Day 11 - Ferdi's Birthday!

Hey hey hey, first thing to say, it is Ferdinand's birthday today.
First day after the village and a big change, we are again with the noise, pollution, people everywhere.
We did not went to work because our coordinator Shamim was not able to work with us.
We did some stuff in our hotel, finishing the village blogs, organising the trip to Nepal while our two german friends went to the German Embassy to have some information about the city.

We went to Gusham to have lunch alltogether (the nicest area in town) and checked out if our shirts were made. They were not ready yet.
We also found a DVD store who was selling all copied American DVD's. We bought a dozen of them.
We will be able to improve our movie culture.

Going back home, we wanted a taxi, we found some of them, we took the one that offered the lowest price.
This taxi driver was one of the only nice ones we had since we arrived in Dhaka.
He kept on saying that he wanted to emigrate to Italy, and asked us constantly how to plan his trip.
He was a very cool guy, so we decided to take his phone number, we now have a personal driver for the city. (Tonight we went to an italian restaurant to have dinner and we called our driver, he actually came in time. Tomorrow he's probably gonna drive us to the airport...)

Coming back home we wanted to see one of our new DVD's. The sound does not work well, so we decided to go to buy some speakers (they are not bad at all and we did not pay much.)
We now have stereo surround quality sound and cool new DVD's.
We''ll come back tomorrow and we'll explain you how Kathmandu looks like.
Good night.

The Village - Days 2 & 3

After almost 12 hours of sleep under our mosquito nets in this quiet, calm and peaceful village, we attended a center meeting with about 70 women, the center manager, branch (brans manager) and area manager. It was interesting to watch this group of women, repaying their money and telling us what the use it for. Cows seem to be the best-seller in this village – almost every woman here buys one and then resells it after a few month. The village is just incredibly nice, colourfully dressed people working between coconut palms, banana plants and mango trees, rice and grain fields – and spread among these a couple of small sheds or tin roof houses.

In the afternoon we went back to the island in the Ganges were Nico and Jaco had gone the day before, to play football with a group of ten local Bangladeshis and all kinds of bank employees, which was good fun. The locals were of course incredibly proud and happy to get this opportunity and so were we! After 30 Minutes the Bangladeshi border officers made us leave though – they probably thought we were trying to get to India illegally… Never mind.
Back at the Brans we had a two hour lesson with the brans manager (who was basically sitting at his desk smiling at us) and our interpreter about all the operations going on in the Brans.

Meal time was always the most difficult time for us. First of all it was hard to convince them that we didn’t want 5 plates of their spicy-chilly-curry mix vegetables and meat. Secondly we had to concentrate sharply not to burst out laughing whenever they sniffled, burped, slurped and did other kinds of noises with their throat and mouths…

At night lots of local people came over to the branch – the rumour “Europeans in town” had obviously spread… They wanted us to sing songs in our language. Ferdi and I really couldn’t think of a German song we both know the lyrics of so we ended up singing Christmas Songs which was hilarious…Good that they didn’t understand them – I guess songs about Christianity are that popular here….. Jaco and Nico joined in with “Azzurro” and then we all sang our National Anthems including the Bangladeshis!

Today we woke up, it was cold and rainy and we could not even warm us up in the shower as there obviously isn’t such thing as hot water… we went to another center meeting and also met women taking educational loan and beggars taking loans. We realised that the quality of life in these villages decreases by at least 100% as everything is wet, cold, muddy which makes life hard for people living in tiny little sheds…

Although this village trip was really nice and very different to what we had seen so far, we were happy to get on our train back to Dhaka in the early afternoon. The bus driver went crazy again and took it as a challenge to race all his bus-driver-colleagues as if to say “Let’s make a bet who gets to Dhaka first”. And in any case of fiddly situations the rule “whoever has a stronger horn may pass first and bump out others” prevails… Needless to say, we saw at least 5 buses completely demolished at the side of the road – some upside down in a rice field, others fallen off a bridge… but yeah, who would have thought, we made it to Dhaka eventually, of course only after being stuck for 2h in the famous Dhaka traffic jam…

The village - Day 1

Hey hey hey! Technology really does miracles! I'm lying in my new bed here in the village we were brought to today which is in the Northwestern part of Bangladesh, only 4 km away from the Indian border!

