Blogs from Bangladesh, Asia - page 29

I’m really much happier now that we have a place to work and we’re getting on with it! I’ve gotten over my grumpiness and homesickness, no longer do I even think to question things! Again, I am continuously overwhelmed by kindness and friendliness! The people here, while Jesmin and Dawlat still insist are peculiar, also seem to have a great sense of humor. There’s a lot of giggling and laughing during the surveys, which seems great to me. I chilled with some moheesh (water buffalo) today for a while. I also proved to the town that I am start raving mad, or at least so my coworkers now think, by jumping out of the van in the pouring ran to walk for half a kilometer to feed my new moheesh friends some kola (banana). Mostly I ... read more

Wednesday we drove from Dhaka to Kushtia. Although Kushtia is due west of Dhaka, the road took us pretty far north; in a country with so much water are only limited bridges and ferries you usually don’t have much choice. It’s a much smaller town than Faridpur, where we were last week. The whole trip, including lunch, took about 6 hours. The area was passed through was very much affected by the flooding. Of course I floods every year after the monsoon, but this year was particularly bad. Many villages were mostly underwater, and the sugar cane and jute fields were inundated. Shanez explained that it has to do with Indian control of the Ganges upstream, so basically India dumps its excess water on Bangladesh. I think America does a similar, though opposite, thing with the ... read more

After being so good about keeping up with writing update, I totally neglected it after the first few days in Faridpur! We've been working extremely hard! Oh well, no one really needed *that* much detail! (and if I repeat myself, I apologize!) The week between my last update and when we finished working at that field site and returned to Dhaka this past Sunday (the 29th) was pretty much just filled with lots of work! My two field officers are doing an amazing job! I've randomly selected households that we will interview. But, I can offer no help in locating the person, in fact I offer no help at all. While they are in charge, I just tag along, drawing a crowd, and looking out of place. I entertain the women and children with my ... read more

Friday, July 20, Faridpur We arrived at our village, Shibrampur, this morning to explain that we’d like to spend a week there doing this survey, and to ask permission from the village elders. We said we’d like to visit each bari (cluster of households, usually related) and get a list of the name of all the heads of households in the village. Two young men escorted us around, they showed us through the whole village and introduced us to everyone. They were unbelievably helpful, Rasheda has said that we can and should offer to give them some money at the very end of the study since we couldn’t have managed without their help! Giving money is an issue here, Bangladeshi’s are uncomfortable being anything but amazingly generous, and so the task has been given to Dawlat,my ... read more

Thursday July 19, 2007 Faridpur Today we went to look for an appropriate village to conduct my survey in. We plan to interview the male and female heads of 20 households, therefore we want to find a village that has between 50 and 60 households. From the road and walking around the roosts, I had the impression that these villages were tiny, maybe 20 households. It turns out they are much much bigger than I realized, and 100 households or more is the norm. My team consists of an anthropologist, Rasheda, who has been helping me all along and is the local PI (principal investigator) on the project as for as the center is concerned. She has been the one giving me great input into my questionnaire. She has assigned two field officers to conduct the ... read more