Sylvia's Journal

My last day in Dhaka was low key. It started with a last breakfast with my Nepali friends who left for Kathmandu in the morning. Ellen, who is from Holland and who I found again on Facebook after having lost her for awhile after she exchanged Tanzania for Park Slope now lives in Dhaka where her husband is the UNFPA rep. We had coffee and caught up with each other and talked about how to raise Dutch girls who have never lived in Holland. She has two little ones. I brought her drop and a chocolate letter (E of course) to remind her of home.

Next stop was the School of Public Health, housed in BRAC University where Bangladesh is preparing some of its future social scientists, computer engineers, businessmen and English teachers. I finally was introduced to the faculty I had heard so much about a few weeks ago in Kabul when Jon was telling me all about this place. I met a few Americans, one an intern from GWU who said her goodbyes after 4 months of fieldwork and another American MPH student about to graduate in a couple of weeks. Everyone was very enthusiastic about their experiences in this place of learning. After a very British fish-and-chips lunch at the Newsroom cafe with Sabina and Lauren I returned home to sort through my stack of business cards and start preparing for my return home.

Sayeed picked me up for dinner and took me to a Korean restaurant which instantly flooded me with memories of my many trips here with Ann over 10 years ago. I remembered Sayeed taking us out to a Korean restaurant then as well. We agreed that Ann was hovering around us even though she is far away in Newton. We had much catching up to do since we had not seen much of each other except some fleeting moments in Cambridge and Kabul; and, as he always does, Sayeed gave me his own familiar and contrary views on BRAC, development, and NGOs, before showing me pictures on his iPhone of his new daughter-in-law and his grown up daughters who are living in the US and UK. The wedding is in three weeks and I was invited to witness this multi-day traditional event. It would have been fun but it is time to go home.

After an early breakfast and many goodbyes, yesterday morning, we distributed ourselves over several small buses that took us to the various field visit sites, some rural, some urban. I joined the Dhaka urban maternal and neonatal child health group. We visited the Corail slum area to see BRAC’s birthing huts, a program that provides very basic facility-based delivery care to some 700 women through traditional midwives supported by a community health volunteer and an upward chain of increasingly trained healthcare workers. It’s still a pilot project but the results are promising.

We met some of the traditional urban midwives, community health workers; saw a bunch at the conclusion of their training, and some of the BRAC program staff responsible for services to the 10.000 households that live in this one of several Dhaka slums. BRAC program coordinators took us through small passage ways, over scary looking open gutters into compounds and even houses (smaller than my king size bed in the BRAC Inn) where we met with brand new moms, or very pregnant ones and thanked our lucky stars that we were born on the right side of the tracks.

Everyone, kids, women and men alike asked to have their picture taken and grinned with delight upon seeing their picture on the camera screen. This is probably why so many annual reports and pamphlets from international health organizations have pictures from this part of the world on their covers. We also met with a member of a microfinance group and visited a BRAC school, where the students welcomed us in beautiful English, danced and sang and asked for nonstop picture taking. All the kids told us their name, then each mentioned a country of the world and then what they wanted to become. One girl wanted to become a pilot and so, naturally, we posed for a picture together. She promised to write me when she entered pilot school – which will be some ten years from now. In between the acts we practiced writing our names, they writing mine in English script, me writing mine in Bangla, no small feat for either any one of us.

All the urban Dhaka groups met for lunch at the BRAC Inn before swarming out over Dhaka in various directions to go shopping, which is part of any conference experience in the world; the people from far away go to the handicraft places while the people from the region go to the discount designer wear market places. In Dhaka this means to the factory outlets where seconds from the countless factories that produce for the US and European clothing markets are sold. A bunch of us went to Aarong, BRAC’s upscale clothing, linens and handicraft chain of stores to buy our Christmas gifts and for me to get some new Shalwar Kamees dresses, handy for future trips to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

For dinner I met up with my Nepali friends, one old, one new, and Pedro a computer engineer from Cuba who is awaiting his return to Nepal, pining for a beer and some proper nightlife and his girl friend. When he returns next month they plan to start a Salsa dance academy in parallel to a computer engineering business. “You see,” he explained to me, “in Cuba engineers also do salsa, we develop both of these sides of ourselves.” But a drink surely helps. He ordered coffee and the rest of us drank water and toasted each other and pretended all were cold beers; just a few more days for me and an entire month for Pedro (for visa reasons he has to wait until 2009 before he can enter Nepal again).
I stayed up very late delighted with my private and fast internet connection, cleaning out my mailbox while watching a rerun of Jaws, without the music of course, but still putting my fingers in my ears when I knew what the music was doing (doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoo).

And now on to the last part of my assignment and check out how the faculty at BRAC’s School of Public Health teaches new professionals how to manage and lead the way to significant impact, like their mother institution has done for more than 30 years.