Last Day in Bangladesh

            Wow, it is hard to believe my last day is here, time both flew by but at the same time it feels like I have been here for a long time. As I finishing up packing and prepare for the journey home it is hard to come up with just a few words to describe this experience. Blessed is certainly one word that I can use. I have had the most amazing support from family, friends, the Clinton School, Habitat for Humanity, and the new people I have met here. Traveling can be a lonely venture but knowing that so many people were supporting me throughout it was incredibly helpful. My amazing mother and grandmother even made cards for every week that I was here as a way to show their support and help to see where I was in the time here. These cards were so sweet and something that I appreciate having to look forward to each week. While here I was able to see a lot of different places thanks to some very helpful and kind tour companies, I went on three different trips with Nihjoom Tours and one with Travel Planner Bangladesh, without these two companies I would have not made it around to nearly as many places. Through my tours, trips with Habitat and BRAC, and project work, it is clear that the people of Bangladesh are very kind and welcoming. Even with getting lots of stares and at times being unsure of what was going on I can say that I always felt like I was in good hands. 
          Bangladesh has a lot of work to do but from my brief time here I was introduced to many people that are working hard to make positive change. I am grateful for the opportunity to come here and work alongside some of them. I don't know if I will make it back here anytime soon but my time here has been a learning experience with many memories  made, I had to throw it in there again. I hope that in the coming years things in Bangladesh will continue to improve for the population of millions and more people will be  able to discover this country. Here are just a few pictures from my last couple of weeks here. I will try to post once I get back home! Thank you so much to everyone that has followed this blog, the comments and support have helped me so much!

Babies, Schools, Loans, Milk, and Ramadan- What a Week!

On Monday I went on a field visit to the city of Gazipur with BRAC. I was able to go with a student from the UK working on a research project concerning microfinance. It was nice to have a new person to talk to and to go on a tour with another person. We were really lucky with traffic and ended up only taking an hour or so each way, I think if we would have left a few minutes later the traffic situation would have been much different.  Our visit started with learning about the general structure of the Gazipur office, this was primarily through visiting a lot of the managers in their offices and learning about the structure of each component. It was very interesting to learn how they utilize volunteers, staff within the community, and the managers to reach so many individuals.

            Our first program to stop by was one of the three microfinance programs that BRAC runs. We went and observed a meeting with female loan recipients, most of the loans BRAC gives out go to women. The community staff member leads this meeting with the women on a weekly basis, all of the loans are paid off in 46 weeks. Seeing this experience in person was great because in courses, especially last semester, we spoke about microfinance but seeing it in person with the basket for collecting the payments and the booklets with all the record keeping made the entire idea of microfinance much more attainable.

            Following the microfinance program visit, we went to learn about one of the health education programs. I had no expectations for this and learned quickly that I could not have anticipated what actually happened. We drove about 20 minutes away from the main BRAC regional office to a local office where an discussion on healthy pregnancies and birth was in process. At a certain point in the discussion some men arrived and began taking some medication distributed by a volunteer. We were told that they were undergoing tuberculosis treatment and have to meet with the volunteer every day to receive their medication. A few minutes later the woman leading the meeting stood up with a young woman and started toward a separate room, the guide told me I could follow. I was very confused at what was going on, the guide mentioned that she was going in for an exam. This made me hesitant for multiple reasons, I am not a medical professional so there was really nothing I could provide in this situation and I didn’t really feel like I had the right to interrupt this woman’s privacy. Following the push of the woman over the meeting I joined but was ready to leave if the appointment got to be more than I needed to be around. However, the exam was very quick just a checking of circulation, blood pressure, and the heartbeat of the baby. I actually got to hear the heartbeat, the young woman is 4 months along and despite a major language barrier it was clear that she was fine with me listening to the heartbeat. They then checked my blood pressure, again I was very confused with what was going on but followed along. I think this might be one of the moments I remember most about my time here, it was a moment that I did not expect but through smiles and a growing baby there was unity between the 4 women in that room. The joy from hearing the heartbeat of a complete stranger and knowing that she was working to educate herself was something that I think anyone can understand.  

