Sylvia's Journal

Everyone cheered for our re-elected president here. During a SWOT analysis the American elections were placed below the heading of Threats (the threat was Mitt – especially to family planning programs) but just at that moment, one of our colleagues who was monitoring the Huffington Post website yelled out ‘he won’ and we knew exactly what she meant. The Bangladeshis moved the entry to another board that was labeled ‘Opportunities.’

We all exhaled deeply – it had been nerve wrecking, this not knowing. I watched as the world commented on the outcome of the elections – most were positive except Indian business leaders who kept harping on the economy. A new mother of twins in Kenya called her babies Barack and Mitt. They are joining the much older Kennedys and Reagans in Kenya.

Wednesday was tense and intense – with always the question whether we would be able to pull it off, these two days squeezed into one without rushing and thus compromising the quality of the interactions and deliberations. Maybe there was some quality loss but we managed to maintain high energy as people began to work as a network rather than a bunch of competing organizations.

Today we had to wait outside the conference center gates for the Prime Minister to leave the formal opening of the Exhibition on farm animals, fish and pets.

She left exactly on time and we streamed in to have our lunch and wrap up the conference. There was stuff to be prepared, presenters to coach and evaluations to be completed. Everything fell into place except the tea which came too late. Those who hung around got to have three cups of tea instead of one.

In the evening we had a celebratory dinner, hosted by the founder of a local health communication organization. We sample fine Bangla cuisine in the company of the organization’s staff and my local counterparts.

One of the drivers who has just started his bakery classes took me back to the hotel. He is a Christian from the north, educated by Scottish missionaries. he looks like he is from Tibet or Sikkim, which is actually not all that far from Northern Bangladesh. He promised to bring me some samples of his baking whenever I come back. He should surely have graduated by then.

Back at the hotel I completed typing up the evaluation responses (65% return rate, not bad) and assemble the documents to use for the challenge of tomorrow: assembling the framework that this workshop would construct – the participants produced the raw pieces – tomorrow is polishing time with a little interruption in the afternoon for a massage at the whopping high rate of 8 dollars an hour.

While Sandy has passing through the Eastern seaboard, cyclone Nimal was blasting South East India and whipping up the Bay of Bengal . Cyclones are named after women only. No one, according to one of my Bangla colleagues, has questioned the logic of associating the devastating power of cyclones with women. I learned that cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes are all the same phenomena, distinguished only by their location. As a result of Nimal it is still raining here and clogging up the drains and streets.

The official opening of our event unfolded without a hitch – everything and everyone was where it/he was supposed to be and we completed the opening ceremony 10 minutes before the break. The rest of the day followed suit. Here, when you invite 100 people you get 50, more or less. This is what my local colleagues predicted and it was exactly what happened.

The afternoon session was in Bangla, conducted by one of our local consultants, who learned towards the end of her turn that a relative had died – we sent her home and others took over. We have an amazing team, aligned and ready. It was very exciting to see people take my design and run with it in a language I don’t understand. From the energy in the room I could tell that we were getting the intended result.

The visit of the Prime Minister to another meeting in the giant conference center put her security forces in charge, overriding the authority of the conference center management. After we had refused to change our 3^rd day to Friday we were told that everyone had to be inside the center at 8 AM. Whoever would not be there would have to wait till 12:30.  We had no choice other than cancelling the entire third morning and squeezing everything into tomorrow afternoon; another leap of faith.

I met up with my friend T from a competing organization, who happened to be in Dhaka but since she doesn’t do facebook we only just found out that we were in the same place. We managed to squeeze in a dinner, catching up from a last visit, years ago.

And now I am sitting in front of the TV biting my nails. It is late and I have to go to bed and hope that when I wake up Obama will still be in the saddle. The American community here is meeting very early in the morning at a hotel to watch the final results.

More pouring rain today which means the traffic crawls at an even slower pace. We made our way to two more of the three communication units that are key to the planning and implementation of health, population and nutrition communication strategies in this country.  It was a day of courtesy visits and final preparations, logistical and other pre-occupations with protocol.

