In the Meantime, Albert was Busy, Too

On Tuesday, Feb. 8th, Albert led a 3 1/2 hour workshop in Dhaka on values formation for the Business Development Team. Fourteen people attended. They discussed values that are important for business people: like, honesty, respect of others and justice. The team has representatives from all the CRWRC partner groups. It was a good time of learning for everyone. This team meets four times a year but they don't often get to talk about values and the challenges there are for business people in following good values.

Adolescent Visits, Continued....

On Wednesday I visited Maniknagar where I met with another Adolescent Peer Educator Group.We did a similar program and in addition talked to them about updating the lessons. They had some great ideas. I'll post pictures of them working on their projects and also some pictures of the girls - they all wanted me to take individual pictures of them. I'll have these printed before I leave Bangladesh so they can have a copy.

Three Days of Encouragement - Visits to the Adolescent Groups

Tuesday - My first day of visiting I went to visit the Tongi Adolescent Peer Educator group. I hadn't realized that I would have three hours with them and that they were expecting some kind of workshop. So Sanjay, who is Program Manager for SATHI and who had come along as my translator, and I had a quick conference and came up with a couple of questions for them to work on together in small groups. We asked them to think of the lessons that had been particularly meaningful to them, then to pick three of them and make plans on how they could share them with their larger community.
They came up with some very creative ideas including contacting their school to get permission to do a skit against early marriage (before 18 years old) during a school assembly, making posters to place in prominent places in the neighborhood showing the evil of dowry, and doing a skit in the street about keeping the public areas of the community clean after having cleaned an area themselves.
The plan is that they will actually though on their ideas, so that next year when I come back, they can report to me on how it went. I am looking forward to that already. Following are some pictures of the groups in action - working on their plans.

Deja Vu' All Over Again

Today is like deja vu' because a hartal has been called here in Dhaka. A hartal is a general strike. Practically it means that everything is closed and nobody goes anywhere, so after one day here, we are basically housebound. The strike has been called because the government wants to build a new, but unnecessary airport and the farmers whose land would be confiscated for that purpose are, understandably, not too pleased.

The upside is that I have an extra day to get myself together for my first Sunday School Teachers' Workshop which will be this coming Friday and Saturday. It will be held here in Dhaka and there will be 22 participants. I'm just finishing up the itinerary for it.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday I will spend returning to visit the adolescent peer educators and programs that I worked with last year. It will be a chance for me to find out what has happened in the past year and if anything needs to be done to improve their program like new or revised lesson.

Being here is wonderful. It is rather warm, (though I won't complain knowing that my friends and family are suffering through snow and cold in Michigan) but we are loving being here and eagerly look forward to the tasks ahead.

Hail? Yes!

Yesterday I went to visit some friends who live only a couple houses away from the house our family lived in for the whole time we lived in Bangladesh. It is quite far from where I am staying, in an area of town called Mohammedpur. Wow, had the area changed in 20 years! Our house was three stories when we lived there on the ground floor. It is now five stories and is a school. Almost all of the rest of the houses all the way down the street have been torn down and replaced by 5-6 story apartment buildings. There used to be gardens around the houses, but now there is only about ten feet between each of the apartment buildings which each take up the entire lot. Across from our house was an open field where the kids used to play and cows grazed; now it has a ten foot brick and iron fence around it and there was no one in it. It was all really quite sad, but this is the reality all over the city as the population booms and more and more space is needed to house all of people.

After walking past our old house, my friend Missy, her small daughter, and I were looking in a shop in the neighborhood when her husband called and told us that they were having hail in the town just up the road and that we should head home. Nothing much seemed to be happening outside, so we kept shopping. As Missy was making her purchase she was telling the people in the store what her husband had said, then she turned and looked out the window and said, "Look at that. We better go." The air was brown from all the dirt swirling around in a very strong wind. We headed out the door, Missy picked up her daughter, and we ran! Fortunately, we didn't have far to go. We had dust in our hair, our eyes, and our mouths, and then the rain started. It started gently at first, then quickly started pouring. We arrived at their building only a little wet, got inside and had to walk up the steps to their fifth floor apartment because the electricity was off (a daily occurrence in Dhaka). As we got into the apartment, the hail started - hail the size of grapes! My friends have quite large windows and the wind was causing the hail to hit them hard. I was sure they would break any minute, but after a pretty loud 20 minutes the hail stopped and the windows were safe.

