Dhaka Hospitality

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I successfully made it to Dhaka (they pronounce it Taka) and have started to get my bearings.

If I can give a first impression of the city and country it would be to comment on their hospitality. I have been fortunate to have quickly met a group of Bangladeshi friends and they have been wonderful. They check up on me more than once a day to see how I am doing, if I need a ride, need directions or any other assistance. They also plan outings to take me to see different parts of the city or attend events.

I am living in an apartment with two people from Germany who are working on their PhD. They are here to do a project with BRAC University. Their experiment is to see the impact on a marriage in Bangladesh when the wife makes more money than the husband. Soon they will start employing couples, paying the woman more, so they can study the effects. I am interested to follow along as it progresses.

The traffic here as expected in crazy. The city was built more than 400 years ago and was not intended to accommodate so many people. There are double decker buses, cars, rickshaws, tuk tuks, motorbikes, and bicycles all trying to use the road. If I am not with a friend who is driving me then I tend to take a motorbike taxi as it is the quickest way to get through traffic. There are also no rules to the road. Cars are frequently driving the wrong direction down the road, no one stops for lights unless there is police directing traffic, and no one stays in their lane. Everyone is honking, but at who I have no idea since everyone is breaking the rules.

I am still figuring out my schedule here since as I shared previously, I will primarily be learning while I am here compared to doing. But, each meeting I have leads to another meeting I want to schedule or organization I want to research. Bangladesh really is the epicenter of micro finance, both from the length of time they have been doing it and how many different organizations offer loans. But, how it is done is very different from one NGO to another. Unfortunately, there are many NGOs that have turned micro loans into a revenue source and charge very high interest rates. I hope to meet with some of these NGOs to hear their reasoning for these high interest rates as well as find the NGOs that are offering low interest rates so I can compare.

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Comments

[Renee]

WOWZA
Thanks for keeping us updated, Sarah! Can’t wait to show my dad that pic of their electrical “system”. I laughed out loud reading your description of everyone on the roads! Sounds so entertaining and dangerous! Also interested in hearing about the microfinance NGO’s with higher interest rates…cause wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?