 100,000 poor sea creatures a year.
Get re-usable shopping bags today! www.reusablebags.com. Even if you [...]

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Some days I have a hard time just speaking English…

and Bangla homework is about the last thing I want to do. Unfortunately my Bangla teachers, while not really sticklers on the whole homework issue, do seem a tad disappointed when I drag myself in to class totally unprepared.
Luckily, now there’s an excuse, and it’s even semi-legit: Bangla TV! I can watch tv [...]

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