Was There Anything I Could Do?

Another week in Bangladesh and I’ve collected a pocketful of stories like shells from the beach only they’re not as shiny and I’m sure if I put them to my ear I won’t be hearing the sounds of waves crashing. Especially not since it’s the noise from inside your ear you’re hearing reflected back at you from the inside the shell. What a disappointing day it was when I found that out – the idea of having a little bit of the sea in a shell in the palm of my hand was very romantic to me at the age of seven. And still is, really.

And while I could tell some of these stories, I think I'll tell the story of:

What it is I actually do here

I’ve been avoiding posting about this directly since, well, to be honest I wasn’t even sure what it is I do apart from get stared at and dress in primary colours and wander around villages asking children if they like school while taking photos of their parents doing crazy things like…watering their vegetable patch.

As I near the three-month mark, and since I’ve had this conversation almost as many times as I’ve responded to the question “what is your country?” I’m probably as prepared as I’ll ever be. And without further ado, here is

Job Description of a Development Communications Assistant in Bangladesh

(Slightly abridged and edited version)

- Walk to work while refusing rides from rickshaw wallahs to arrive at 8am trying not to laugh at all the people wrapped up in beanies and scarves at 15 degrees

- Have cha (tea) and ‘discuss’ with colleagues

- Check e mails, of which there will be about 800, 750 of which will be all of office e mails saying variations of: “I will be out of the office on a field visit”, or “I am back from my diseases”, or “remember to fill out this form today which was due four years ago”…

- Knuckle down (after chuckling at above) and get knee deep in researching my next visit to the field which will focus on one, or all, of my program’s areas:
* Income generation and food security
* Women’s empowerment
* Natural disaster risk reduction
* Health and education

And here comes the serious bit (feel free to tune out and skip on to the next story which will invariably be about me getting lost in an underground foot tunnel in the dark trying to avoid the mess of limbs created by people scrambling for potatoes rolling down the stairs…)

Serious bit...

But, for those who are still tuned in: more specifically, at the moment my focus at work has been making a documentary on the excavation of a canal in an extremely poor region of Bangladesh, which has solved water logging problems in the area. It has been fascinating, and is a great example of aid work - well, working - as it has led to improvements in all of the above areas.

The canal before excavation

See, the ‘buzz word’ in aid these days is ‘sustainability’. There’s an age-old adage that goes something like “you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day…etc.”, and essentially that is at the heart of the program I am working in. It aims to not only feed our beneficiaries, or send their children to school, or disaster-proof their house; but do all of this at once and in a way which can continue long after our funding has run out.

Fishing in the canal - after excavation

Which is really bloody hard when you get down to it, for many reasons, but I guess the reason that sticks out most to me is that once you start ‘meddling’ in a community (be it a village, a slum, a union, whatever), you automatically start fiddling with the power dynamics of the place. And once that happens it’s a bit like the butterfly wings flapping idea that winds up causing a tsunami somewhere else (so glad other people have come up with snappy metaphors for me).

You see (adopt wise professor type voice) when people don’t have enough food, can’t afford to or access education, can’t earn any money, and have all their assets (and possibly their lives) washed away by fairly regular natural disasters, you can imagine how much power and representation they have in their local community. And, as uncomfortable as it is to talk about, there are a lot of people who benefit (intentionally or not) from a large proportion of the community not having any power, or much of a voice.

So, when well-meaning people (like my very eager self) wander into a village and start messing around with things like mother and child nutrition, agricultural training, education, sanitation, and empowerment, and all at the one time, you can start to see what ripple effects that may have. And why it has the potential to cause quite a mess if you go at it like a bull at a gate (I can borrow them till the cows come home).

Eager little me

In a country like Bangladesh where an overwhelming proportion of the population teeter precariously on the edge of subsistence poverty, there can be quite a lot of resentment in a community when only the poorest of the poor receive aid. On a wider scale, as people spend less time just trying to survive, they have more time for things like demanding to participate in the local community, demand government services, become aware of things like local unions and local elections, and at an even more basic level they start living as opposed to dying, or being well enough to attend school and work as opposed to having constant diarrhea etc. Which makes a very big difference in the community on a small scale, and when you start multiplying this across the 400,000 households my program works directly with, starts to make my eyes boggle at the rate and scale of change we are causing.

Another view of the same canal after excavation

As I type this, I know I am teetering precariously myself on the edge of trying too simplistically to explain what I am learning on a daily basis here and will insert the disclaimer that I’ve still got my training wheels on when it comes to development work.

But, I guess at the heart of what I am trying to say is that my ‘day job’ is to capture the personal stories of the impacts of my program’s interventions across the country, and I’m only just beginning to understand what these impacts are. And I love it.