Last Saturday, Joanne (another Dutch lady who works here in the office) and I went to a wedding. Strictly speaking, it was not the wedding itself – that had already taken place on Thursday – but the ‘Bouw-bhat,’ the rice meal for the bride. The marriage had taken place in the bride’s village. While this was the rice meal to welcome the bride in the groom’s village. The groom works in our project as purchase agent, and he comes from the capital of our district, Dinajpur. The feast meal was held in a rented hall, which in my opinion, was rather empty looking. We traveled by bus, dressed in our finest, and after the arrival of the bridegroom the meal was served.

As you can see from the picture the table cloth was newspaper. We could put the bones from the meat we had eaten on the newspaper. When we were finished the table cloth was thrown away and new paper was put on for the next group. As you can see, there is no silver ware, and everybody ate with his right hand, which is the usual custom here in Bangladesh, even in the higher classes. Personally, I also think it is easier to get the meat off the bones with my hand.

When we were ready with the meal, the bride arrived. It was her job to sit on a special podium and to be beautiful and to provide an opportunity for the guests to have their picture taken with her. We managed with difficulty to get the groom also in this picture!

This is the view from my balcony. The past Friday night it rained very hard here, and the rice fields are now beautifully filled up with water. Some of the fields have already been ploughed, so soon they will start planting. The green in the picture … those are weeds!

My work is going well. I continue to do surgery on adhesions after burns, and I have a better sense of which surgeries will be the most difficult. In addition, I did some abdominal surgeries – those remain a bit my ‘first love.’ Over the past few months, I have also done some shifts in gynecology. This is a team with a larger group of doctors, in contrast to my position as only surgeon, and it feels good to be a bit part of that team again.

In two weeks, I will take a 2 week vacation in ‘my own land.’ I go to the Southeast, to a mission hospital between Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar. The main attraction of this hospital is a swimming pool, and I’m completely away from the routine in my own hospital. I’ve never been there, so it will also be interesting to see how they do things in that hospital, although I don’t plan to spend much time there except in a general tour. And we’ll probably make a few day trips from the hospital. I’ll keep in touch!