Blogs from Bangladesh, Asia - page 30

Tuesday July 17, Faridpur Away from the city! Yesterday, after spending many many hours editing my survey, both changing the questions somewhat but also cutting and pasting the Bangla version onto the English (which is hard when you don’t even recognize the type as letters, let alone words!) We finally headed out into the field!! We is myself, Jon my advisor, and two Bangladeshi veterinarians he works with, Shanez (though pronounced Shanay-waz) and Saludin. The Bangladesh countryside is beautiful, (relatively) calm and I am really happy to be here and not in the city! It took us many hours, of course, to be properly packed and on the way. It then took well over an hour to simply get out of Dhaka! To be fair, that included a stop for lunch, but Dhaka lives up to ... read more

After feeling considerably overwhelmed yesterday, several hours emailing, blogging, and messenging made me feel much more up to it.... I got dinner here in the hotel (I guess they serve food 24 hours, insane!!) -- I had chicken tandoori and garlic naan (yum!) all for 250 tk which equals, um, just over $3!!! A huge bottle of water is 30 tk (less than 50 cents). I showered, watched the tour de france (!) and slept for many hours, though woke up several times due to heat (I turned the a/c off silly girl), bizarre dreams, and lots and lots of honking as soon as the sun rose. Jon has arrived, we're off to the institution we're working with, locally nicknamed the cholera hospital. (several hours later...) We had a really great day today, we met with ... read more

So leaving you on tenterhooks was not my intention.....but for one reason and another (and another, and another!) I haven't been able to write this blog until now. So here it is...just exactly what happened on that bright sunny day... We had prayed for no rain. Everyone in the office had variously anti-rain danced, consulted weather maps, held wet fingers in the sky with serious expressions, studied the clouds and pretended to phone Allah from the office. Something must have worked (maybe the direct line to God?) because when 20th June dawned, it was not only a sunny day...it was the opposite of rain. For those who aren't used to different degrees of scorching, the opposite of rain is virtually cloudless. The sun is so hot and bright that the air itself becomes hard to ... read more

Hello - not much time for writing this time as I have been pretty busy. Here's a quick run of the week: So, Bangladesh has been living up to its stereotype and producing gallons and gallons of rainwater, which is flooding the land, and producing those classic pictures of thathched roofs just above the water-line that once we could watch from the nice dryness of our couches. Every day I journey either one or two hours to a camp (depending on which one), and then the same distance back to Cox's Bazar at the end of the day. We drive down the narrow penisula at the bottom of Bangla, to land that is closer to Myanmar than the rest of the country. Consequently last week, the whole field team - all 12 of us - ... read more

Last week Tun Nyo, Soo-Eun and I were flying. We’ve started calling ourselves ‘the three musketeers’, as we appear inseparable (I think its a kind of self-depracating plan to stop our colleagues taking the mick first). We’re the first people we cheerily greet in the morning, we share an office in a cutesy hut, we sit together in the jeep, work in the same room at the camps, return in the jeep and then are always the last ones working late into the hot nights. We're also the most avant-garde of departments in the office - floating new ideas about social development (putting people's wellbeing/happiness at the heart of all projects), gender mainstreaming (making sure both sexes are equally provided for/promoted in all projects) and participatory practices (ensuring the refugees are consulted at every step ... read more