June 22

I finally figured out what my research will be on. I will be comparing the health volunteers’ work in the rural areas to their work in the slums. I believe that in the slums they are having less success, and maybe we will be able to pinpoint why this is and give BRAC some advice on how the slum health program can be improved. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but what a health volunteer does is go to 15-20 households per day, make sure everyone is healthy, try and identify TB patients or pregnant women, and then give advice on other health issues. They are in charge of about 300 households total. On Thursday some of the interns went to a village about 2 hours outside of Dhaka. This was just to get a general overview of what BRAC does, which we have been reading about, but had not actually seen. First we went to a microfinance meeting, where women paid back their loans and they discussed any problems that anyone had. One woman then showed us the cow she purchased with her loan, which produces milk she can sell for a profit. We also went to a BRAC school, met all of the children, and they sang and danced for us. This was followed by a health meeting, where a health worker taught a class, a different subject each week- this week was hand washing. It is amazing how such simple information like this can make a difference in peoples’ lives. All of these visits involved trekking through muddy villages along winding roads and being followed by dozens of village children, who have probably never seen white people. We then went to one of BRAC’s clothing production facilities (they have some moneymaking enterprises whose profits go directly back into the system, so they are becoming less and less donor reliant), and watched women and men making hundreds of clothing items that will be sold in the city. Then we went to a sanitary napkin production facility. I have mixed feelings about this, because I certainly wouldn’t enjoy spending all day sitting, sewing on sequences or rolling up pads in hot conditions. However, it is providing people with income- perhaps what they would be doing instead is less pleasant- I feel the same way about all the maids here, I can’t figure out if they are grateful for the opportunity to earn money and be clothed and fed, or have no other options and resent being ordered around. I’ll have to explore this more.
Today I bought a Bangla book, so now I think learning will be easier. It seems that there are only 2 or 3 English/Bangla books in existence, it was difficult to find. This is strange considering Bangla is the 5th or 6th most widely spoken languages in the world. I sometimes wonder why schools offer languages like German and Italian when there are other languages that are more popular. Another interesting thing I have noticed is that there are some words that are surprisingly similar to Italian and other romance languages- this is because they originally come from the same roots, are Indo-European languages, and I have heard that this early language was Sanskrit, but my book says it is not but is not very clear. It doesn’t help too much, but every now and then I find commonalities.
I’ve been having moral dilemmas with the beggars, especially those who come to the car windows, and there is nowhere to go to get away, you either have to look away or just watch them plead. It would be so easy for me to give them all a few cents worth in taka, which would probably make a difference in their day, but in the long run this would be solving nothing. I haven’t figured out what these people would be doing if they were not begging- do they truly have no other way to make money and would die of starvation if nobody helped them? Many are cripples and can’t work- do they bring back the money they receive to their families who are completely fine? I’ve decided not to give any money away until I can figure out how I feel and what the actual issues are.

Ok here is a link to some of my pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/alyssa.panning/Bangladesh

I'll keep adding more