I can’t believe I’m leaving today! A part of me feels a little anxious and hesitant to leave the comforts of home, but the other part of me feels completely excited and eager to see and explore all there is in another foreign country! Many of my friends are all abroad this summer. One is in Greece, another is in India (on another DukeEngage program), another is in China, and yet another is working for a NGO in Ghana. Its strange how no one stays home anymore, but I think it’s an amazing age to explore everything that’s out there.
I’ve always been a huge Borders Bookstore fanatic. I always go there to study, or read magazines and graphic novels; they have just about everything from Austen to Zebras. So I was incredibly surprised when I went to the travel section and found absolutely NO books about Bangladesh! I looked through the large bookshelves and the travel books were organized in areas. There were books about Europe, Asia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and then skipped from Pakistan to India, with absolutely nothing in between.
Which leads me to think that not much is known about Bangladesh and its culture. When old acquaintances and friends ask me what I’m doing for the summer and I reply with my plans, they usually have a shocked/confused expression on their face. “Bangladesh? Where’s that!” and “Ohhhh. What are you doing there?” are a few common reactions that I’ve gotten, though one friend did immediately guess that I was going to be working with microfinance. My mom and her friends are extremely skeptical of the safety in Bangladesh, and is definitely more than a little worried about me. Though I assure her that I will be fine, there are still some innately instilled fears that I have of a place that I have never gone. For example, what if I get swept away by a monsoon wave? Or what if I contract Japanese encephalitis? What if I shrivel like a raison in the sun when I walk around in the forty degree Celsius weather? Unfortunately, these are just risks that I will have to take, but I’m ready to take them.
On another note, I think I packed pretty conservatively. I brought a ton of clothes…but I hope that we’ll get a chance to go to a local mall to blend in with the crowd a little more. I mostly borrowed my mom’s clothes—long dresses, light blouses, etc. I couldn’t find any mosquito netting…but I did find bugspray. The camera equipment is safely at hand, though the security people wouldn’t let me hand check the tapes and insisted that they go through x-ray machine thingie.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been testing out some of the camera equipment and I think it works fine and well. I always get a little confused with all the wires but my friend from home helped me out. We actually took the filming equipment and made a short movie about my sister and her friends’ effort (all ages 5-12) in raising money for the recent earthquake in Sichuan, China. We edited the footage using the Adobe Premiere Pro program thenwe put the movie on YouTube, and it’s gotten over 1700 hits within the last two weeks! The whole project was pretty interesting and educational for me, though I still have some trouble remembering how to use everything—but I’m sure that will get better as we use the equipment even more in Bangladesh.
This is the video link:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=X5-OHJeLApo
No comments:
Post a Comment