Our journey began very early this morning! We woke up at 5.45, checked out from the hotel and met Shamim who was waitin for us at the reception with our interpreter Matin! We caught a couple of CNGs and rode to Dhaka bus station! At 8 we left the city and headed for the village! Four hours of crazy as hell bus ride! Drivers here do not care at all about speed limits and stupid stuff like that. Simply because there absolutely no police around here in Bangladesh. We haven't seen a signle policeman in the whole journey.
Bangladeshi land really is a beautiful one! I knew Dhaka was not representative of the Country and that's also why i really cared a lot about this trip we've had the great chance to do. Rice fields are everywhere around us, and palm and bananas trees just spot the watery land leaving the almost forgotten clear blue sky and its pale sun as the simplest and most gorgeous background to this unseen picture. People are working in the fields and in the villages and we deeply enjoy observing them from the bus that now runs faster than ever on the even surface of the road!


Finally we get to the village at about one o'clock, we take a rickshaw and ride through the countryside for about ten minutes till we reach Grameen branch's house where our two rooms are located. Jaco and I are sleeping in the same room with Matin, whereas the German boys have their own room.


Right now, while I'm writing, Matin is talking on the phone with his girlfriend, whispering in Bangla. ( He's been with his girlfriend for 6 months and still hasn't even touched her! Impressive enough!)
Going back to our first day in the fields... as soon as we arrived, we went for a quick walk in the sugar canes fields where a guy cut us some pieces and showed the way ones supposed to chew the core of the cane, suck the juice and spit the rest. Every single person person here chews the cane! Hence, we tried it too!


Then we had lunch and discovered that locals all eat without forks and knives, they only use their right hand, because with the left, they say, you do dirty stuff!
After lunch (pronounced "luns" by Banglas) we were suggested to rest a little but everything was so new and interested us so much that we could not take a nap! So we woke Matin, who was already in bed ready to sleep a couple of hours, up. We also tried to wake Consti and Ferdi up but didnt manage to.
So we went for a walk through the village with the Branch (brans) manager and his staff. Houses here are mud of mud and people around are dressed in the most amazingly colored clothes and fabrics! Kids always follow us everywhere and they seem to adore our digital cameras!


Jaco and I got to no the branch manager a lil better and at some point asked him if it would have been possible to go to the near Padma river! Of course it was feasible!For us here almost everythin seems to be doable, we just have to ask! People, especially form the Bank, treat us really nicely!
So we got three motorbikes from the branch and rode to the riverside! A beautiful wooden boat was crossing the halfmile-wide river! A guy of ours gave them a signal to come back and pick us up! After ten minutes we were on the other side, on the amazing piece of land emerged from the water after the Indians deviated the flux of the river further up north.


While we were checking out this smooth white sands some people were loading the boat! After some other 10 minutes we got back an the vessel and sailed across once again.


Riding the bikes back we could not avoid noticin the simplicity and the beauty of this place that looks, I believe, how Medieval Europe on a sunny day probably looked like!
Every peasant is doing somethin, each one has his or her own particular activity, from building bricks and walls to squeezing sugar canes, from harvesting weath or rice to sell groceries, from washing clothes in the river to play cricket in front of the school! And every single person appears to be happy, not needin anything more than what he or she has.


