Parents visiting and life without facebook
Written by Antje on November 26th 2015 18:18
My parents arrived two weeks ago for a visit! Time for a good visit and hart-to-hart sharing, and to show them something of my life here. My mother is enthusiastically taking pictures and making videos. After their last visit two years ago, my mother made a video and now she is thinking hard once again what she can tell about my life in a short video.
Last week, we spent a day in Saidput, a town about a half hour drive from us. The curtains on our porch really needed to be replaced, so we went looking for fabric. In the picture, you see my housemate Kris and myself keep a close eye on the weighing of the fabric we had selected. It was to be sold by the pound.
In the meantime the curtains have been sewn and our porch looks a lot better.
After our succesful choice of fabric, we ate at a local restaurant. Here’s my parents and I in the VIP part of the restaurant. The usual thing is to eat with your right hand, and in the background you can still see the sink in which you are supposed to wash your hands before you eat. It was a busy restaurant with fast service, so you know that the food is freshly cooked and safe!
A few days after our visit to Saidput, there was another attack against a foreigner. This time, it was against an Italian priest who lives and works in Bangladesh already 30 years. In Dinajpur, a city 45km from us, he was shot on his bicycle on the way to work. Fortunately, he survived the attack. Around the time of this attack, there was also a court case of a war tribunal dealing with the war of liberation of 1971, a case in which two people were sentenced to death. Since the day of this attack, social media sites like Facebook and Whatsapp are not accessible in Bangledesh, and internet has become much slower.
We have also become more careful with going outside the gate of our compound. It is better for now to forego a nice day of shopping in Saidpur.
This week, I am off. I decided to stay here on the hospital compound instead of going away. I’m quite successful in staying out of the hospital for now (the second day), and I hope I can rest up.
At the end of the week, we travel to Dhaka to wave my parents goodbye.