Muang Mai, Phongsali

In April I spent two weeks in Phongsali (pronounced pong-sa-lee) with coworkers surveying and selecting new target villages for our project in Muang Mai. We opened a new CRWRC office there this month with 10 staff working in 12 villages. I visited five villages that were quite remote: until a few months ago, they were 1-2 days’ walk from the nearest big town. Click on the map to see a flickr map of all the photos I took there. Over the next few days I will feature some of the best photos on this blog.

Visiting Cicely

See more pictures from Bangladesh on my flickr site.

I stayed in Bangladesh a few extra days to visit my friend Cicely, from Calvin/Harambee days. She lives in Mymensingh, a city a few hours north of Dhaka, working as an MCC volunteer in a Salesian sisters’ convent. She teaches English to the novices (younger sisters) and aspirants (girls who want to become sisters).

Mymensingh provided a welcome change of pace for me after a busy week of work visits. Although the city is larger than the capital of Laos, it feels like a small provincial capital – not unlike where I live now. We spent time walking along the river, going to mass in Bangla, eating meals with the sisters, sipping tea with Mother Superior, etc… Mymensingh even has a Taize brothers community, so I attended morning prayers there. Like at mass, the Taize community uses tabla drums and a traditional table accordion accompanied by men and women singing Bangla melodies.
I also helped Cicely with some of her normal work: teaching English class, visiting a house for disabled boys, and playing with the orphan girls at the convent (yes, we taught them to sing “Baby Shark”). When I sat in on her English class, the aspirant girls asked many questions about Laos, the DR, and all the other places I’ve visited… it turned into a geography lesson. The sisters at the convent were incredibly hospitable, first preparing me “foreigner food” but quickly adapting it to my tastes once they saw I ate mostly Bangladesh food.

The food, by the way, was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip: where else can you eat a healthy vegetarian meal three times a day? We were often served rice, dahl, chapaties (indian tortillas), curried vegetables/fish/chicken/mutton, fresh fruit, good yogurt, and (of course) sweet, milky tea five times a day. Cicely introduced me to all the good street foods, small tea shops, and delicious breakfast places. I brought home four kinds of lentils to cook here.

Bangladesh Learning Visit

Internet access in Bangladesh was spotty, but here in Laos we’ve got broadband wireless internet, so I can finally write about my adventures the past few weeks.

The easiest way to do that is by way of photos. You can enjoy my photos from Bangladesh (in reverse order). The captions might give you an idea of what I was doing.

Here’s a quick summary: I was in Bangladesh for nearly two weeks; the first week spent visiting CRWRC’s big USAID-funded Child Survival Project. I went with three Lao colleagues, 4 people from CRWRC Cambodia, and a few Americans.

I went along because I want to learn about different approaches to community development. CRWRC Bangladesh provided an excellent learning opportunity, not only in health areas (the main focus of this exchange visit) but also in their general way of working with communities. Although the cultural context differs from Laos, many of the things I observed can be adapted to work here. Above all, the trip got me excited about what good community development can look like after ten or twelve years. I’m grateful to CRWRC for making this great learning exchange visit possible. I love my job!

Bangladesh

Rickshaws

Originally uploaded by James Zwier.

I took this photo by accident but it turned out to be my favorite one from the whole trip. I think I was riding a rickshaw one morning from the MCC office to the convent in Mymensingh when I took this photo.

Pai Tiao – An Outing

Thursday was International Womens’ Day, a big holiday here in Laos – like Mothers’ Day and Labor Day and general holiday-ness all rolled into one day. Congratulations to all you women out there: May equality and opportunity and hope for women spread across the world.

Since it was my first major holiday in Laos, it was my first time experiencing the typical Lao holiday outing, which turned out to be a lot like outings from my childhood in the Dominican Republic. We hadn’t planned anything in advance, of course, until one of our coworkers came by at 9am to rouse us into an outing. And so it was that we gathered our things, invited everyone to join us, stopped by house after house loading up a pickup truck until it was full of 19 coworkers, friends and family, went to the market to buy fruit, snacks, and things to make a meal, and eventually left town by noon.