Once we got back to the branch we met the two chickens, at that time still alive, that we had requested for dinner! How sad!
We then had our meetin with Grameen local staff and interviewed them! After a while the zonal (pronounced jonal) manager, a guy that controls about 250.000 borrowers surprisingly shows up. Everyone is honored to meet him since he's one of the 50 most powerful people of the Bank! So he talks to us and asks us questions. At a certain point... here comes the tea! We all drink it or at least have a sip and after few second he just spontaneously burps in our faces! Giving the World one of the most amazing burps ever heard! Somethin I wouldnt be able to do not even drinking a whole bottle of coke straight! I simply could not hold my laughter and so i laughed at him in his face so hard that i couldnt stop for at least the followin five minutes! Amazing! Im still laughin now! Wow! The room kinda went silent and everybody was ashamed and scared for what I did! Fantastic!
At dinner we decided to put ourselves completely into this new experience, except from Sir Rojahn, so we forgot about the silverware and ate everything with our right hand! All meals are served by the center managers who kinda surround us in a sometimes embarassing environment!
Allright folks! Time has come for me as well, to fall asleep! Get back to you soon!
Love Love Love
N.

Day 7 - Ready for the village!

Busy day today! We even woke up early…
We started out with some two hours of work at the Bank where our dearest Shamim explained us everything, or almost, we needed to know about the upcoming trip to the village. In fact, tomorrow at 7 (and as you can well imagine is gonna be really tough for us from the very beginning!) we’re leaving for Rajshahi, a city in the Northwestern part of the country, almost on the border with India, and we’ll be staying there for two nights and three days. Originally it was four days and three nights but on our friends’ suggestion we decided that two nights would have been more than enough. So… we kinda got that whole thing planned and then at lunch time, left the Bank and headed for our travel agency in Gulshan II where the general manager was waiting for us to issue our tickets for… for… for… Nepal!! As you should no, everybody here is a general manager. Every single employee is the general manager of his activity. So in this country you don’t even have tailors or normal workers, you’ll instead find the general manager of the sewing machine etc. etc. etc.
Yeppe Ya Yeeeeah! We’re going to Nepal after our trip to the villages and precisely on Friday the 1st of February! Kathmandu, Patan, Everest!!! So excited bout it!







As general info for all our fans and beloved ones from all over the world: I’m not sure we will get phone coverage over there at the village so… don’t think we’re lost or in danger or that we don’t love you anymore, or that we decided to never come back to Italy and spend the rest of our lives in this beautiful country or anything like that. Start worrying only if you don’t hear anything from us before Thursday. Understand? Good, good, good!

Second stop of the day: the tailor!
After paying for our tickets we had lunch in the same shopping mall where the Agency is located, which is called Landmark, and then on the way out stopped in a tailor shop. Jacopo and I started looking at some fabrics they had there and asking for prices both of the fabrics and of what they call “making charge”. So after a tough hour of bargaining we eventually managed to have 9 tailor-made shirts for as low as 9 euros each. They’ll be ready on the 5th, the exact same day when we come back from Nepal, and we’ll tell you then if we’d made a good deal or not!

Done this, we took a Tuc-Tuc (the three-wheeler mini green taxi) and in about 1 hour and a half we got back to the hotel, risking our lives several times cos of the particularly crazy driving style of our Bangladeshi driver.



At the hotel we bought all the food and water necessary for these three days out of town.



Now it’s 10.40 and I think we should all go to bed soon since tomorrow morning we’ll all be challenged by our 6.00 wake up call!!!
Don’t miss us too much in these three days and… I’ll get back to you on Wednesday!
Ciao

Ps. After three days of pouring rain the sun decided to come back to Dhaka!! And… since I discovered myself to be a very weather-sensitive person I’m feeling a lot better and a lot happier! I almost like this place now!

Day 6 - Raindrops keep falling on my head

Hey hey hey!

Thanks God we are alive, we' ll tell you later what happened to us...

We left our hotel at 13h, and caught a cab to go to a travel agency that our hotel recommended to us. We wanted to buy our tickets to Katmandu - Nepal.

The travel agency did not seem serious at all so we decided to leave, they wanted us to pay for flights that did not even seem to exist - in cash (we won't talk about the amount).

So we decided to leave, quickly checked out our lonely planet travel guide and went to another agency that seemed much better, the manager of the agency explained to us everything so we reserved our tickets.
We are going to go, with a special offer (all included) to the Hyatt of Kathmandu, an amazing hotel...
(http://kathmandu.regency.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/index.jsp)

After that, we went for a walk in town, but it was raining cats and dogs so we decided to go to have dinner at 18h to a typical Bangladeshi restaurant. (Let's not talk about the food, very very very very very spicy.)