I remember having these kinds of storms near the end of winter when we were here. If they come before the mango blossoms set, they are wonderful because the mango trees get some badly needed moisture after several months of no rain. But, if the mango trees have already blossomed, the hail knocks the blossoms off and the mango crop for the whole year is decreased. I don't know which is the case this year, but of course I am hoping it is the former. One thing for sure; after the rain the air felt and smelled incredibly fresh and the brown film of dust that had covered the leaves of all the trees had been washed off and they were once again green and beautiful.

Peer Educator Workshop

After visiting the Adolescent Program on all five of the fields, it was time to take all the information I had gathered and do something with it. We decided that I would design and run a workshop for 15 Peer Educators (1 boy, 2 girls from each field) and the five Adult Facilitators. There were two objectives to the workshop. One was to bring the PE's from the different fields together so they could get to know each other and share some of the skits, and songs they had written to use with the lessons. The other was to take the suggestions they had made about which subjects needed more lessons, and to teach them how to make a plan for writing a lesson: to define the problem, the intended outcome, and the method. Because there was so much interest in dowry, we decided that would be the subject they would work on. They also got experience working with people they don't know because we put them into three groups of five, each with one PE from each field. The facilitators worked together as a separate group.
In the morning we played ice breaker games, shared skits and songs, and then, after explaining the tasks, everyone spent an hour working in their groups. After lunch each group shared their results and we had a wrap up session. The PE's decided that they would like to collect all the skits and songs into a booklet that could be used as a supplement to the lessons and agreed to have all their work in by the end of the month. We suggested and they agreed that I would take what they had written and, in consulatation with Sanjay and Rina, write a lesson on dowry that they can then try out with their Adolescent Participants.
The evening of the workshop, when I was thinking about what we had done and how it had gone, I had the idea that actually the facilitators would be the perfect people to write the lesson. They know the youth the best and they had also been though the workshop, so I proposed and it was accepted that on Thursday I will give a mini-workshop with the five Facilitators to help them finish the process we started on Saturday and actually write the lesson. I have gotten to know four of the Facilitators quite well, as I have been teaching them English twice a week for three hours. I am finding it all very exciting, and it is so much fun to see them all; Participants, Peer Educators and Facilitators so excited about learning new things to share with their groups and their communities. (Note: I spent 3-4 hours trying to put captions on all the pictures, but just couldn't get it to work properly, so you'll just have to enjoy the pictures by themselves!)
We played a game in which each person thought of a descriptive word that begins with the same letter as their name and then did a corresponding action, i.e. I said "Mighty Mindy" as I flexed my muscles. then everyone repeated it. They had a blast!

Getting Around

So you all probably think I'm getting to all these far flung places in Dhaka city by car. Wrong! I do some of my traveling by rickshaw, but the vast majority is by a vehicle called a "seengee". That's CNG for compressed natural gas. When we lived in Bangladesh in the 80's, they were baby taxis and ran on diesel, but the CNG's don't pollute as much. So, I am giving you a picture of a CNG - the passengers ride in the back and the driver sits in the front and drives with handlebars something like those of a motorcycle. And, I have uploaded a little video I took of a bit of one of my journeys that have ranged from half an hour to an hour and a half. The nice thing about a CNG is that the drivers are very skillful at maneuvering through traffic that includes cars, SUVs, buses, trucks, rickshaws, handcarts, and LOTS of pedestrians. You'll hear lots of horns, that's just everyone saying, "I'm coming through!" Enjoy!