Somehow in the rush of hosting bosses (visiting from America), training replacements, packing and saying goodbyes, I decided I should sneak off from my last week in Bangladesh and cross the border to India. I said hello to Max (who is working in Banaras for the summer) and goodbye to India (though undoubtedly I'll be back soon), and otherwise spent my 3 days in Calcutta trespassing into crumbling buildings, eating street food, and taking glorious naps in an old British flat on Park Street. Through a fantastic company (www.calcuttawalks.com), we took two organized walks (one through the old ric [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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(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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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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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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Today I caught a special on Al Jazeera's "101 East" program--a feature dedicated to investigating the issue of climate refugees and whether more developed nations have a responsibility to those who are displaced by the effects of climate change. The narrative follows a man from the southern coast of Bangladesh--a man who, like the people we met last week in Bhola, has lost everything he owned after his village was washed out. There is now a river where his house once stood. In light of my last blog and the week that Parendi and I spent tracking down "washed out villagers" [View Full Entry]

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Parendi and I typically travel in middle class style to Barisal--we take an overnight launch from Dhaka's main port (Sadar Ghat), sleeping in a hired double cabin that usually comes with AC, sometimes has functional fans, and always has curtains to shut out the peering passengers and curious boys who work on the boat. The older of the boats have suspiciously stained sheets and families of cockroaches, but we've figured out which of the boats are the cleanest and have the least smelly bathrooms. We can't complain. It's safer and more comfortable than traveling on the roads, and its certainly be [View Full Entry]

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One of my roommates (who has lived in Bangladesh for 2.5 years and thus has a broader range of experiences and reflections) just wrote a really good blog about poverty...it mentions her study in Mymensingh (the peepoo bags), Hena (whom we all love and want to protect), and a community development project similar to the one I visited in Pabna (another incredible example of Bangladeshis devoting their entire life and resources to bettering their own communities). You should read it. It's really good. http://bangladashley.blogspot.com/2009/04/faces-of-poverty.html [View Full Entry]

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It’s been more than two weeks since the Bengali New Year on April 14th, making it not nearly as new or exciting as it would have been if I had managed to post something about it in a more timely manner. In the spirit of celebration, however, let’s just pretend. Put on something red and white (and throw in some yellow, if you’re more courageous), and imagine that you’re ringing in the new year with outdoor cultural programs, family visits, and lots of eating—all on a festival appropriate 100 degree day. We started our morning in an upper-middle class manner with [View Full Entry]

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