A Meeting of Great Minds

I had an amazing meeting last night, and I thought I would share a bit about it. Nike has been a generous funder of the SoFEA project I’m working on, and last night two of the primary NIKE foundation contacts came to meet the BRAC staff, so tensions were a bit high. Also at the table sat a most amazing woman, Susan Davis, the CEO and president of BRAC USA (which funds projects in Asia and Africa), economist Dr. Imran Matin (BRAC international), Dr. Shafiq Islam (head of educational programs at BRAC), my boss and her team, and me. I was a mere fly on the wall, and it was strange to be in a somewhat high-stakes conversation that I knew little about.

I have had little exposure in the past to donor meetings, so this was great for me to observe. The NIKE women asked pointed, interesting questions about the direction of the program, and it was fascinating to see how the funding dance proceeded. The women also wanted the staff’s two cents as to why Bangladesh has been able to become such an amazing innovator and success story for the poor. I smiled and said I had the same question, which is why I am here. I hope to meet other funders in such forums and to learn why they have decided to give substantial amounts of funds to BRAC and other sister organizations. I also found it interesting how the economists in the room and the MBAs asked entirely different questions relating to girls’ livelihoods, and I was equally fascinated by both ends of the spectrum. I hope to keep this dialogue going, although I’ve been a bit shy so far as it pertains to introducing myself to people (particularly high-ranking men at BRAC), but now that I’m more used to cultural norms, I plan on arranging for meetings. This afternoon I head to a village called Mymensingh to begin my livelihood market assessment and couldn’t be more excited to go to the field. Let’s hope for benevolent mosquitoesJ

 

Calling all passengers, and ONE female

I’ve only been in Bangladesh for a week, but the extremely long flight, heat, and intense fish-out-of-water feeling has made it seem like much longer. So much has transpired in the past week that it has made me realize that I need to blog at least twice a week to get everything down!

The flight over was long, but the third and final leg of my flight from Bahrain to Dhaka was extremely interesting. I stood by the gate awaiting the boarding call, and as I waited I noticed that there were very few females. All of the Bengali men were chatting and trying to not have me notice their stares. Due to my travels in Latin America, I am used to keeping a close eye on boarding lines and jumping in once boarding has been called, and I did the same here. I noticed, however, that all of the men were staring at me in line, and they all seemed to step in front of me as if I weren’t even in line. I kept looking around for the women, and literally none were in sight. Not only was I the only Westerner, I was also the only female. Joy. I was really hoping that I would have the seats to myself, but alas, someone sat down next to me. To my surprise he spoke broken English and asked me about myself. There was dead silence as the others tried to listen, so I kept my answers short, as I was not sure what protocol was for speaking with men.

I arrived in Dhaka very early in the morning, and it literally took one hour for my luggage to come out, but I was happy to see it. It was fun to see the luggage that came out though because Bengalis apparently don’t think their luggage will arrive unless they wrap it in fleece blankets and rope. A few people even attached their pictures to the outside of their luggage, and when I saw all of these shenanigans I thought I’d never see my luggage again if this is what is necessary to receive it! 

The first two days after arriving in Dhaka I was literally in a heat and culture shock, so I didn’t even venture out of the house, but it was an incredibly lonely feeling because it was just me and the maid (who speaks no English). I got over these fears by the third day and took myself to multiple sites via rickshaw (bicycles and CNG taxis). These taxis are called “baby taxis” because they are more like little, motorized buggies. I quickly learned that Dhaka is not meant for strolling about. I literally begin to drip with sweat after standing outside in the shade for 30 seconds, let alone walk a few blocks. One cannot talk a leisurely walk for multiple reasons, including the extreme heat and beggars. The first few days I was here I made it a point to walk, but now I’m getting smarter and am finding that rickshaws are not only faster and shadier, it also shields me from tons of staring eyes.

 My initial days at BRAC have been wonderful. BRAC is a 21-story building that is home to a multitude of development projects and hundreds of employees. It has been very interesting to meet the other interns here (varied ages and projects) as well as the local staff. It’s been great to also meet BRAC employees who are from other countries and are only here temporarily to learn and bring the BRAC lessons back to the Pakistani BRAC, for instance. Just in my office, for example, sit Bengalis, Afghanis, Americans, and a smattering of others. I love walking in and seeing a sea of beautiful fabrics that the women wear (and now, myself included). I found that by wearing the local baggy pants and very modest tunic (shalwar kameez), the stares have declined substantially. I also just plain love feeling like I’m wearing baggy pajamas around all day.