            A local man offered us tea in his home and goodness gracious did he have a beautiful home. He was the landlord of a large area of land, including the local BRAC building and offered us mangos, mango juice, and tea. He has visited England a couple of years ago so he and the other student on the tour talked a lot about London, another reminder of just how small our world can seem at times.  We left this area after a while and headed off to a local BRAC elementary school.  BRAC has schools throughout Bangladesh that are another free program. When we arrived the students all said hello and greeted us with some different dances. We stayed to observe a lesson and I wished I understood what had been going on but it was all in Bangla. It was really nice to see a bunch of kids having fun in a classroom and being able to learn because of a school provided by BRAC.  Education is so important no matter where you are in the world, but in a country like Bangladesh that experiences such extreme poverty, any way to build upon a better future could mean an incredible improvement for the people.

            Our last stop of the day and the most unexpected for me was a milk processing and packaging factory. BRAC realized that with so many individuals throughout different villages having cows but not being able to sell any milk because everyone else has a cow. Following this realization they developed a process of collecting the milk at chilling centers then transporting the milk to the factory, and processing it into different products. This has been an incredible success for BRAC and because of this social enterprise they are able to take the profits from the milk and further develop community programs, as well as grow the milk enterprise.

            The entire day was overwhelming when considering that this is all done through the same main organization. From what I could see from the community has embraced the different programs that BRAC offers, making it easy to understand how they can be the largest non-governmental organization in the world.

            Following my day with BRAC I went back to the habitat office and continued developing the advocacy program. On Thursday night the staff at habitat had an Iftar party. Iftar is the meal each day at sunset, the first meal since sunrise that those individuals fasting eat since before 4 am. It was a really interesting event, before the meal some of the staff presented some of the general points about Ramadan.  It was really interesting to learn about the different components of the Ramadan month and the different important days, particularly the last 10 days. The party was a great end to the week.

            If you made it to the end of this blog thank you for keeping with it until the end! Just over two weeks left here in Dhaka, I can’t believe it but look forward to finishing up this project and making as many memories as I can :-D.

Hello Again!

          It has been a couple of weeks since my last post and I'm not really sure that I have a good reason for why. I have been continuing to work at the office and the project continues to progress. Over the past two weeks I have been working on developing documents that habitat can use in the future as part of an advocacy program. However, at this time we are still trying to focus in on some of the main issues that the organization can cover but this is quite difficult. There are so many different issues and every one is complex. I am making a lot of general issue documents and hoping that they can be specified either while I am still here or later in the future. A lot of my recommendations have focused on the need to collect research concerning the issues identified by the community but this will take time and is not able to be completed in my remaining time in Bangladesh. 
          This upcoming week I am going on a field visit with BRAC, a non-profit that started in Bangladesh but now works internationally and works on a wide variety of issues. According to Wikipedia BRAC is also the largest non-governmental organization in the world! I am excited to see how they work in the community and hopefully learn some methods that could be helpful in the project with habitat. 
          I cannot believe that in 3 weeks I will be starting the journey home, some days it seems like I just arrived and others it seems like I have been here for a long time. Over this past week I had a couple of conversations that really made me think about this experience and the universal nature of service. I was speaking with a habitat employee about the project and hopes for the future, we ended up speaking how the ways different roles in an organization are  important. It was a conversation that I feel like I had a lot when working as an administrative assistant and it just reminded me how service is such an all encompassing term. In our first semester at the Clinton School we were tasked with developing an individual definition of public service. Although this was a challenging assignment it was very interesting to see how the definitions varied among each member of the class. It was also a very refreshing conversation, it is easy to bogged down in the difficulty of finding out different information but then to get focused back in on why an organization like habitat is so important, when there are millions upon millions of people living in substandard housing or urban slums. 
          I will probably update soon with more details about my day with BRAC.

Halfway Point :-)

I have officially passed my halfway point in my international project experience. It's both a strange and exciting feeling to say the least! I feel like I have finally gotten the hang of some of the necessary logistics to living here, although I am very lucky to have a lot that I don't have to worry about like so many other people in this huge city. Last weekend I went on a tour of the old capital of Bangladesh, it was one of the most beautiful and happiest days I have had since arriving. It is incredible how different the more rural parts are from the city, the lack of honking and being away from all the different vehicles on the roads was a nice break. During this day trip I was able to see a lot of different Hindu temples and some incredible homes from the colonial times here that were abandoned but have remained in relatively good condition because of government intervention. What struck me most of all though on this day was the kindness of the people, especially of the children we saw. There were a lot of kids around some of the areas we visited, especially when we went to a school made entirely out of bamboo! The kids were so interested in why I was there, continually walking up to me saying "Hi" and "How are you?" in English. It was so sweet and although I don't think they understood very much when I responded back to them, they really made me smile. 