Going out of the restaurant, we asked for a cab to the security guy. He came with us to catch one, and we gave him a tip.
Apparently, this tip wasn't enough for him, he got pissed off and he said something laughing to the taxi driver.
The taxi driver seemed a bit dodgy but we did not care much at the beginning.
He changed spontaneously the way back home and said to us that he wanted to take a shortcut. He passed through an army control saying that he was "bringing four foreigners home".

Obviously, the soldier stopped us, started asking us some questions in a scary way, and finally - after five intense minutes - said to the driver to go back and take another road.
After this army intervention, we were tired, scared and very pissed of with the driver and the other guy of the restaurant.

I (Jacopo) punched him on his shoulder shouting, telling him, in Italian to go immediately to the hotel. It seems that he understood and we luckily arrived safe and sound.

That's it for today, we'll come back tomorrow with some fresh news of the bank. (Yes, in this country we work on sudays.)

Goodnight and sweet dreams to you all! (especially if you're goodlooking, nice, funny, interesting, sexy girls!)
Ps. Its so good to write stuff here in the blog cos whoever reads it doesn't know who exactly among the four of us wrote it!! Nite Nite!

Day 5 - Pink Palace

Today is Friday which is holy in Muslim countries.
This is why the traffic was limited this morning so no one woke us up and so we slept till 15.30… (One of our records...)
In the late afternoon we took a taxi to Old Dhaka to visit the Pink Palace which is the major tourist attraction in this city.
Still, the driver did not know how to take us there (we arrived after an hour and a half...).

We arrived eventually though and paid the outrageous entry fee of Taka 2 (2 cents of euro).
It was getting dark and the palace looked impressive in the rain.






The fact that wherever you look you see somewhat 20 faces staring at you, tells you how little foreigners the people here get to see.
It was wet everywhere, streets were full of mud and water, but still we found hundreds of rickshaw drivers offering you a ride, people with sewing machines on the streets, women sitting on the floor offering their vegetables and tons of children begging for some Taka.




It did not seem to be the safest place on earth so we decided to take a taxi to a shopping center, but as it was impossible to explain this to the driver, we told him to drive to the Sheraton, where the concierge wrote down the name in Bangla ... we would have never expected such a modern shopping center in this city, where there
even offer the iPhone…

As economists, we realized that they really have not yet grasped the concept of competition and differentiation – we always found at least ten shops next to each other offering exactly the same products…

At 20h we realized that we hadn’t had breakfast or lunch yet so we got some food in the food court of the mall we seemed a bit dodgy…
let’s see if we are sick tomorrow...

Day 4 - First experience!

Good evening to all our virtual fellows travelers! Today I’d like to begin with a big Thank You to all of you for following us in our adventure, for commenting on it, and for letting us share with someone back home our experience while living it at the same time.


Ok! Enough formalities for today! Let’s get some action going.

I’m sure you’re all very much curious about what we’ve done today. Well, for the first time ourselves, we’ve seeing microcredits in action.

Tough day today…

We woke up at 6.30 which for us is like saying 4.30, cos basically we’re just a bunch of desperately lazy guys! But… we managed to wake up in time, (this time we had set not one but two alarms! Just in case!) got dressed, had our usual powdered milk and cereals for breakfast, and finally left the hotel with our friend (a manager of Grameen Bank) Humayun in a minivan and headed for the villages.

First stop: the Branch office! As you should know, Grameen Bank has a very strict pyramidal organizational structure which sees at its top the Head Office (in which we do our researches every day), then the District offices, then Area offices, then Branch offices, then Groups, Group leaders and eventually individual borrower (97% women).

So we went to the Branch office, met the branch manager, went over some data and examined some basic papers, i.e. the loan proposal form. We also got the chance to ask the branch manager some more detailed questions on how the system works both in “credit-wise” and “debit-wise”.

