A Good Old Fashioned Dance-Off

My first few days in Dhaka have been interesting to say the least. My primary job is to facilitate Orientation for the GW students who are here for classes (read: be a WM OA but without the cool yellow shirt...). When I'm not shuffling them about, I'm taking Bangla lessons with them. It's the official language here and in some parts of India (Bangladesh means "the country of the people who speak Bangla, fyi). We're in an intense course of about 4-5 hours a day all week. It's a crazy language, but not too difficult once you get past the whole their-letters-look-like-ink-blot-tests thing. At least they write right to left.  It's really helped so far. Since the main mode of transportation here is a rickshaw (read: death trap with ink blot test writing all over it), telling the rickshallah where to go in Bangla reduces your chances of 1) getting ripped off and 2) getting dropped in the ghetto. 

So after our Bangla class today, we had a conversation hour with about 50 woman teachers at a school that is sponsored by the NGO I work for. Well, the conversation hour turned into a singing hour, and then into a dancing hour. First, they sang their national anthem (beautiful...) and then they did some traditional dances. You can tell that these steps are embedded in their DNA- they've known these since they could walk.   

They then asked us to do some "traditional American dances". uhhhh....what? We don't have elaborate dance steps set to ancient hymns passed down orally for hundreds of years. (Unless maybe you count "Crank Dat" by Soulja Boy....) All we have is the electric slide. So that's exactly what we taught them. Then when they wanted more, we panicked and did the macarena. Yeah. A song  that's not even in English that's more than 15 years old. eh, they loved it. 

Hope all of you are doing well- 

Salaam o pore dakhaa hobe (Peace and goodbye for now) 

--Nick