During my time here I have been able to see quite a few different sites. However, I'm not sure anyone could ever adjust to seeing so many disparities when out and about both within in Dhaka and the rural communities. It is challenging to find the words to describe what all you can see when going down the busy roads. What I have taken note of and discussed with different habitat staff is how some people survive with such little money but do so by working so incredibly hard. Take for example building a bridge. Back in the US a bridge would involve a lot of workers, big equipment, and lots of time. Here in Bangladesh and I'm sure in lots places in the developing world a bridge is made with many workers, bamboo, barely any big equipment, and a lot of time. I don't want to make it seem like back home building a bridge isn't a lot of hard work because I certainly realize that it takes a lot of time, hard work, and planning to get it all done and then add in the many hours of labor. However, here it is startling to see how the same sort of structure is built without such large tools. Instead of big concrete trucks you will see people carrying what I will describe as big plates of concrete from one communal concrete collection area and then walking it over to the area being worked on at that time. This process makes the process of the concrete structures take so much longer and to think about all the concrete necessary for that bridge, well it is a bit overwhelming to think about all that work. Instead of steal structures to support the workers you see bamboo structures used. This is just one example of the hard work here. Organizations such as habitat and so many other non-profits are so important because there is not a social security system here like we have back home. If something unexpected happens and the finances run out it can put a family into a very hard situation. Many people move to Dhaka for better access to jobs but in such a big city they face living in slums because of the inability to pay for other housing.  As a friend's blog recently reminded me, there are no simple solutions but I can certainly say that I am proud to know that organizations such as habitat are working hard to improve the lives and stability of people here in Bangladesh and around the world. 

I appreciate everyone keeping up with this blog and hope that this week I have been able to share a little bit more about the experience of being here. Ramadan has started bringing with it a whole new cultural experience to witness.

Best wishes to all I hope you will enjoy some pictures of the memories I made this past week!

More Pictures and Update

As I tried to think about what to write about this week I realized that I have not really discussed the project that I am here to work on with Habitat for Humanity Bangladesh.  My project is to develop an advocacy program for habitat. Advocacy is such a big and often vague term that it can mean many different ideas. For the project we are taking advocacy to mean both collaborating with the communities and the government, if necessary, to work for change or greater awareness. That definition is still very vague but by trying to explain it I hope its a bit easier to see that there can be many facets to the project. Habitat has been in Bangladesh for 15 years and although they have not have a advocacy program, at least in recent years, community based advocacy in the form of education for water, sanitation, and hygiene has been a small part of different projects. For this project my supervisor and I have gone on interviews to different non-profits in Dhaka, the site visit to speak with habitat staff in different communities, and started a questionnaire concerning advocacy with the staff throughout the country. I'm at the point in the project where it is time to take all the information that has been collected and bring it together into the program. This is quite the task because there are so many directions that are possible to go in, but with the help of the staff and best practices from other habitat offices throughout the world its working out. Hopefully in the next 5 or so weeks a sustainable plan can be developed for the program. 

Now that I have gone into my project I wanted to share a couple more pictures that I received from the tour company from my tour last weekend. :-) I'm going on another tour this coming weekend so I will hopefully have lots of pictures to share! Thanks for all the support and keep making memories! 

Traci on a boat! Thank goodness they had those umbrellas because the sun was intense!

In front of the parliament building. 

Traci on a rickshaw!

Traci on a rickshaw!

I don't know what face I'm make here, but this is a tea stand on the side of the street. They are really common and this is me awaiting some red tea with ginger, I promise I'm happy in this picture. :-)

