Wo Sind Meine Tanzhosen? (Scott Peppel, 06.12.08)

The sun rose across the city of Dhaka and we once again awoke to face the day. Today we continued our efforts to fully understand our individual programs and compile interview questions. Our various programs are working out quite differently depending upon the meetings that we have had and the available information. But as a whole we are having success.

We are starting to settle into a routine at the office and the group seems ready to head into the field and continue our adventures. The time at the BRAC headquarters has been great but the group is a little stir crazy after a long week inside. It can be difficult sitting inside working when we look out the windows at the bustle of the city the whole time. We are all quite passionate about the project and excited about promoting BRAC but Bangladesh has so many new places to go, people to meet and unique situations to find that it can be hard to sit inside getting teased by the beautiful view and potential.

Last night in the TARC we were playing our board game Karambul with local students. Like many nights before this turned into singing, jokes and leaning Bangla fraises. One of the students was talking to me about religion and wanted to teach me some terms. He had me repeat a number of consecutive phrases before telling me what they meant and after about 30 seconds of repeating, he said that I had officially converted to Islam. So today is my first day as a part of the Muslim community. So far it has been very receptive.

Over lunch we further expanded on our linguistic abilities by learning some German for the European Cup soccer game tonight. Rob is our resident speaker and fanatic Germany fan so he lead the charge with Sam and John as his sidekicks. We realize this will probably not help us very much in the field but we all now know how to say dance pants if we ever get caught in a jam in Frankfurt. As a side note Germany lost the game and Rob is still lamenting.

We celebrated some office birthdays today and all got to indulge in one of our collectively most missed experiences from home: chocolate. This was part of meeting the new interns from various universities around the world. The students are all working on different projects but we came together for a while this afternoon to get to know one another and talk about mutual questions and curiosities.

Our group continues to work well together and we are all looking forward to getting out into the field and finding out how BRACs programs translate on the ground.

Allah hafez, and Auf wiedersehen