Pabna, first field visit

It was the best and worst of Bangladesh. Overall, incredibly enlightening to see how the project works in the field, talk with the people who work in the villages-- there's nothing like being there in person!

After a five-hour (A/C-- fantastic) bus journey, I arrived at the home of Sekander. He has a beautiful family: four grown sons, their wives, and their incredibly cute children all live under the same roof, one big happy family. The little boys were adorable, especially Taief who would steal everyone's shoes and shout "Hiiiiii!" at my door in the morning. The women are lovely. Their English is not too much better than my Bangla, but together we cooked fried rice and kung pao chicken one night, shared wedding photos, played with the kids. They shared their home and their lives with me, so warmly and with no hesitation about me being a stranger or a foreigner. This is Bangladeshi hospitality: the Pabna Community Clinic committee met before my visit to decide whose home I would stay in, who I would eat my meals with. Mukut's family cooked an amazing dinner of pulao (this flavored rice), and a tableful of savory meats and vegetables, Protik spent three full days accompanying us to the clinic, the villages, touring... extend this to Piya, Piya's friends, Shireen Miss, Aneez Miss, and Prat's parents, who have made me feel so at home and welcome. Or Marzina, at the hospital, who went out to Agora and bought me soup and a kilo of apples when I was sick-- the hospitality of nearly every Bangladeshi I have met is truly heartwarming.

The work, though, can be confusing and frustrating at times. It's a slow and exhausting process to comb out what is going on--everyone tells a conflicting story and the culture is to just do as your superior commands, so field staff have little understanding of the larger goals of the project. In this way, it was a mistake to rely on the field staff for a more complete understanding of when, how, why, we measure data and chlorinate. We had several long interpreted interviews, during which there were many AHA! moments and subsequent "wait, you just contradicted yourself... wait, is THAT what you meant?" rallies that made it hard for me to trust anything I heard without confirming and reconfirming it through slightly varied questions. After it all, though, it was just today when I talked with Mostofa and Bidut back in Dhaka that my questions were really addressed.

I did come away with the understandings that:
1) The villagers: LOVE the water, don't get diarrhea ever from it, see no need to change what they are doing
2) The field staff: feel like they are doing their jobs, are doing fine with chlorination and data measurement. However, upon probing, they don't record any of their data and don't have a protocol of what to do if high fecal coliform level is discovered. Indeed, they don't inform the villagers and just add .25mg/L more chlorine the next month.
3) DCH: feels like they are doing their jobs, but realize there is a gap in data measurement. Has a completely different perception of what's going on in the field than what the field staff reflected to me.
4) The lab at DCH: feels like they are doing their jobs, doesn't keep data in order, has minimal communication with the rest of the project.

It is a challenge to go between these four different actors and their differing perspectives. The first thing out of my mouth always has to be, "I know you are doing your job well," or "the fieldwork is excellent, but"-- they are very defensive and criticisms have to be sugar-coated so much. Dealing with nightmare advisors at JMUN, or more recently, Del Rel (<333) has been great preparation, not to mention years of soothing overly vocal delegates in committee. Sometimes, admittedly, I just want to scream "this evaluation such a mess, you cannot expect anyone to want to fund the project and why are you not more alarmed??"

But though it takes time, I can see that I am finally making some progress. Sugar-coated or not, in the end we are all in [rough at least] agreement about the gaps of the project. Mostofa and I are probably a day away from developing a written protocol for actions to be taken after discovering contaminated water-- now, the field office will be required to drive to the village within 24 hours, tell them to start boiling water, and start emergency chlorination. Tomorrow, I'll finish the written instructions to chlorinate/measure data in Mar-May and Jun-Aug, instead of the random four or five months chosen during other years. Implementation will be another challenge, but with Mostofa's help and authority, not to mention that of Chairman Zaman, I am confident it will be done.

Time here passes quickly and slowly at the same time. Quickly in that the work I've accomplished in my five (six?) weeks here is nothing close to what I did in Chile at this point. Slowly in that I know I have learned and changed much in these weeks. Bangladeshi time, too, is like an hour behind what we in Chile called "gringo time." For my concluding meeting at Pabna Community Clinic, the General Secretary strolled in 40 minutes late and I had to apologize for the fact that I had already started because I had somewhere to be in another 15 minutes. Being flexible is important, and sometimes you just have to let things go. I was so excited about proving to the World Bank consultants that dugwells are effective--what a cool opportunity!--but they canceled their trip because of the BDR conflict. And what can you do? On to the next.

And then there are incidents like when a forty-something-year-old man tries to hold my hand and explain it's "Bangladeshi custom." It would have been funnier if he wasn't my coworker, interpreter, and the only one who could speak English there in the middle of nowhere. I had no problem telling him that I may be young and foreign, but I wasn't born yesterday. I called him out on a couple of incidents and he apologized profusely; I just told him not to let it happen again. I'm just thankful that his wife and young son (yeahh...) came on the return journey so I didn't have to sit next to him for five hours on a cramped bus.

For reasons like this--because this is certainly not the first creepy incident with men from work--I think I will have a very different relationship with these co-workers than I have with the Un Buen Comienzo team. I really, really hope that my direct supervisor won't disappoint me, but admittedly I am completely ready for that to happen. This is a sad realization, but work is work and I have met and am expanding a wonderful circle of friends outside of DCH.