New Sites

It's been a while since my last post but I wanted to wait until I could share some fun pictures! This past week was spent developing and sending out a questionnaire to the Habitat for Humanity staff both in Dhaka and around the country concerning their thoughts on topics that could be used for an advocacy program. The feedback we have already received has been really helpful and interesting and I'm hoping that this week will get us some more.  This past weekend i went on a tour of the old part of Dhaka, is was quite the memory making experience ;-D. I was picked up around 9 am and the first place we went was the Bangladesh Parliament building. We weren't able to go in because it was the weekend and if you want to get access you have to go through this process of approvals. By parliament there is also this big park where a former president is buried. Here are some pics, included in this is my first picture featuring myself in Bangladesh. The blog isn't working with me right now so all the pictures are going to be below all of the text, there are a lot but incase we aren't facebook friends I wanted to share :-). The next stop was a Hindu temple, we were actually able to go in which was neat. The next stop was a tea stand, they are found all along the city and are places for gathering and a quick drink of tea. The rest of the day was interesting because unbeknownst to me the previous evening was a Muslim holiday and most of the sites we were supposed to be visiting were actually closed. The guide tried to find other places to visit, such as Dhaka University, and we went on a longer boat ride than originally scheduled. The heat index for yesterday was 113 degrees Fahrenheit, on the boat it was very hot and many of you know I get a bit motion sick. I was not feeling the best but it was really interesting seeing the traffic on the water, the guide said at the end of the day when many people are getting off of work there will be actual traffic on the river because so many people are going back and forth and there are only two bridges. Following the boat ride and a little Traci needs to cool off now moment, we went to a yummy lunch. The last part of the tour was a rickshaw ride through the old part of Dhaka, some of the streets were so narrow that cars are not able to go through them. This was really neat and I am happy to say that I have grown to enjoy rickshaws quite a bit!

Although we didn't get to see all that was expected, the tour was still a great time to see a part of the city I had not been in yet and to learn a bit more about the history. I'm supposed to be sent some other pictures from the day and when I get those I will make another post!

Thank you all for continuing to keep up with this blog and for all your kind words, I really appreciate them! Make those memories and see you soon!

The stairs on this side of the building are only for the President to use.  

Seeing a man on a boat with a bike made me smile. 

5 Days and 3 Cities!

I wish I could make more creative titles for these different posts but for some reason all my creativity is currently hiding. However, as the title suggests I am back in Dhaka after a week away with my supervisor to different cities in the north were the third phase of a WaSH, water, sanitation, and hygiene program is about to begin. My job during the ceremonies was to take a lot of different pictures during the ceremonies, after the ceremonies if there was time we then spoke to the staff of the local habitat offices concerning advocacy. We first went to the city of Mymensingh, this was the largest of the 3 cities we visited, and was out base for all but the last night. The first ceremony was on Monday morning and it was held at a large conference hall. Although the each ceremony was entirely in Bengali I was able to get a sense of what was going on thanks to my supervisor, the other staff, and different English phrases they would use. The staff at this Habitat Resource Center, HRC, were very welcoming and had a lot of ideas about advocacy and made for a great start of the week. The next day we went to Modhupur, this was a smaller city but on the way we saw monkeys! We drove through an area that used to be a very big forested area but with time a lot of it has been taken down. Our last ceremony was the furthest north, very close to India! We could actually see India in the distance when we went on a walk around the village. Our last night was really nice, we stayed at the YWCA in the city, it was the most secluded place we have stayed and the most calm night in terms of the amount of honking, etc, it was great but also very eerie not hearing what has become usual background noises. 

 Before leaving on this trip I got my keys to the apartment I will be staying in for June and July, it is directly beside the habitat office! The location is definitely ideal and it is so nice! A lot more space than I need but being so close and having the easiest possible commute is wonderful. Last night was my first night here and it was a great night! This morning I had my first grocery shopping experience and my first rickshaw experience, the rickshaw was actually a very easy process, I was worried about it but the driver understood English and once I realized he thought I meant a different area of the city and made it clear, we were on the right track. 

During this past week I was able to see so much more of the country than I had expected, it was so interesting and although I was in a van for most of the time, it was still really eye-opening. As I shared in my previous post, Bangladesh has a very large population. One thing I kept wondering was where are all the people, well I can partially answer this now, they are everywhere! Back at home there are a lot of places where you will see no one, but the areas that we saw always had some people within view. It was really interesting to see the similarities and differences between Dhaka, a city with millions of people, and compare them to some of the small villages we drove through. Rickshaws and these small vehicles called CNGs were the primary vehicles we saw, a long with some construction trucks that have very pretty paint jobs. There were also a lot of different animals from cows, chickens, goats, and sheep, it was really fun to keep a look out for what would be coming on the next part of the road. Again, I have to give a lot of thanks and credit to the drivers here, especially the driver for habitat. It is amazing all that the drivers here can handle, at times very bumpy roads, with a plethora of people and vehicles, even animals, and still they are able to successfully meander the roads safely!

Again, this was a great week and I still have a lot of reflecting to do on the experience and see how it can help in the advocacy program development. Below are some pictures that I took over the past week, I will be adding more later but here are some of the highlights! 

 Above is a quick pic of one of the construction trucks.

Left, my bedroom at the apartment.