Greetings from Bangladesh – Day 7

The day began with breakfast at a local place that I would not have gone near when I first got here, I guess I am adapting. Unfortunately everyone seems to eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner here, and I am getting tired of rice and dhal.

Saturday we spent the day with Save the Children. They have a nice office with internet access and western toilets – these are my Bangladeshi essentials, I will gladly live without a TV or a/c to get a western toilet. In fact you delay going a lot here in hopes that there is a better bathroom at the next stop.

Save the Children is funded by USAID, your tax dollars, so they are slightly Americanized compared to Grameen and BRAC. They have much more rigorous studies in place to show that programs work before they spend a lot of money on them. They actually make you sign release forms and get approval from people before you can put them on camera. They have PowerPoint presentations to show you all their research (Bangladeshi groups have printed brochures for everything). And they put US flags on all the products they distribute. In the case of commodities like wheat and peas I hear this is a big disruption to the local market, as all the product USAID sends is from US farmers – keeping them in business and hurting the local farmers in the countries we are trying to help. That’s not to say that emergency aid isn’t a great thing, it’s the long term programs that continue to send American product that seem to be the issue.

After a couple of PowerPoint presentations and lunch (rice and dhal) we went out to see two village safe houses that have been built for girls to come to play and talk to each other, as well as get lessons on hygiene, finance and job training. They were a lot like the ones we saw in Dhaka, but it is great to see how different organizations are implementing the programs that seem to work. When we talk to the girls they often have questions for us, they usually go in this order: Where are you from? Are you married? How many children do you have? There is one woman on this part of the trip with us who is not married, and she has gotten tired of the sad looks, so she is now inventing husbands. If you invent a spouse you have to have a back story, because there can be follow up questions. One day I got asked what my wife does and I told them she works at the Humane Society helping animals. The interpreter looked at me with a blank stare and had no idea what to say. I tried to explain that they rescue stray animals and adopt them out to good homes. Again nothing. In a country where, I am guessing, 90% of the dogs and cats just hang around the village and eat whatever scarps they can find, this is a very foreign concept.

When we got back from the village we all went to dinner (rice and dhal). Our guides have been a little taken aback by how early we eat. They usually eat dinner at 9 or 10 p.m. and they are worried they will be hungry again if they eat with us at 7:30 p.m. We keep telling them they will digest their food better if they eat with us and then go for a walk. This is pretty funny when we outweigh each of them by 20-50 pounds.

Tomorrow we have been promised to go out for Chinese food for dinner.