Meeting people

Times goes and very day we meet more and more people who have an opinion about development aid in Bangladesh. Opinions sometimes are opposite to those that we are used to hear back in Russia and Germany.

2 days ago we met a friend of Gaetano, Ricardo, another Italian living in Bangladesh for the past 15 years. Ricardo is a missionary here. From the time that dinner started till the night we were talking about Grameen bank, hierarchical structure of Bangladesh and its influence on the system, “group” mentality of Bangladeshi people and etc. It was good to hear thoughts of someone who knows Bangladesh and its people very well already and at the same time has a “western” approach of percepting the reality.



Yesterday we had another opportunity to meet people and talk about the project. We were kindly invited to take part at the one of 65 Rotaract clubs of Dhaka. It was a meeting of RC Udayan that took place at the Pioneer Dental College and hospital. Bjoern was able to get in touch with the club through contacting one of the members via Facebook.

During the meeting we had an opportunity to present in brief our project “Transparency for development” and explain its basic structure.

I must say that we received a very warm welcome. We got flowers, club brochures, cd, postcards and moreover an invitation to join club's project on 3rd of August. The project is called Dental camp. What it is we'll write later.

rain...

…keeps us staying in gaetanos’ house. chatting, listening to music, writing and research - working is probably the wrong expression to describe what the three of us (bryan hopefully comes soon) are doing at the moment. however björn and sascha are organizing our social life for the upcoming days and nights…

our first day in bangladesh...

...begins after a relatively short night with a trip to gaetanos' house, a friendly italian businessman who invited us to stay at his place for the next days and who supplies us with italian food.
my first impressions of dhaka are quite good but with about 26 degrees the climate still is quite comfortable. the pictures below are snapshots taken through a taxi window…

trip to the hotel

32 degrees celsius and 98% humidity formed a wall which tried to hold us back from leaving Dhaka Int. airport. a cautious Alexandra, a nerved and tired Jochen and björn who has been inebriated by a lack of sleep finally reached the hotel…

Transit Doha: Day one

After a busy flight working on my last work to be done before Bangldesh we arrived in the grey sauna of Doha. Luckily the last tickets to Dhaka where business class and we now stay in this wonderfull business class lounge of Quatar Air with showers, good food, drinks and wireless. We hit the time smoking habana cigarellos, drinking champaign and eating vanilla ice-cream with rawsberrys until the clock turned 12 and we moderately celebrated Aleksandra's birthday continuing to satisfy our human longings. In between we played Gran tourismo on the playstation the children's room and observed the people in quatar air red - ants scurrying.
Below a picture from the flight and from the airport.

Transparency for development: Students for Bangladesh

I recently uploaded a new version of our brochure. The picture quality is not very good - however I will work on this later.


brochure version 4_3

Last Preparations

Today I am still in Moscow - on Sunday we will fly to Germany and on Monday we will fly to Doha then to Dhaka.

I got immunizations for almost 500 Euros and bought medical supply for about 200 Euros including replicants, lariam, something against diarrhea and penicilin for emergencies. Supposivly 70% of all travellers have a light diarrhea and skin or breathing problems because of air pollution in Dhaka - I am just scanning through the travelguide and learn my first words of Bengali. Check for water without arsen - eat with you hands - never use the left hand - do not interfer local economics by spending too much money - etc.



(my doctor)

However I am really looking forward now.