Protocol here is a very serious affair with lots of prescriptions of what is requirement and acceptable. We foreigners are leaving it entirely to our Bangladeshi colleagues.

Just when we thought we had dotted all the I’s and crossed all t’s the conference manager asked us to move our last day to Friday (a holiday here) to accommodate the arrival of the prime minister at another hall in the conference complex on Thursday. A very assertive local colleague made it clear that the dates were not negotiable anymore, too late. And so the crisis was averted, and we wiped the sweat off our brows. We do have restricted movement that morning, no loitering in the enormous hallways, and arriving early. I think it will cramp our style a little bit but it is too late to worry now.

For dinner I was joined by my friend Fatima who is a student here. She brought along a friend of hers and an advocate of midwives, especially in this part of the world – we are connected through our inspiration by the Afghan midwives who hold the key to women’s empowerment and health in this unfortunate country. We had met at the annual Afghan midwives congress two years ago in Kabul and now we had a chance for a more leisurely introduction.

I watched the final frenzied campaigning from a distance while Axel watched it up close, seeing both Obama and Clinton in New Hampshire.  Everyone here is clear about who should win. But some of my American colleagues didn’t get their absentee ballot organized which is serious, especially because a few are from swing states.

Like Holland Dhaka is a very wet place, even now when it is not the rainy season – it is what ties the two countries together: a never ending struggle to control the water.

This morning, after a wonderful Bangla breakfast of pulses and potatoes I realized the sound of water did not come from the 6 floor deep waterfall but from rain.

I waited outside for a driver to pick me up, mesmerized by the water dramas playing themselves out in front of the hotel. The rickshaw drivers looked even more like skeletons with their wet clothes plastered to their emaciated bodies. Most of them had plastic bags tied around their heads, or the thin foamy packing materials our electronics are wrapped in – why the obsessions with dry hair when everything else is soaked?

I was transported in a luxuriously dry car to another part of town that wasn’t very far away as the crow flies; but as the traffic inched forward, one kilometer seemed like a hundred. Despite plenty of extra time we arrived at a meeting already in full swing one hour and a half later.

A large team had assembled in the conference room of a local organization that split off from a USAID project and appears to be doing well on its own, given the nice quarters and the impressive staff. We reviewed last minute logistics, divided tasks and reviewed the ‘technical’ part of the program – that part that is following the protocol. It is strange to have facilitated conversations referred to as technical but that is the lingo here.

I was dreading any further ventures across Dhaka but there were the courtesy visits to be made– we could only do one today.

At the family planning directorate I was warmly welcomed by the line director of the communication unit in his colorful office with slogans, pictures and colorful models gracing the walls. The warm welcome included an ice cream treat, followed by thin vanilla cookies, followed by sweet tea. It is the first time in my life I have received ice-cream during a courtesy visit to a government agency. It has bumped the macchiato served with the compliments of the Ethiopian government to second place.

After our courtesy visit we checked out the venue that is located in a behemoth of a conference center, designed for heads of state and very senior government officials and the kind of meetings such people attend. In the absence of any high officials the fountains were dead and the countless flagpoles stood silently and bare in military rows.

The conference rooms are enormous and smell like conference rooms in warm and wet places – a musty smell that can hopefully be masked by the powerful aircos. We discussed the room set up – protocol first and then a more relaxed layout. It was then I found out that we couldn’t use the walls – this is of course a problem for a design that is based on flip charts  We were able to mobilize 9 rolling boards, white board on one side, pin cushion on the other. It will have to make do.

Another dinner engagement, further uptown, required that I take a rickshaw with one of the wet and wily rickshaw men. When it rains you get to sit under a plastic sheet to put on your lap to cover your legs and my umbrella covered the rest of my body. Rickshaw seats are slanted forward and so it takes some practice to keep from sliding down. I clamped my fingers around the dusty slatts of the awning and hoped for the best. Those three actions (plastic sheet on lap, umbrella in hand and holding on required three arms rather than the two I had available.

