Came in: 1999 Picture: ___

When Ms. Kahn won the lottery visa and prepared to move to the US, her brother gave her this object, called a boti, to remind her of home. But it was a souvenir boti and not a real one. She regretted that she had not packed a real one. “I did think about working in a kitchen,” she said. “After I came I saw I had to do everything by hand. In Bangladesh, we always had a maid to help us.” She did finally buy a boti when she went back to visit, but she really doesn’t have the space to use it in her home, in the Throngs Neck section of the Bronx. Still she keeps her souvenir boti, though she often has to hide it from her two young children. “It makes me think of my family and my culture and my Bangladesh.”

CRIME PREVENTION