Faith and I are happy to report that we've had our longest stretch of health this past month since we've arrived in Bangladesh. It's been a month now since we've had the "big D" and we must admit not missing it. This is a definite answer to prayer by our supporters for which we're really thankful.

Some have wondered what's been causing our health problems... well, in a nut shell, Dhaka is a small (geographically speaking) city with ten million people packed in. Add extreme poverty, intense heat, flooding, poor sewer systems and drainage, bad waste management, massive air pollution, etc. to the packing in of millions in a small place = health problems, not just for expats, but for Bangladeshis as well.

One of the biggest problems is a lack of clean drinking water. Often the water supplies are not entirely clean--I won't mention exactly what is in the water that makes it unclean... This problem is solved in part by boiling the water. However, often people don't boil the water. Water for tea is usually boiled enough to kill anything harmful, however, the cups for tea are often rinsed in unboiled water. So, someone may give you a cup of tea and the tea itself is no problem, but the cup has just been rinsed in unboiled water and has water droplets mixed in with the tea and on the rim of the cup... uh oh.

Another common practice is what I guess you could call "communal rinsing." I stopped drinking the tea at church because I noticed that this practice was going on; after multiple sicknesses, you could say that I've been trying to cut down on the potential hazards.

Communal rinsing is when "clean" water is in a large bucket for public rinsing. At the street shops they will often offer tea to customers. After one customer drinks tea, they dunk the cup in that bucket of water, swish it around a bit, and reckon that it's ready for the next tea drinker. Do this twenty times and I don't even want to know what's in that bucket. Likewise, at church, fifty or a hundred people might have tea. The tea itself is probably no problem, but grabbing the dirty cups and swirling them around in the same bucket...

Culturally insensitive or not, I'm becoming a bit more select about the tea I'm willing to drink. The other day while I was in a shop practicing Bangla I was offered the customary tea. I thought to myself, "How can I be culturally sensitive and accept this without getting sick? I know, I'll ask for a coke instead and I can drink it straight out of the can." So I asked for a coke and set my heart at ease. But when it arrived, it had not only been poured into a cup that had just been rinsed, but it was filled with ice as well. Ice can also be a source of problems since freezing doesn't always kill all the harmful critters like boiling does. What did I do? I drank it, and by God's grace I was spared this time.

So, we're trying to avoid some of the hazards and thankful that for the past month God has given us some momentum without any big D toilet action.

Thanks to all who have been praying for our health!

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