I had been a bit sleepy before the rickshaw ride but it perked me right up. I had to hold on for dear life as my man cruised through narrow openings in the congested traffic lanes at breakneck speed.  Occasionally we would hit a bump or pothole with always the risk I would fall out and be ran over by the rickshaws in back of us (a best case scenario as there were also cars all around us).

The friendly hotel staff had assured me that the rickshaw driver knew where we were going. As it turned out he didn’t. He also didn’t speak a word of English. I tried Dari to indicate that we should head to Road 55 but instead he dropped me off at the Westin, in the opposite direction. I could just see how his mind worked: rich white lady goes to rich white hotel.

Eventually I made it to the right place – thank God for cellphones – quite dry thanks to the umbrella and plastic sheet and without falling off the bench. My newfound friends and colleagues were already seated in a stylish Indian restaurant and a waiter was ready to pour me a glass of red or white wine despite the large sign outside that said ‘no alcohol allowed.’  The Moghul cuisine menu made me a little homesick, if one can call it that, for Afghanistan, with the Persian names of various dishes (sabz bahar, paneer palak, murgh, ghost) streaming back into my consciousness – accompanied by a few deep sighs for remembering the good times of our short life there.

I am happily ensconced in my Platinum Suites (or Suits as my colleague called it) hotel on busy road 11 in the Banani section of Dhaka. It is the same street where I had a nice lunch with my friend Sayeed last time I was here and a pedicure before going home, then a reward for a trip in vain, this time hopefully for mission accomplished, at the end of next week.

The Suites (suits) hotel looks a little tacky on the outside, squeezed between lots of dangling wires, a large hole in the ground for a new neighbor and thousands of advertising signs. Inside it is quite comfy with lots of bowing staff attending asking me whether there is anything I wish (sleep).

To get here was a little less comfy. All the flights were full to capacity, crammed together with several hundred other people I tried to ignore the unpleasantness of the 14 plus hour flight to Dubai, jealous of the people stretched out on their flatbed seats in business class. I have been there in the past so I know what I was missing. Sometimes it is better to not know.

Something about the feeling of comfort in the very first few minutes after I settle into my plane seat tells me whether it is going to be a sleepful or sleepless flight. So at 9:30 PM on Thursday night, leaving Atlanta, I knew it was going to be a no-sleep flight. In spite of a triple dose of the Ayurveda sleeping pills, sleep never came. I read, I watched movies, I listened to music and watched the excruciatingly slow countdown to arrival time.

I arrived in Dubai at 7:30 PM, emerging from the transit desk and security check at the Pink Berry shop but I had no appetite for its creations. All I wanted was to catch up on a missed night and a missed day. Thursday had imperceptibly turned into Saturday.

I purchased sleep for a steep price (50 dollars an hour) at the Dubai International Airport hotel – it was nice to get away from the shopping frenzy that is continuous at Dubai airport where there is no sense of day and night.

The place is like a post-Thanksgiving shopping mall all year round. Foot traffic from all corners of the world (except Latin America) is clogging the major central walkway from Terminal 1 to 3. People carry large quantities of the Shop Dubai plastic bags with stuff to take home.

My fellow travelers to Bangladesh carried, or rather dragged, an average of three giant plastic bags per person. I was wondering what was in those bags. Goods purchased here are not cheap and Bangladeshis here are not part of the middle class. I suspect many are deep in debt for having had the privilege to work in the Emirates, having a paying job at all.

Because of all that hand luggage, boarding the Dhaka plane as an economy passenger requires much patience and forbearance as it is a most chaotic and pushy experience. The crowd is unruly, anxious and impatient, and not very experienced in airplane travel.

The latter is clear from the state of the toilets just half an hour into a five hour flight – dirty footprints on the seat, un-flushed and a wash basin full of brown water, the floor soaking wet. I decided to refrain from drinking any more water to avoid the toilet 3 or 4 hours into the flight, a sight i couldn’t even begin to imagine.

