bangladesh

So much has happened since I last updated that it's too overwhelming to try to catch up. I'll just start with Bangladesh, and you can refer to the team blog/ask me questions on your own if you're curious the rest of the time we spent in India. But, here are two photos I took there that I like:

We arrived in Dhaka two nights ago after spending one night in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to an overnight layover. There, we stayed far away from the bustle of the city in a hotel near the airport, where we spent the evening enjoying room service, the swimming pool and comfortable beds. I don't feel guilty about not venturing into the city because Griffin and I will spend four days there after we leave Bangladesh on the 28th, and we certainly needed to relax because for some reason, we flew four hours to KL and thenfour hours to Dhaka, instead of just cutting up through Calcutta directly.

Once we landed I was little concerned about getting my visa in the airport, but I got one without any problem for $50, much to the dismay of my teammates who paid considerably more for the service back in the states. For me though, it was relatively expensive because all I spent the whole two weeks in India was $50. We met up with someone from the Indian WaterPartners (now water.org actually, after it merged with Matt Damon's H20 Africa last week) and a representative from one of their Dhaka partner organizations, DSK, and we went to our hotel.

The traffic in Dhaka was terrible, and although we were used to the hectic driving in the country, driving in the seventh most densely populated city (according to wikitravel) was something else. Colorfully-decorated bicycle rickshaws wove in and out of traffic among pedestrians, vans like ours, cars and delapidated buses. The sidewalks were packed with people, and when we pulled up to our hotel and unloaded from the van, a crowd gathered to watch.

One sad thing was the many child beggars. Right when we first got out of our car, a few kids ran up to us and motioned that they were hungry. These kids were really persistent though. After Tarik gave them money one time, whenever we would leave the hotel they would rush up to us asking for more, even if their arms were full of half-full Coke bottles and Pringles cans they had just gotten from other tourists. One girl followed us on the street for several blocks, pulling on Tarik's hand and pleading with him in Bengali until someone shoo'ed her away for us. It's a complicated issue because it's one thing to say that you shouldn't give money to beggars, with movies like Slumdog Millionaire giving evidence of what might really be going on behind the scenes. But it's another thing to say no to a poor woman holding a skinny baby, tapping on your car window and bring her hand to her mouth to motion for food. Especially when you are staying in a hotel with a rooftop pool.

In our one full day in the city, we spent the morning visiting a slum. There, we watched a presentation from female leaders in the community about how DSK introduces their programs into slum communities. It was all in Bengali though, with sparse translation, so it was really hard for me to pay attention, especially since it was ridiculously hot and humid. Also, there were tons of children peeking into the structure we were sitting in, so that was distracting too. After the presentation we walked around the slum and saw the water connections they had built there, and I added to my already-large collection of photos of cute little kids.

Also, I may or may not have stepped in poop while we were walking around (there is no space/money/foundation to build toilets there so "open defecation" is still the way to go), but I like to tell myself that it was just mud. All I know is that after I did, the kids in our posse kept pointing at my feet and saying things in Bengali, and one ran to a nearby water pump, filled up a bucket and poured it over my feet to rinse them off. After the slum, we interviewed the man in charge of DSK and then crashed in our hotel, exhausted from the 35 degrees celsius weather.

This morning we checked out of our hotel and drove outside of the city to the headquarters of another of water.org's partners, the Village Education Resource Center (VERC). We're spending the night here tonight, and tomorrow we are going to drive 200 km (5 hours!) to the north to a region called Tanor. The electricity there isn't 100 percent all the time and we'll have bucket baths instead of showers, so I'm excited :) We are going to stay there and visit one of their completed projects until the 25th, and then we'll return to the HQ's. We'll use this as a base to visit areas where programs are ongoing, until we fly out of Dhaka on the 28th. This post is getting very long and the computer room doesn't have air conditioning, so I am going to retreat to my room now and hopefully I'll be able to post more once we're settled in the countryside!