Bangladesh

---

Tomorrow marks two weeks from my arrival in Bangladesh. Everything has happened so quickly, and already I feel that I’ve come a long way from my first days in the country, when I was positive that my body would never adjust to the heat and that I would never figure out how to say “dhonobad” (thank you) properly.

I landed in Dhaka at 6 am on a Saturday and was met at the airport by Elizabeth—the girl whose position I am taking—and a wall of hot sticky air. We hit the ground running, and after a full day in Dhaka we loaded a launch boat on Saturday night, headed down river to the field site where our research is done. In Barisal, a rural district crisscrossed by waterways, we conducted site visits and checked in on the adolescent peer groups that we (as research assistants for JPAL, an MIT-based research group) are monitoring and evaluating for Save the Children. Although between the insane humidity and my inability to understand rapid-fire Bangla I tended toward distraction and an inability to focus, those first few days were valuable in giving me a tangible idea of what it is that I’m here to do.

This perspective has proved essential in the last week, when I’ve had to settle into work on my own in Dhaka. Elizabeth has left and I am beginning to sort through the different layers of our project—the implementation of the adolescent peer groups, the staff management issues, the monitoring component, and the separate oil incentive project that we have recently incorporated as a scheme to delay age of marriage for adolescent girls. The first few days were, as with any job, stressful and overwhelming: acronyms I don’t know the meaning of, questions I didn’t know the answer to, people whose names I couldn’t keep straight and a general feeling of uselessness. Synchronized with a really negative reaction that I had to malaria medicine, I must admit that there were dark moments.

But I am, thankfully, becoming familiar with “There’s no way I can do this” moments. In my travels I have learned that these moments are real but that they pass. Every day is a new day, building to a level of comfort and confidence that will allow me to own and love my life here. Already I am feeling infinitely more in charge at work. I have ordered 24,000 litres of oil for our next round of distribution, contracted the creation of a monitoring software for the oil program, and helped craft the agenda for a five-day staff training for our adolescent empowerment Field Officers (and its incredible how much being productive can provide sanity). My Bangla vocabulary is growing, I have a small cadre of people who recognize me, and the other day when I bought two bundles of lychees, the locals at the next store that I went to assured me that I’d gotten a really good deal.

It also helps that I am now joined by MC, who has just arrived from trekking in Nepal and who tends to make my life pretty easy to adjust to wherever I am. We have two weeks together in the country before we both head to Nepal—she will catch a plane back to the states and I will settle down to a fellowship in Kathmandu for two and a half months (before coming back to finish my one year commitment in Dhaka). In the meantime, we will continue to explore Dhaka and Barisal together.
We have just returned from a day-long boat excursion from Dhaka, arranged by one of my roommates for her parents. We have all kinds of unattractive sunburn lines and splotches to attest to a day spent cruising down the river and disembarking at various points to tromp through rural Bangladesh. We visited the site of an old Hindu kingdom (now irrelevant, as most of the country’s population left after the war of 1971 when West Pakistan invaded), toured a sari-weaving village, and waved at countless groups of children jumping up and down on the river banks and men perched atop of boats full of jack fruit.

---

Photos

Waterways
Behind the boat is a cement factory. Half of today's water tour was spent appreciating the finer industrial highlights of outer Dhaka. We passed a cement factory, a sugar factory, a salt factory, a pepper factory, a jute factory...At least we now have an appreciation for the local economy.

Comments

[lizzie]

she's back....
3 cheers for the travel blog. i forgot how good of a writer you were. i love to live thru your blog entries. miss you!