Welcome to the Hanham Family website.

(05/22/09 (Suzanna)  We left Kentucky April 13 and have been living in South Asia for five weeks! We are enjoying the friendly people and delicious food.

Our biggest challenge as we adapt to this culture is the language.  We take classes 5 days each week , work with tutors, and take advantage of opportunities to be with national people in social, shopping, and church situations.


[Richard working with his language tutor, Manik]


Our area suffers from lack of electricity and water.  The heat and humidity can be quite uncomfortable, especially when we have no electricity and the generator in our building is not running.  We have one A/C in our apartment, in the bedroom, but it only runs when we have electricity.   Our building generator runs a couple of ceiling fans, and that’s better than no fans!

Traveling by rickshaw or CNG is becoming a daily routine!



Our apartment building has an iron fence around the property and unarmed guards to admit the vehicles and pedestrians.  Security does not seem to be a major problem in our area of the city.  The police commissioner lives across the street.   The guards keep out the street vendors and the beggars.

[Entrance to our apartment building]


We love the fresh fruits that grow here!  The pineapples are quite small but so sweet and juicy!




In addition to familiar fruits, we’ve enjoyed many mangoes and have just tried lichis for the first time.

This popular Chinese fruit is about the size of a walnut, with a bumpy red shell encasing white translucent pulp that's similar in texture to a grape. The flavor is sweet, exotic, and very juicy.


We enjoyed a delicious Bangladeshi meal in the home of national friends with whom we attend church.


We often see animals in the city streets – usually goats, cows or sheep.  Some are destined for the meat market and the others are destined for Hindu sacrifices.



It does not get any fresher than the meat at the local Meat Markets.   Since there is no refrigeration, the cows, goats or sheep are butchered daily and the fresh meat laid out on the concrete floor.   We choose to buy our meat from one of the few grocery stores in the city that caters to foreigners.


Also, you cannot get fresher chickens than this!  This man was selling chickens to apartment residents.


Sadly, this area has much poverty and high unemployment.   People of all ages go through the trash.  There are many beggars, and people do very strenuous labor – long hours and low pay.


Bicycles are used regularly to haul both people and heavy loads around the city.


The locksmiths do not have individual shops.  They wander the city streets with a huge ring of blank keys and manually make the keys at the side of the street.    As we found out, when the keys are made in this fashion, they sometimes do not work in the lock.


We had a major dilemma when electricity went off as we were using the ATM and the machine captured our card!  Fortunately, by the end of the day, a nice medical university professor who came by and overheard our  “conversation” took us to his friend who is a banker and helped us get our card back.