 I have seen the mind-boggling mix of poverty and wealth Latin America has to offer, but this phenomenon in Bangladesh has been brought to the next level. I have never seen such dire poverty in my life, and it’s literally right outside my house door. The family I am staying with in Dhaka is quite prominent, and they employ two maids and a driver, which is quite common for upper-class Bengalis. I have never lived with either of these services, and it’s been very hard for me to accustom myself to this. When I leave for work in the morning, I accompany the father in the car, and I almost feel guilty for this luxury. I merely float in the leather bubble as the driver dodges the masses of people and rickshaws trying to cross the street. BRAC is only a few miles away from the house, but it takes an easy 30 minutes to get there, and I step out without an ounce of effort exerted.  The same can be said for the maids. I really like to cook and prepare my own food, so being at the mercy of the ladies is a bit tough, and I continue to insist that I bring my dishes to the kitchen when I’ve finished, but I fear I’m insulting them, so I’ve stopped a bit.

 I have also never seen so many people in one city in my entire life. It’s rare to see a stretch of street, lawn, land, etc. that that doesn’t have someone sitting, standing, working or begging with an incredible number of missing limbs. There are literally people everywhere, and impromptu lean-tos and rudimentary houses also line the streets and alleys. I particularly like the impromptu “barber shops” which consist of bamboo poles, a solitary mirror, and a very trusting man who lets the barber shave his face with a rusty blade.

 The amount of intense manual labor I have seen has also been shocking.  Men scale bamboo poles that serve as scaffolding without harnesses, women carry and unfathomable load of bricks on their heads, rickshaw drivers pedal up to five people or pull extremely weighty bundles, men lift piles and piles of dirt and rubble in assembly line fashion, and laborers heat and break metal rods with rudimentary tools. In light of modern technology and machinery that would do many of these jobs in a fraction of the time, I question the price and access to such machinery. I literally look at fields of people working and slaving in this dreadful heat, and I honestly feel like I’m looking back to an ancient time when modern technology didn’t exist. The sad part is that is does exist, yet it’s cheaper to pay laborers who don’t want for anything but to make money. It also kind of reminds me of stories I’ve heard about the Depression when men would break up bricks on roads just to clean them and put them back on the ground again. People here just needs jobs and income, not matter what the task.

 I have also been exposed to people with remarkable skin diseases and lost limbs. Today as I was being a super tourist and touring Old Dhaka with two other interns and a very generous Bengali-British BRAC volunteer, I saw a young boy whose face was completely misconfigured. Half of his face was normal, but the other half was swollen beyond words and apparently without bone. I have a fairly strong constitution and usually can avert my eyes and walk past, but this young boy stopped me right in my tracks. I also have never give money to beggars because I do not believe in that form of charity, but for once I was almost compelled to give, but I stopped myself and couldn’t get that poor boy’s image out of my mind. If I had given him money, what would he have spent it on? Would he have given it to his smug father who was watching the whole thing transpire? Had his very father done this to him? What are the medical facilities and services available to a boy like him? How much would a reconstructive procedure cost? The questions continued, but I didn’t have any answers.

I also convinced the group to go down to the river and take a little boat across to the other side. The Bengali-Brit I was with thought I was completely nuts, but we went for it, and it was so interesting to observe the people coming and going on the river. The ferries we saw were scarily decrepit and on the brink of decaying, and I can only fear what might happen to them shortly when monsoon season begins.

 Today I also went to a memorial about 1 hour from Dhaka in commemoration of the very bloody liberation war fought in the late 1960s until 1971 when Bangladesh claimed it’s independence from East Pakistan. The memorial, while a bit far from Dhaka, was great fun. We were the only foreigners among hundreds of Bengalis who were also there to stroll among the beautifully manicured park and sit by the small stream’s edge. Friday is the main Bengali weekend day, so the park was packed with families and couples who were enjoying its beauty. I got the feeling that not many foreigners go to this important monument, and we attracted a huge crowd. It’s really funny how the young men and boys constantly take pictures of us with their cell phones without any hesitation or shame. The staring is very different from Latin American staring, however. In Latin America, the men often stare in a very offensive way and have some sort of vulgar comment to share, but here, the staring is done out of complete and utter curiosity and intrigue. The men typically don’t say anything and are far more respectful, but feeling their eyes is an incredibly uncomfortable sensation. Additionally, their wives stare even longer sometimes! In any case, a throng of men followed us all around the park, and it was incredibly strange. We happened upon an interesting musical group of a father and son, and we decided to take a seat in the grass among the circle of onlookers that had already formed. This of course brought many more men, and the circle was massive. There was a young boy singing, and I didn’t know what to make of it. His father was playing a traditional instrument and demanded that his son sing and dance for us, the foreigners, but I didn’t like this at all. The poor boy was a puppet that really only had dollar signs in his eyes when he saw us. Regardless, they shared a very nice song with us, but I was ready to leave once the song was over so that I could escape the hundreds of eyes and the feeling that I was pressuring the young boy.

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!