How we got to Dhaka

The year was 1995, my kids were in elementary school, and I was working part-time at a tax publishing house in Northern Virginia so that I could be there for them after school.

We owned a house in Falls Church, VA and visited Florida to see Lew’s mom often. We got a dog and I really tried to be a perfect little suburban housewife – but I was sinking into depression. American doctors prescribed prozac. Honestly, I think I had grown up believing that as long as I played my roll right people would love me, and as long as people loved me all was well. If I was dependable and loving, cheerful and responsible, then life would be good. If I tried hard enough I could make my life good. But it wasn’t working out – I couldn’t. I was not born to be a happy suburban wife. I wasn’t ready to just support an ambition and hard-working government employee of a husband and raise to happy kids.

Lew and I went to a marriage counselor for a short while…then I went alone to the therapist. She helped me have the courage to say to Lew “we gotta get out of here”. He was pretty happy as he was – he had a job in the Dept. of Energy policy office and a supporting wife and lovely children, after all. But we decided that he and I would both apply for jobs overseas. I don’t think he really thought we would leave home, deep in his heart of hearts. But he had promised me when he married me and in my brain, I knew that if we didn’t find something where we could live abroad as a united family, then I would take the kids and go it alone in the developing world.

We both applied to whatever we were qualified for, anywhere on Earth. Not surprisingly, Lew (PhD from Penn) got the best offer: Teaching environmental development in Dhaka Bangladesh.

One particular day sticks in my memory like old gum. It was one of those days where you stand up for what you need. I got home from work to make lunch for mother-in-law Joan and then get the kids from school when I received a call from Lew from his office.

He was laughing when he told me “I just received a fax. Let me read it ‘We are honored to offer you a job as professor of Environmental Science at the Independent University of Dhaka. Can you start in one month’s time? We will offer $2000 a month pay and round-trip tickets for you and your wife’. Can you believe it? Hahaha”

Of course, my response was not what he was hoping for: “Oh Lew this is your big break into academia! Let’s go. But we can’t be there in a month. Ask about next term? Oh my God this is so exciting.” No more laughter from him was forthcoming. He back peddled hard: “Lili I don’t even know where Dhaka is! Isn’t Bangladesh the poorest country in the world? I have a steady job with the US government. We can’t give that up”. Etc etc.

The look on my usually good-natured mother-in-law was the meanest I ever saw in her whole life. “You are not taking my family away” – I might have laughed at her intensity except that I was honestly a bit scared of her tiny person myself. Although I didn’t know it at the time – Joan had most of the power in our marriage after all (and yes I do mean Lew’s and my marriage). Joan had her son wrapped around her finger with her ‘collapse and conquer’ approach to life – but that’s another story for another time. I told her she could come to Dhaka too. But she would have none of that. She stared daggers at me for the rest of the day. Maybe she quit talking too, but she never talked much, until she had her evening cocktails in her.

Back in 1995, Joan spend several months a year with us in suburban Virginia and I took the kids down to visit her in Florida several times a year as well. She liked that life and didn’t want me messing it up.

She didn’t want us to go away. She had nobody else to take care of her and she felt that we wouldn’t be safe. But I had explained to Lew when we married him that I couldn’t raise my kids fully in the USA and thus we would have to live abroad for a time. He had agreed. My sisters and brother and I were raised partly in Africa, and I thought it was the best thing that every happened to us. So I wanted the same for my kids.

Before I left to get the kids from their school, Lew admitted on the phone that he almost hadn’t told me about the job offer because he was afraid that I would like it. But his Mom had assured him that I too would get a “kick out of it”. She didn’t know me as well as he did.

So next, I called my oldest sister in Seattle, I knew Anamaria would back me up in the need to get the kids out of suburbia USA during their formative years. She did not disappoint – cheering me (us) on and even saying she would come and visit us the next Christmas.

I started talking up the 18-month adventure and the leave of absence idea to anyone who would listen.