With the branch manager and our friend Humayun we then headed to the village, which was only a few minutes away from the office.
When we got there, all the women borrowers were reunited and ready for their weekly meeting. We took part in it and through Humayun (who also worked as our interpreter) we asked them some questions on their lives, their conditions (before and after they got in contact with the Bank and started taking out loans), their jobs, investments and savings (Grameen also provides few different kinds of saving plans).

Afterwards we visited three houses owned by women who made their way out of poverty also thanks to Grameen.
It’s been very interesting apart from the fact that they kept on offering us food and water which our stomachs and intestines could not perfectly tolerate.
Another funny part was the very strong accent of our interpreter, which certainly kept us focus on what he was saying!

The village left, we wanted to visit a garment factory, and so we did. There are plenty of these factories in that area north of Dhaka.
This part really interested our young growing entrepreneurial minds and us. The factory employed 200 people but will need 300 more in the next three months. It required an overall investment of 2.500.000 Tk (25.000 €) to set it up (shared by two partners), and at 100% capacity it will generate a profit of about 250.000 Tk (2.500 €).
Grameen Bank also took part in this project as it provided money to the wife of one of the two owners.

After that we just came back to the Hotel and crashed for the whole afternoon as we were completely destroyed! I know that you, reader, are thinking that we are real pussies but… try and then tell us! Just one thing to be mention to justify why anything can be so tiresome here: pollution. Dhaka is one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Breathing here is like taking a deep breath directly from an exhaustion pipe, every single breath.

Lastly… Jacopo is gonna write something about the fun part of the day: nighttime! (by the way... it's almost four in the morning so Jaco might not be delightful! We love him anyways though! yeah?!)

For dinner, we found in the hotel elevator other interns of Grameen Bank.
They invited us to join them for dinner, in the nicest district of Dhaka, "Gusham", at Pizza Hut.
(second time in 5 days - we were a bit tired of the chinese fried rice...)

After dinner, we went for a drink to the Westin Palace
(we found later out that one drink was more expensive than a week worth of meals of our hotel restaurant - whatever - ...)

From 23h to 04h, we have been planning the next week-end trips to Nepal - Katmandu- and to a beach in the south of Bangladesh - St Martin's Island - .
We also finished to write the blog.
The 4 of us would like to read new comments. Thank you!
Good night.

Day 3

Hey hey hey hey hey! How r u people?
Today first of all we welcome our second German friend (Ferdinand), who's gonna complete our group and whom you're gonna see in some pics from tomorrow on.
Today we went at the bank and watch some videos and presentation to gather some basic info on the institution and on how it works, we came back to the hotel for lunch and then went back to work again.

Heres Jaco on the way back from the Bank. A rickshaw ride costs as low as 4 cents of euro (4 taka or 400 Quasha) from the hotel to Grameen Tower.
Our coordinator Shamimur expained us after lunch how was the internal structure of Grameen in the fields, and villages organised. After the briefing, it was around 16.30PM, and we were free to go.


We decided to go to the bangladeshi clothes bazar, clothes made in Bangladesh and ready to be exported in the Occident, which is in Dhaka city (an hour from our hotel by taxi).

We arrived in front of the bazar, and a dozen of "personal shopers" jumped on us shouting and screaming. We were kind of confused and scared. We asked them for what we wanted, jeans, trousers...
So we followed them (they kept insisting) while everyone was staring at us (as usual), and shouting as well in english. I (Jacopo) ended up buying 2 pairs of trousers for 20 euros, and 2 American Eagle boxers for 3 euros.
We left at 19.30h, and it was getting dark, (there were very few road lights in the street).

All these people that apparently became our friends started shouting at us (again) when we wanted to leave, asking for money, touching us, putting their hands into our pockets in a really uncomfortable way. Plus with the confusion of cars, rickshaws, people everywhere, little children, old men, we had to give them some Takas and "run away" with a kind of weird taxi that obliged us to pay more threatening us to go back were he took us.


This is how the bazar looked, very dirty, and plenty of dust everywhere...In the second floor, we saw all the taylors, making jeans, etc...
Today, it has been an incredible adventure (and a bit dangerous as well -Maman s dont be afraid, we are fine-), we discovered were most of the clothes "made in Bangladesh" come from.

