Advertisement
Published: June 27th 2008
Launch boat to Barisal
The launch ghat in Dhaka, where at least half a dozen boats wait to fill up with families and jack fruits going down river. The bottom floor of every boat is an open seating area, where men set up prayer mats and women sit on blankets in circles with their children. The upper cabins In the last two weeks in Bangladesh, I’ve spent quite a bit of time “in the field.” This is a term that gets thrown around by development workers in these parts, and is meant to mean that we have temporarily left our fancy flats and cushy social clubs and taken long journeys to unspecified destinations in rural Bangladesh, where we briefly interact with the key players and beneficiaries of the projects that we work on from our offices in Dhaka.
The field visits are so far what have made Bangladesh manageable and valuable for me. I actually feel useful “in the field,” where I can help with program decisions and meet the people whom I otherwise just know by codes and statistics in my office in Dhaka. I can eat a deshi breakfast and kill scores of cockroaches per day and feel like I’m living something slightly closer to what most people think life in Bangladesh is like.
Barisal
These last two field visits provided two very different experiences. In Barisal I worked with Jewel and Shahana to put on a five day training for the Field Officers in our Kishoree Kontha (“Adolescent voice”) program. MC and I
Vendors
Vendors walk the edge of the boats, selling their wares to customers packed into the bottom floors of the boat. boarded a launch boat from Dhaka on Saturday night and I spent Sunday at the Save the Children office in Barisal, preparing training schedules with Jewel and putting together figures and graphs for my part of the training. The Field Officers (FOs)—half men and half women, my age or slightly older, situated in the middle of the project staff hierarchy, and who each oversee somewhere around 400 adolescent girls in their jurisdiction—were in the office for training from Monday to Friday.
The week was an education in the local professional culture. Presentations and training sessions were regularly interrupted for song breaks or rounds of jokes led by one of the project participants. In one roasting session, a senior project coordinator stood at the head of the room and spent five minutes making fun of the way that one of his FOs drives a motorcycle, much to the delight of all of the other participants. Everyone was made to participate in some way, so we all quickly discovered who had a beautiful voice and who would do better to come up with a joke routine. I was only allowed to bow out of my singing obligation because I offered to
Boat classes
The bottom floor of every boat is an open seating area, where men set up prayer mats and women sit on blankets in circles with their children. The upper cabins are where we stay--two beds to a cabin, which comes with a tv, a fan, and sometimes a whole colony of cockroaches. pay a fine instead. The fine was contributed to the group ice cream fund.
We were fed three times a day, and always on schedule, thanks in part to the “hero of the day,” a workshop participant who was elected on a daily basis simply to make sure that participants were fed on time and sufficiently entertained.
The most consistently popular training activities involved role plays or games. In one role play, an FO in his late 20s/early 30s played the part of a menstruating adolescent girl; in addition to grabbing his stomach in pain and behaving generally whiney and miserable, he went so far as to draw blood marks down his legs in red permanent marker. When he stood up to reveal a red paper cut-out that he had attached to the seat of his pants, giggles exploded across the conference room. MC and I looked at each other in astonishment, but were apparently the only ones who had any concerns about professionalism or sensitivity to the issues we were working on.
Whenever eyes started to glaze over, Shahana (who is otherwise a fairly serious woman) stood up and gave instructions for a competition or game. In
Road construction
and the back of a cycle rickshaw one instance, teams were given five minutes to build a necklace and a flower out of scrap materials. Hands were flying and participants were giggling like school kids. I was then made to judge my favorite from each category, and my decisions left some adult male participants standing with wilted expressions on their faces and plastic necklaces hanging from their necks when I didn’t select their contributions.
The training ended well (in my opinion) with a day’s worth of sessions on “Monitoring and Supervision” led by me. Until that day the entire workshop had been conducted in Bangla, and I had been provided with infrequent and incomplete translations (which I was then expected to expand upon and record in English as official meeting minutes that could be sent to the central office in Dhaka). For my sessions, I stood at the head of the room and delivered presentations and activity instructions in English, as Jewel stood faithfully by my side and translated into Bangla. Though I am in no way an expert in monitoring or supervision, my business cards say I am an “evaluation consultant” and I am generally expected to know what I’m talking about. So it was
encouraging to see that the information I presented was both new and helpful to the FOs. It was a perfect way to end my time “in the field” in Barisal, and to set the stage for a confident and familiar return in September.
