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…
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…
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