Welcome to Bangladesh, Cowboy Country for Backpackers Bangladesh is the real deal. If you want to know what you are made of, you come here. I have found myself describing India to the other interns here at the Grameen Bank as 'too touristy'. Once you get into it, I think that most would agree, but from your desk chair in the Western World, I can see how that might raise an eyebrow or two. One great thing is that there is always 'that guy who speaks English' in every village. So eventually, you will figure out where you are and how [View Full Entry]

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What initially drew me to Grameen Bank was the potential of micro-credit to challenge traditional attitudes towards gender equity. The goal of the micro-credit summit campaign was not simply to reach women but empower them. This meant developing micro- and macro-level strategies to achieve gender equality in power, rights and resources. Yet, empowerment is a culturally specific word. A young female receiving a liberal arts education in the west has a much different understanding of empowerment as compared to an uneducated woman growing up in a rural village. Therefore, until I could answe [View Full Entry]

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Saying goodbye to a place is always a surprising revelation in the way that you feel about your experiences there. As the days leading up to my last trips to Barisal passed (and as my final days in Bangladesh slip through my hands now), I found myself wondering how I would react to the end of my time here. I arrived in Bangladesh just over a year ago. I stepped off the plane into Dhaka on the morning of June 5th and was on a boat to Barisal that same night, setting a pattern that would define the first few months [View Full Entry]

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It is almost impossible in these parts to not take up a number of causes and issues outside of your official realm of obligation. In a beautiful country full of sweet and welcoming people, many of whom live in very challenging circumstances, it is inevitable that we end up investing energy in “side projects.” Ashley, for example, has a relationship with a community in the lake region of Rangamati, where she raised money to sponsor a handful of composting toilets for families who until then had been drinking water from the same shores that they defecated into. Now the families have [View Full Entry]

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Initially, my plan for last weekend was to visit the Sundarbans and take a relaxing boat ride through the beautiful Bangladeshi jungle. But due to Cyclone Aila, which killed over 200 people and left thousands without homes or clean water, I knew I could not enjoy being a tourist amidst so much pain and destruction. Looking at the front page of the Bangladeshi newspaper, I grew frustrated that neither the government nor the private sector was doing much to help. Suffering has become such a daily reality for the people that the government no longer bothers declaring the country in a [View Full Entry]

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(Brought to you by my once lost and now returned camera charger) Finally, the video of our sea plane landing. It's a decent view of the landscape, but hold out for the end of the video, when you can see children from the nearest village running along the banks to see what has just landed in their river. The second video is a new favorite of mine, and gives a sense of that enchanted-forest type feeling that I sometimes talk about in Bhola. You half get the sense that one of the boys (carrying pots of fish on their heads) will [View Full Entry]

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Biking Through the Tea Estates- 29/05/09 This morning I woke up thinking it would be a mellow day bike riding through the tea estates of Sylhet. However, I am quickly learning that nothing in Bangladesh is easy or relaxing. The bike shopkeeper was supposed to deliver fifteen bikes for the interns at 9 am to the Nirala Guesthouse. Of course, when we walked downstairs in the morning there was no one waiting. Two hours later, after much sweating and negotiation, we had fifteen shoddy bikes and a tour guide who neither spoke English nor knew the area. Heading out to Lowacherra [View Full Entry]

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In a coincidental and tragic follow-up to two of the blogs I published recently, Cyclone AILA hit the southern coast of Bangladesh last week, washing out dozens of villages (like the ones I wrote about two weeks ago) and producing more climate refugees. I was actually due to go to Barisal on a launch boat the night that Aila hit, but the country has a good tracking system and I was told that there was a signal 7 storm coming. Anything beyond a signal 4 and Save the Children staff are not allowed to get on a launch boat; and with [View Full Entry]

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Social Business: Last week I traveled with three other interns to visit some of Grameen’s sister companies. We drove five hours to the conservative town of Bogra, stopping first at Grameen Danone. Professor Yunus recently published his book Creating a World Without Poverty about the project with Danone. Basically, the French yogurt company approached Yunus looking for a way to market their company as a global institution that cares about the world’s poor. Yunus proposed the idea of a social business, or a company whose main focus is helping others rather than making a profit. [View Full Entry]

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I'm still waiting for the arrival of my digital camera charger, so in the meantime I've been digging through the archives of things I never shared. Here is a video I took on a boat crossing the Meghna river. The scene is full of fairly typical Bangladeshi things: women with varying degrees of head coverings, a beggar, crying babies, staring children (and adults). You can also see Hena (sitting in front of me to the right) and Parendi (with Hena's daughter Rahima on her lap). [View Full Entry]

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