Jhamalpur
On Friday night I left behind the air conditioned conference room in Barisal and boarded a launch boat back to Dhaka. We landed in the city on Saturday morning, and then woke up Sunday morning to do it all over again. This time Jewel, Shahana and I took a car for our “field visit.” We were destined for Jhamalpur to conduct an exposure visit to a micro savings and loan project that we hoped to learn from and possibly emulate for our adolescent girls in Kishoree Kontha.
I was already slightly enamored of the launch boat experience (despite the bugs in the room and the dodgy bathrooms), but now I have an even greater appreciation for water-based modes of travel. Rivers have neither potholes nor stray goats that you must swerve to avoid; there are no lorries passing at full speed into oncoming traffic, and therefore there is no regular and excessive honking.
Village hunting
At the beginning of our journey I was told that we would spend 45 minutes in a car and then 45 minutes to find the village we were looking for. After walking through a few villages we seemed to have lost the way, so a shirtless local elder guided us through the compound of his house and into his fields in the proper direction. On the banks of the river, you are not likely to see the remains of a recently crashed bus, so fresh from its detour from the road that many of its passengers are still squatting by the side of the road, keeping vigil over the one unlucky passenger whose limb can still be seen extending from one of the seats. Boats are amazing. Cars are kind of awful.
But they take you where you need to go, and so on Sunday we were delivered to the offices of the Chars Livelihoods Program, which oversees the Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA) that we were visiting. We spent more time that
day moving to and from villages than actually observing the meetings that were taking place in them (so it goes, I suppose, in a rural country with a tendency toward flooding and poor infrastructure). In our afternoon visit, we trekked across flooded paddy and through jute fields, past old men tending goats and even older men, sitting squat in the middle of their fields, dressed only in lungis under the shade of single black umbrellas. We walked single file along the elevated banks that marked the edges of plots
and squished mud between our toes until we arrived, drenched in sweat and with shoes in hand, in a small village where an all women’s savings meeting was taking place.
The women, arranged in a neat square made technicolor by the multi-patterned saris they wore, purchased shares in multiples of 10 taka (approx 15 cents), and repaid loans that they had taken in previous meetings. The value of this micro savings model is that it is entirely self-run, and meetings are conducted by a five person committee that is elected from within the group; these committee members manage all meeting procedures, count money, record purchases and loans, and keep tabs on repayment schedules and interest rates. Because many of the participants are illiterate, their passbooks (in which shares and loans are recorded) operate on a system of symbols, tallies, and thumbprint signatures. Though the group secretary must be basically numerate and is required to record all loans taken and repaid, the model also employs a collective memory method to keep track of loan repayments, thereby encouraging financial responsibility and group accountability. When group member number 17, for example, takes a loan of 400 taka with an interest rate of
And then there was water
As we followed the shirtless man through the fields, he and some of the local staff we were with were discussing something rather energetically. The only part I could pick out was "pani aceh" (which means "there is water"), which was repeated several times emphatically by the old man. So I guess it was no huge surprise when we hit a flooded field that lay between us and our destination. 5%, members 16 and 18 are in charge of remembering (and declaring at subsequent meetings) that member 17 owes 420 taka; 16 and 18 will monitor 17 until she has fully paid back her loan (within the three month time period that she is allowed to do so).
Halfway through the meeting it started to rain, but not hard enough to disrupt the orderly procedure of meeting activities or disband the group of men and children who had gathered to watch us watch the meeting. When the women had completed their transactions we had time to ask them some questions, after which we asked them if they had any questions for us. All they wanted to know was whether each of us was married and how many kids we had.
In the evening we drove for an hour and a half in the direction of another village where another meeting was taking place. The roads that took us there looked practically identical to the roads that I took by auto rickshaw through rural Tamil Nadu: long stretches of fields and palm trees, interrupted by irregular clusters of shops and stalls marking the presence of a township. Bananas and
Trekking through rice paddy
With our pant legs hiked up we followed the edge of the paddy fields, picking our way across several acres of rice fields. biscuits for sale in stalls right next to the local metalshop, lit from the inside by sparks and torch lights. Rickshaws carrying baskets of chickens, and flipflops for sale displayed in a neat line above a pyramid of mangoes. Dense clusters of activity punctuating green and damp landscapes.
