Setting out for a whole new world

Thanks to the generous support of Nancy Germeshausen Klavans and the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, I will be interning with BRAC, the largest non-governmental organization in the world, from May 27 to August 5, 2009, in Bangladesh. BRAC began as a fledgling nonprofit called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and today new BRACs have successfully launched in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Tanzania and Sudan with affiliates in the U.S. and UK. Their headquarters remain in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka, where I will be working. BRAC works for poverty alleviation and the empowerment of the poor, and it focuses its education, health, microfinance, and other programs on women and girls.

I'll be interning with a specific project called "Social and Financial Empowerment of Adolescents" (SOFEA), a new intervention by BRAC targeting the adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh. It will integrate two existing programs of BRAC in order to empower the adolescent girls' population both socially as well as financially. It will build on the work of existing interventions by learning from their past experiences and will establish a model that will work towards achieving higher and more sustainable outcomes for the adolescent girls.

The initiative currently has 360 clubs and 14,000 girls participating, and with a grant from the Nike Foundation, it hopes to expand its reach to 20,000 girls this summer. After living and working with adolescent youth in Ecuador, I came to the Kennedy School with resolve to learn what I can do to harness the potential of adolescent females despite adverse circumstances. In Bangladesh, adolescence is where girls tend to lose their mobility, their friends, and what limited freedom they might have had. It is during adolescence that girls are pulled out of school while boys are allowed to continue When an adolescent girl is married, she generally has to leave school to begin full-time work in her husband’s parental household. This drastically reduces her ability to participate in social and economic activities outside the homestead. Furthermore, in rural areas, there is very limited opportunity for paid employment, especially for girls, and if they are able to find a job, it is generally one with low pay and low status. They are often marginalized in settings that reflect men’s needs but ignore women’s.

I'm expecting this summer will be a time of many firsts. I am used to traveling in developing countries in Latin America and conversing in Spanish, but this summer, I will be at the mercy of translators. I do not speak Bangla, and the only phrase I know is (phonetically) "ama geeche buchee nah," which means "I do not understand anything you are saying"! What I do know, however, is that Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world (approx. 1/2 the population of the U.S. living in an area the size of Colorado), almost half of the population lives under the poverty line, and approximately 30% lives under the dollar-a-day estimate.

While my travels, interests, and language aspirations have continually brought me to Latin America, I decided to do something completely different this summer and will be living among a people and culture completely unknown to me. My goal is to use this blog as a means of reflection and communication with friends, family, colleagues, and supporters. I really hope that this experience challenges me, stops me in my tracks, and makes me critically think about what I can do to help harness the potential of adolescent females not only in Bangladesh, but in the United States, and Latin America as well. I hope to present ideas and opinions in this space in a somewhat unfiltered form, and I hope that you will consider that what I post is coming from a very personal angle and viewpoint.

No matter how much I read and try to prepare myself for living a completely different style of life, I still feel that I will only begin to understand Bengali culture once I arrive. I go with a certain sense of intrigue and wanderlust, but also the stark realization that the division of women and men does not boil down to solely machismo in Bangladesh. There are ingrained differences between genders, and this will likely be the first time I diligently choose clothing that closely aligns with social mores, the first time I have to constantly avert my eyes from onlookers, and the first time I have to bite my tongue (which many of you know is painfully hard for me) while living in extreme poverty.

Please continue to check this blog for weekly updates (internet permitting) from Dhaka and the field. I will be including photos, thoughts, and reflections and am hoping that you will be involved in the discussion!