Jinn, Genies and Bryan Adams

I apologize for the huge length of time between posts.  Life has been hectic and frankly, I simply forgot about communicating with the outside world for a while (or maybe it was laziness?)  In any case, life goes on and I thought I would share a few of the things currently occupying my time. 

For starters, who knew that Bryan Adams was so popular on a global scale?  He is HUGE here.  The kids love him, the adults love him and heck, even I am beginning to love him!  I borrowed some music from the French teacher across the hall and, lo and behold, when "Summer of 69" blared across the room on my classroom speakers, my kids lit up and started singing and dancing, complete with air guitar!  He had a concert here in February of last year and after doing a little bit of research it sounds like it was a really big deal here in Dhaka.  I don't think they get too many big-name Western performers willing to come here!

On another note, myself and another teacher are leading a video editing club ( as I write I can almost hear the laughter of the people who know me well) and right now we are creating a 50 People 1 Question video around the neighborhood.  The question our kids chose was: "If a genie gave you one wish, what would you wish for?"  I am pretty excited about the end result of this video as we have several high-school students who know their stuff when it comes to sound and video editing. 

I am going through a horror unit at the moment in my English Language Arts classes (hereafter exclusively referred to as ELA) and I am amazed at how firmly all of my students believe in jinn.  Almost every student has some sort of personal experience with them and I did a little bit of research and figured I would share what I learned.  Muslims believe that Allah created three kinds of sentient beings: angels, humans and the jinn.  While angels (and their fallen demonic counterparts) are relatively uninvolved in the affairs of the world, the jinn are extremely active, can take the form of humans or animals and can be either good or evil.  As creations of Allah, they have free will and they will be judged in the same way as humans on judgement day.  My goal is not to write a mini-thesis on the religious beliefs of Muslims but I thought that this was interesting because how many of my students say they have seen, heard or even interacted with these creatures.  Hmmmm!!!

Last but not least, I had the great privilege of walking out of my apartment straight into the smoke of a massive garbage fire.  They don't really have dumps here and they burn all of the garbage throughout the city.  It is not uncommon to see several trash fires over the course of a few minutes on the road.  Lets just say they will certainly never become my potpourri! 

Cheers!