sigh.

We're getting more ready to leave. I'm deep in the preps for classes that will be taking place in Minnesota, not in Bangladesh. Even though there is a little more than a month left in our stay here, I'm solving problems that will come up in June and July, and answering student emails from those future classes.

Next week, Shaked will be here! She still has a final and a paper, so she's not quite ready to think about packing up. She took her dorm room apart and sent the contents to a storage unit, so she's down to the suitcase and mr. bunny. She'll leave on Wed afternoon and it will take nearly 2 days to get here. She'll spend almost a day in Singapore on the way.

A Dhaka newspaper ran an article today on the Children's Literature conference. If you use a magnifying glass and know what I look like, you can see me in the picture.

Another link to an article on global warming and the threat in particular in Bangladesh.

Looking ahead -- I'll be teaching next week for two weeks as the new semester opens here. Hoping to travel with Shaked outside of Dhaka as I haven't seen much of the countryside. I suppose I should have taken each of those professor's business cards and called and visited and thus met far more people. I'm trying to go easy on myself and remember that many days were just exhausting to get to work by rickshaw and home again. Dealing with laundry and cooking and trying to pay attention to Matan's progress, as well. But now I do wish I'd done so much more.

Returning to MN as program chair in Women and Gender Studies -- it's official! Kind of exciting to think about what I'll need to learn and do.

Not sure what the summer will bring as we re-integrate. On the one hand, I do very much like this feeling of living outside the familiar, and yet, learning that I don't do it easily or push myself beyond a certain comfort zone.