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 process takes an ungodly amount of time, patience, and luck. Perhaps in the future I’ll blog about the visa ordeal, but for now we’ll just blow past those issues and try to get back into the swing of things.

A couple interesting things this week: a hospital boat from France is visiting Bangladesh, providing things like cataract surgery. Interesting article in the BBC.

Second, I had a test of my Bangla skills this week when my class had the pleasure of visiting the Bangladeshi Embassy for lunch. We got to meet with the Ambassador and had a really nice time talking about the opportunities and challenges in Bangladesh. However, at one point, someone turned to me and said, “Rachel, you haven’t said anything yet.” Now, this is the point I dread in any conversation, in any language – but they were waiting for Bangla. I nearly crawled under the table, but somehow I managed to get out a grammatically incorrect but semi-coherent question to keep the conversation going.  Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get to a workable level in this language, but I guess everyone manages somehow …