After a four hour nap in Dhaka I ventured out into the street to get some sunlight and reset my body clock and stock up on bottled water. For dinner I joined two of my counterparts at a Thai restaurant in another part of town. The hotel tried to talk me into using their house taxi for an outrageous amount of money but I declined and opted for a CNG (compressed natural gas) tuk-tuk – according to the receptionist unavailable at this time of the evening and expensive too, which turned out not to be true, both ways. And now it is bedtime and of course I am wide awake.

With five members of the facilitation team, we spent the morning in the large and empty hall we had rented pretending that the workshop was actually happening. I facilitated the program with them as participants. We did a micro version of the workshop and it succeeded in making the design come alive for the team. They realized that cutting the workshop in two parts – one of our previous plans – would not have been a good idea as ownership and energy would have been compromised.

In the end we agreed that we should start afresh in July, after the government’s new fiscal year has started and the frenzy of end-of-year spending subsided.  We discussed how to move from alignment to leadership training and moving the common agenda forward. It’s an exciting combination of activities I love to do.

Rumors are circulating about the strike being extended even longer. I have heard of evaluation and fact finding missions that have come, and left again after having been waiting in hotels and guesthouses for the hartal to end, not able to see or interview any of the people on their lists.  One of those teams in town was from the ‘What to Expect Foundation’ (from ‘what to expect when you are expecting’ fame); such irony. I was told they returned home.

Now, after the brief training this morning and seeing the enthusiasm of the local team my trip felt not so useless any longer even though one could argue about the costs versus the benefits.

I was not the only one who had come from afar; a colleague from Johns Hopkins had flown in from Baltimore for the occasion. We decided to have our nails painted at a local spa so we’d had something to show for our stay in Dhaka.

The strike got nasty last night and cars and buses were set on fire, people died. These things happen here. This is the reason people don’t want to drive after dark. And this is the reason why my date with Sayeed was also canceled this evening. He tried to leave his house to pick me up but he returned when it was clear that the demonstrators had not stopped creating mayhem. The strike was extended by a day.

The consequence of another day of strike is that our two day workshop has now been reduced to one day, Tuesday. Whether we will even be able to have that one day remains to be seen. I hear a lot of incha’llah talk about the end of the strike. There is much at stake with the opposition’s threats that the hartal last until their kidnapped leader is returned. But some people fear that he cannot be returned because he may already be dead.

Not knowing quite how to behave under hartal circumstances, and with the restrictions of movement in Kabul still freshly imprinted, I was happy when my friend Fatima offered to come and get me for an escape from the hotel to have lunch at Nando’s. She came in a bicycle rickshaw and then negotiated in a mix of Urdu and Bangla our trip to the first circle in Gulshan where one has to transit to another rickshaw as the territories are clearly delineated. The presence of a foreigner by her side put her in a poor bargaining position – a difference of 80 cents.

We had lunch at Nando’s where I opted for a ‘mildly’ spiced meal, fearing that spicy would be unbearable in this place where most food is very spicy (mild was just right).  Over lunch I learned that Fatima hails from Hunza, of Three Cups of Tea fame, up in the northwestern corner of Pakistan, the place so eloquently described in Kathleen Jamie’s book ‘Among Moslems.’

She told me what it was like to be a midwife there, something she did for many years. I got a glimpse of the stress she endured of not having people die on you lest the health center’s (and one’s own) reputation be damaged; a heavy load to carry by a young midwife in a place where people usually don’t come to the health center after they have tried everything else. Death is usually around the corner at that late stage.

Now she is studying at BRAC University’s school of public health. She confided in me her struggle on  how to connect a difficult bio-statistics course with her practitioner’s experience of public health. The school used to be good at making that connection for the students.

Back at the hotel I had a vegetarian thali while watching a TV channel that seems to show only one movie, over and over again (The Bridges of Madison County). No matter where you start in the movie, eventually you get to see the whole thing.