24/07/12 16:01
Date written: 18/7/12 Posted late for technical reasons, I hope to add photos once the current technical issues have been resolved.
As hard as it is to believe, today is my last proper day in Bangladesh. I fly back to the UK at 10:15 tomorrow morning, so it will be a very early start as it has turned out to be impossible to check in on-line here. It now seems almost ordinary to be here, to see things like rickshaws, that a few days ago were unusual - though people here are very entertained by the fact that I am not like most foreigners. In coming from where I do, seeing animals wandering around the streets and experiencing problems with electricity supply are not anything I find unusual. In Lochranza people fence the deer and the sheep out of their gardens, not into fields, and when I was small the electricity supply was much less stable than it is now, though to be fair it went off much less frequently, but for much longer at a time than in Bangladesh, where the power can go off for a few minutes or seconds several times a day.
It has been a busy 4 days of meetings, initially the Annual Country Learning Review, and then Strategy Implementation meetings. It has been a time of change for TLM Bangladesh over the last few years, particularly given the drops in funding and staffing they have faced. The efforts made by staff to keep things going are truly heroic, but there is a lot more change to come, and this is what they have been talking about over these last days, and will go on talking about in weeks and months to come. We hope that there will not be any more drops in funding over the next year or two, but there are always so many things which could be done, some major strategic thinking needs to be done to prioritise and plan for the future. Some of the areas where leprosy is most common in Bangladesh are not currently being served by TLM or by any other of the NGOs which work with people affected by leprosy, organisations like the Damien Foundation and LEPRA. It was great to have a staff member from LEPRA with us for one of the ACL days. TLM is the lead leprosy NGO in Bangladesh, and that places a certain responsibility on our staff to think more widely and plan more carefully. Integration and partnership have been key words over the last few days, we hope to work more closely with government health departments, and to find new and creative ways of working which will make best use of limited resources. TLM Bangladesh is currently recruiting a new Country Director and HR Manager, which adds another layer of complexity to the planning. Please do pray for the senior staff in Bangladesh - Dr David, Jiptha, John, Labio, Sumon and Suren all have great need of wisdom, clear thinking and sensitivity.
This trip has been a real privilege, to meet the colleagues I have exchanged so many e-mails with, to see the day to day reality of what I wrote about so long ago in the application to the Scottish Government, and to meet the people we are working to help, to see how they are using a small investment from Scotland to transform their own lives, not by becoming dependent on hand outs, but by using the small loans to change the way their families live, grabbing the opportunities with both hands and achieving great things in a relatively short time. On the other hand, seeing how people live here makes me ashamed of the way we live, where we are so happy to get a bargain, to get cheap clothes and goods, and don't think about what these low prices mean for the people who make these things, and the conditions in which their low wages mean they have to live. We in the UK wouldn't stand for it, so why should people in Bangladesh, and other countries of the Global South have to? Yes, our economic conditions are worse than they were, but still we live in luxury compared to many of the people I met, and some of them were far from the poorest of the poor.
As hard as it is to believe, today is my last proper day in Bangladesh. I fly back to the UK at 10:15 tomorrow morning, so it will be a very early start as it has turned out to be impossible to check in on-line here. It now seems almost ordinary to be here, to see things like rickshaws, that a few days ago were unusual - though people here are very entertained by the fact that I am not like most foreigners. In coming from where I do, seeing animals wandering around the streets and experiencing problems with electricity supply are not anything I find unusual. In Lochranza people fence the deer and the sheep out of their gardens, not into fields, and when I was small the electricity supply was much less stable than it is now, though to be fair it went off much less frequently, but for much longer at a time than in Bangladesh, where the power can go off for a few minutes or seconds several times a day.
It has been a busy 4 days of meetings, initially the Annual Country Learning Review, and then Strategy Implementation meetings. It has been a time of change for TLM Bangladesh over the last few years, particularly given the drops in funding and staffing they have faced. The efforts made by staff to keep things going are truly heroic, but there is a lot more change to come, and this is what they have been talking about over these last days, and will go on talking about in weeks and months to come. We hope that there will not be any more drops in funding over the next year or two, but there are always so many things which could be done, some major strategic thinking needs to be done to prioritise and plan for the future. Some of the areas where leprosy is most common in Bangladesh are not currently being served by TLM or by any other of the NGOs which work with people affected by leprosy, organisations like the Damien Foundation and LEPRA. It was great to have a staff member from LEPRA with us for one of the ACL days. TLM is the lead leprosy NGO in Bangladesh, and that places a certain responsibility on our staff to think more widely and plan more carefully. Integration and partnership have been key words over the last few days, we hope to work more closely with government health departments, and to find new and creative ways of working which will make best use of limited resources. TLM Bangladesh is currently recruiting a new Country Director and HR Manager, which adds another layer of complexity to the planning. Please do pray for the senior staff in Bangladesh - Dr David, Jiptha, John, Labio, Sumon and Suren all have great need of wisdom, clear thinking and sensitivity.
This trip has been a real privilege, to meet the colleagues I have exchanged so many e-mails with, to see the day to day reality of what I wrote about so long ago in the application to the Scottish Government, and to meet the people we are working to help, to see how they are using a small investment from Scotland to transform their own lives, not by becoming dependent on hand outs, but by using the small loans to change the way their families live, grabbing the opportunities with both hands and achieving great things in a relatively short time. On the other hand, seeing how people live here makes me ashamed of the way we live, where we are so happy to get a bargain, to get cheap clothes and goods, and don't think about what these low prices mean for the people who make these things, and the conditions in which their low wages mean they have to live. We in the UK wouldn't stand for it, so why should people in Bangladesh, and other countries of the Global South have to? Yes, our economic conditions are worse than they were, but still we live in luxury compared to many of the people I met, and some of them were far from the poorest of the poor.