We come back tomorrow telling you how our first day trip to a village near Dhaka was,
(we are going to see the Microcredits, Loans and repayments in action).
Good night.

Day 2

First of all: we got Bangladeshi sim cards!

Here our numbers:
Nicolo' +880 1720107381
Constantin +880 1720107382
Jacopo +880 1732071371

Yesterday night we went to bed with the goal of waking up the morning after at 9.00 am to go to the bank (Grameen Bank). This morning we woke up at 11.30 because we set the alarm at 8.00 but on a phone that still had the european time.
We ordered hot water and with some Nestle powder we made ourselves milk for breakfast.
We got dressed and everything and we walked to the Bank. While walking on one of these very very crowded streets a random guy shouted: "Constantin!"
Among 15 milion people our friend Shamimur, the guy we later found out being our coordinator at Grameen, found us. He told us to meet him at the Bank at 2.00.
From 1.00 to 2.00 we took a walk around, on the streets off of the main road. They look much poorer and you can really see and meet people there. Whereas on the main roads everybody is just walking fast, not minding you at all.

At two we arrived at the Bank, where, at the international office on the 8th floor, Shamimur explained us everything about what we're gonna do in the next four weeks. He also told us that we'll be going for five days out to the villages in the fields and see micro-credits in action.



After the meeting at Grameen, we went back to our Hotel which is also a 10 minutes walk away, on the same road, and chilled. We tried the pool, which is extremely cold, but very very very cool, and worked out little at the gym.




Lastly, here are two pictures of Dhaka from our Hotel roof, on which the pool is located. As you can see from the picture of us two on the pool side the air of the whole city, especially in the part we're staying, is very dusty and at 5.00 pm even if the sun is still high up in the sky the light is not intense at all.

Day 1 - Our room. The Executive Suite

Heres our nice two bedrooms suite at the Grand Prince Hotel of Dhaka.

we've been here for less than one day and it's already a complete mess!


This is the bathroom which is very cool and surprisingly clean. We even have a bath tub and a shower!


And these two guys we met are the two most famous models of Bangladesh. Check out the Bangladeshi supermarket bags!

Day 1 - Wow!

Here come some pics of the first two days of adventure. The very first one as you can see its us leaving the civilized western world from Malpensa International Airport.

After an almost 6-hour flight we got to Abu Dhabi where a crazy taxi driver, speeding 200 km/h on Abu Dhabi smooth highways, took us to what he wanted us to believe to be the city center, which in reality was just a crapy shopping mall where all the shops were already shut down.

So we met this British gentleman and we asked him if it was possible to share a taxi to go to the real center which is where his hotel was located. So we did, and very kindly he also paid for the ride.

We ended up going to Pizza Hut and had a stuffed hawaiian pizza with cokes and a caesar salad.

In a hurry, we caught another taxi and went back to the Airport where our second Etihad Airways Airbus A330 was waiting for us.

We landed in Dhaka after 4 and a half hours and one thing that really caught our attention was the kind of luggage with which all the Bangladeshi fellow passengers were travelling. We attach a picture!

Shock number one: just outside the airport. There are people all over. The police won't let them in. They're stuck outside, waiting for someone to arrive. We feel like mice in a cage with all the people shouting and pushing on the fences. Eventually a guy comes up and ask for our names. He's from the hotel and in a minute he'll have us picked up by their minivan.

This is Abu Dhabi newest mosque. Guess how many people can fit in there!? 1000? Not even close. 5000? more more more... 20.000? Nein! more!

As many as 35.000! Can you believe that?

Second shock: Dhaka city. Incredible poverty!

Travelling in the minivan makes you feel weird. The world that is just on the other side of that windshield is something you have never been used to. Its something you've never seen before. Its something people see on TV and go: wow that's unbelievable! Well, thing is that it really is unbelievable.

I still haven't found proper words to describe what we saw today. And I'm not sure I'll ever find them. It is just so different that believing that this is part of the same World we live in turns out to be very hard.