Kar ghor eta? Rahna ghor kothay? Ke ekhane thake?
Whose room is this? Where is the kitchen? Who stays here?
A woman outside of her mud home in one of the villages near the Panigram site.
Over the last couple weeks, we three interns explored a village near the Panigram site to learn about the Bangladeshi homestead. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, after almost two weeks of settling into our humble abode in Jessore, we interns, have become quite adjusted to our new lifestyle abroad. We eat our egg and ruti in the morning before our hour-long autorickshaw ride to the project site; a ride which often makes me think of getting pulled down bumpy sidewalks as a child in my little red metal wagon. Here, though, the sidewalk is eight feet wider and trucks stacked twenty feet high with local goods like hay, bricks, or goats (though not usually all three together…) fight at top speeds for the extra sliver of road beside me.
Millie waits for our driver Rafik in the autorickshaw.
We have a great group of interns this year, all architects who will be helping us construct our site office to test out our mud building techniques.
Bradley Kinsey
Bradley Kinsey
Raised on steak, potatoes, and public pools, Bradley was your quintessential product of the American midwest. While the suburbs of Chicago offered him a side yard and picket fence, the idea of varying topography and open space was all too alluring, so he packed up for the University of Colorado. While at C.U., Bradley’s appetite for new cultures was heightened as he studied abroad in Italy and traveled throughout Europe with the university’s snowboard team. When it was time to move on, Brooklyn, New York came calling to him with a similar lure as Colorado, being the pursuit of architecture and the excitement of a foreign land. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the third summer now that I have been fortunate enough to have interns. This year I have two Cornellians and a student from the University of Edinburgh, all architecture students keen to learn about mud buildings.
The interns spent their first night at my house in Dhaka. I immediately put them to work on an arts and crafts project, but jet lag caught up with them and craft time soon turned into nap time.
Jet lag catches up with the interns as craft time turns into nap time...
Last Friday’s class was the last session of Panigram’s English Lessons for the summer. The pavilion was plentiful with kids, this time about a hundred. When we arrived the kids were already waiting, cross-legged, in rows, chattering about in anticipation. The theme of this session was Plants and Recycling.
Katrina illustrates the different parts of a plant and how it grows.
Prior to the class, I wanted to demonstrate how to plant a seed, which required another trip to the crazy Jessore market. Trang and I scurried through damp allies to get to a kiosk selling all kinds of seeds. From pumpkin to mango seeds, the owner’s store was lined with packages of ready-to-grow items. (Except for the expired cabbage seeds he tried to sell me!) In addition to papaya plants, which we heard are fast growing, we also bought four baby ready-to-pot papaya plants.
Over 150 children children attended the third Panigram Resort English lesson, more than double the number of the previous week again!
Our third Friday English Lesson was about geography. In preparation, as usual, we went to the market in search for supplies. We were on a hunt for either a world map or globe, preferably in English. Who knew it would be such a difficult feat just to get a map that wasn’t distorted, inaccurate, or discolored. We finally settled on a decent laminated map in Bengali. We figured we would put labels in English on top of the map.
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Kristin Boekhoff
Owner, Panigram Resort
kboekhoff@panigram.com
Mikey Leung
Designer and Web Guru, Panigram.com
mikey@panigram.com
