Diagnosis: Asthma

Yup, I thought it was weird too. Of course, I know nothing about asthma, so I thought it was like that commercial where they say "Imagine having to breathe through a straw" or the one where the fish has only a few teaspoons of water in the fish bowl and is gasping for...ummm...water, but I guess coughing hard for no reason is another symptom. Whatever, I got an inhaler and I feel a little better. Still not great, but hopefully it will improve more.

I am working on a new project and I'm really excited about it. One of the senior Fulbrighters (meaning she has a PhD and gets more money than I do) has an NGO (non-governmental organziation) called Nari Jibon (Women's Life). Man I use parentheses a lot. Anyways, the NGO is aimed at disadvantaged women, mainly garment and sex workers, and the main goal is to give them skills such as English, computers, and office management, so that they can get good jobs with decent pay. So I started randomly going to English classes just to observe and help out, and now that I'm in Dhaka I decided to get more involved. I am starting with helping to set up the computer class, and I'm going to do my photovoice project with them. Hopefully we'll get a website up so you can all see what we're doing. I've been pretty busy with this project, and I'm trying not to forget that I still have to analyze my data from my first project. I love being busy, I feel so productive.
I'm also taking Bangla lessons again, which is kind of nerdy but I'm happy about it. For all of my Bangla-speaking friends who read this blog (it will not make sense to the rest of you), today I learned that the proper sentence is not "Amar class-e jete hobe" but "Amake class-e jete hobe". Hmmm. It's a little embarrassing when I realize how many mistakes I've been making, but always good to fix them. My teacher is so nice about it. Poor guy, it would be like teaching someone to speak English who learned to speak deep south English. He has to say things that are the equivalent of "Now there is no such word as 'ain't' in the English language. Instead we use 'isn't' or 'is not'." He's so tactful.
Besides that, Isaac's birthday is coming up. I actually found a place that makes a Thomas the Tank Engine shaped cake, and we're going to have a big shindig at Pizza Hut. He wants me to buy him a ridiculously huge and heavy (non-suitcase friendly) toy that costs 4500 taka (about 75 smakeroos). I'm hoping that he forgets about it. Yeah right.