Although some of the savings groups operated by VSLA are mixed gender, most are single sex. The second meeting that we attended that day was all men and a few boys. The youngest participant was a ten year old boy whose father was also in the group. The boy generated his own income through the sale of eggs and it was with this money that he purchased weekly shares for savings; he admitted that sometimes he had to borrow money for weekly meetings from his father, who proudly looked on and nodded in approval as his son spoke to us.
By the time we reached the village dusk was crawling toward night, and the secretary of the meeting had lit a single oil lamp (rigged out of an old medicine bottle) to cast light upon the evening’s proceedings. With the call to prayer echoing across the fields from the nearest
Village Savings and Loan
We finally found ourselves in our destination village, sweaty, barefoot and splattered in mud. We had come to witness a micro savings meeting being held by a group of women savers. mosque, borrowers 1 through 24 quietly approached the savings committee one at a time, depositing money in multiples of 10 taka to purchase shares.
One member, upon his turn, rose shakily from the far edge of the square. As he came closer to the light I could see that his legs and feet were distorted from a birth defect, and that he also suffered from some slight mental disability. He approached the treasurer and handed him 50 taka to purchase five shares, the most that a group member is allowed to purchase and far beyond the standard one or two share purchase. As the treasurer announced the amount to the secretary (who was then to mark 5 stamps in the member’s passbook), the group broke into applause to celebrate the commendable savings efforts of this one member. The VSLA staff later informed me that this man was a begger, thereby explaining his incredible ability to generate income and save.
When the call to prayer ended the crickets took over the background noise; lightning lit the fields and a firefly (something I had never actually seen before) swam around above our heads as the men continued their meeting, paying
Onlookers
All the men and children of the village turned out to watch us watch the meeting. back loans they had taken to fix rickshaws or pay for their children’s examination fees, and submitting a new round of loan requests. At the end of the meeting we left the men in the dark, where they remained sitting in a neat square to address an issue that had arisen between some of their members and members of a neighboring youth club.
The purpose of this exposure visit to Jhamalpur was to further understand the unique self-run micro-savings model and explore how we might apply it in the context of our peer groups for adolescent girls. On Monday we had the opportunity to meet with a group of adolescents who composed their own savings group under VSLA, and the reports were encouraging. All of the girls in the group were in high school or college, and all were literate. Most members used loans to pay for school-related costs, or to help with family expenses. One girl had recently taken a loan to purchase a cow, and now she is running her own small business, selling milk on the side when she isn’t attending college.
Our journey back to Dhaka from “the field” took us eight and a
Alternate route
Instead of trekking back through the rice paddy, we left the village in the other direction and walked until we hit a river, where we caught a boat back to our car. half hours, due primarily to poor roads, unpredictable traffic, and frequent stops for fruits that can and evidently must be purchased “in the field.” Shahana , Jewel and our driver picked through stalls of mangoes, piles of jackfruits and bags of blackberries, depositing each in the trunk of our car until we started to smell like a mobile fruit stall.
The field visits were successful, providing me with a greater understanding of the country that I will be working in for the next year and giving me something to look forward to when I return in September. But for now I must leave behind flat stretches of rice paddy and weaving waterways, and prepare to explore a more mountainous terrain. The call to prayer will be replaced by bells from Hindu temples, and I must switch from thinking like a research assistant and a development consultant to thinking like a human rights campaigner and a women’s rights advocate. In two days I put my explorations of Bangladesh on hold and head to Kathmandu to complete a ten week fellowship with the Uterine Prolapse Alliance of Nepal supported by the Advocacy Project, Washington DC. In Nepal, a whole new range
Jewel and Shana
The two I work most closely with from Save the Children of field experiences, first impressions, and adjustment processes awaits, from which I am sure to gain a valuable complementary perspective on what I have seen and learned here.
Salaam aleykum for the last time, as soon it will be “Namaste.”
Advertisement
Tot: 0.139s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 8; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0892s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
m.c.
non-member comment
Hero of the Day
Thank heavens for the hero of the day so that I could have my mango on time. And thank you for letting me tag along on all your new adventures. I love the pictures and I hope that you continue blogging throughout so that I can visualize your life in Bangladesh/Nepal.