At this time you see, the US government (Under Reagan??- nope Clinton) had a culling process going on, whereby they fired employees and shut down whole offices from within the Government. We knew that the Senate Republicans didn’t like the Policy Office of the Dept. of Energy (facts already had a liberal bias by then, and Lew was working as best he could to mitigate climate change). Lew’s boss really liked the idea of his taking a leave of absence – in naive hopes that this would keep them under the radar from the nasty government shutdowns. No such luck of course – so we returned to no jobs when we came back from Dhaka. But that’s another story too.

We negotiated with Grandma Joan that we would only go for a year and a half, and she could even come visit us. She tried to tell us that we had to leave the kids with her, but I knew that my parents had been through the same thing when I was a baby. At one point Joan even said “when your kids are grown up they will move to Jupiter and then you will see how I feel”. But Lew rightly pointed out that Joan had immigrated to the USA from Canada when she graduated university in Nova Scotia, and her parents had visited her. Americans move for work.

Finally, we decided to move in January of 1996. I had to threatene that I was going somewhere with my kids alone if Lew couldn’t stomach it. I had some connections in Nairobi and Lew didn’t want to lose us all so he bravely went along with the scheme.

Also, the fact that a neighbor lady, one whose husband collected guns, had a psychotic break and decided that our kids, Sadie aged 6 and Terry aged 9, were her enemies, helped encourage us to get out of town fast.

I quit my job and Lew took a leave of absence from his. We rented out our house and sold our furniture. The kids’ doctor asked me what I would do with all my pretty things and I responded “that’s easy, I don’t have any” I packed 8 large suitcases (back in the days when one had luggage allowances) full of stuff that I thought we would need: one huge trunk was from People’s Drugs (“No More Tangles” cream rinse, a pool ‘noodle’ antihistamine, which may have saved a sister’s life the next year, that sort of thing). Another one was for children’s literature (having been 10 when my six-year-old sister and moved to Ghana I remembered the value of good books for kids).  I brought warm footy pajamas in big kid’s sizes because I had been warned that Dhaka apartments got really cold for a few months a year. I hid away Halloween, Easter and Christmas paraphernalia in the luggage as well because Sadie still believed in Santa.  Terry wasn’t progressing very well with his reading (we found out later how dyslexic he was) so he needed to practice the fun Scholastica young adult fiction on his own. Also, I knew that we wouldn’t have a television, but I didn’t tell that to the kids. I did tell them that they would be able to eat with their fingers in Bangladesh. But I didn’t even know that Terry would want to eat with his left hand which is a major no no in Muslim countries.

Finally, I sold our piano to buy the kids each one-way tickets to Dhaka and my younger sister – the other young mother from my family – told me that she was only then coming fully to terms with the extent of my insanity: “you don’t sell your piano to buy one way tickets to Bangladesh for your six and nine-year olds”.  But I knew that if we kept up-to-date US credit cards, we could buy return tickets home whenever we needed too. And simply pay them off over time, once we were back to a western economy. But we did actually send money home to the states every month from Dhaka – sort of a reverse immigrant thing in retrospect.

Our January flight out of Washington, Dulles airport to London then Doha then Dhaka was postponed the night before we thought we were leaving for a whole week because of a huge snowstorm. This quirk of fate worked really well for us because we sent the kids out to sled with our neighbors while Lew and I frantically painted the empty house for several days straight. I can’t remember where we slept at night but I guess we still had some mattresses somewhere. It was a very cozy time and the neighbors were awesomely hospitable.

Wouldn’t you know it? The taxi driver who took us to the airport was a Pakistani gentleman had fought in the language wars between East and West Pakistan in 1970, His side lost and he warned us that the Bengalis were lovely people as long as they were illiterate, but “be careful of those who can read”.

Lew was off to teach University. It was hard for him – he had to be very brave a few time – but he has often thanked me for making him take that gig. It changed his, and all of our lives, a great deal for the better. So happy ending.