In Country Orientation

We had two weeks of orientation and various trainings at the lovely Hotel Lake Castle.  The ‘lake’ was somewhat different to the photograph and reminded me more of sewerage filtering ponds.  But apart from this the staff were all very friendly, the rooms spotless, and it was generally a very cushy place to live.  Training sessions were held at the hotel and covered things like security (safehouses, hartals, muggings and the like), living in Dhaka (houses with guards and preferred perimeter walls), health (multiple forms of diahorrea, malaria, dengue fever), and transport (curfew after 8pm).  Perhaps it was aimed squarely at eliminating the Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ motif. 

The AYAD staff are a dedicated bunch and consisted of Badral the manager and Boby and Raihan running the logistical operations.  These consisted of mainly multiple shopping and tour runs using two vans amongst the crazy Dhaka traffic.  They handled it with aplomb and I was further impressed to know that Boby had pulled it off previously with 17 AYADs last year (including sari shopping, which he diligently took our group on also).

Pre Departure Training - Canberra

Have just had pre-departure training - 5 days of health, culture, communications, and development primers in Canberra for budding aid workers and other types of random bleeding hearts such as myself. Demographics of participants confirms my 'two-hump' hypothesis - of a large portion being the 'post-arts degree next step crowd', followed by the 'I'm pushing 30 (the age cut-off)' crowd (myself). It was a bit of a hothouse with 110-odd of us sleeping, training, eating and socialising largely in the one hotel. Met some amazing people who I hope to stay in touch with across the globe during assignment. But it was with some relief that I could have some downtime after-wards for a few days at my sister's place.

 A bit of glam at old parliament house.

 The main sessions.

 Trialling 'culturally appropriate' dress.

The group going to Bangladesh!

Accepted into the AYAD program!

I found out that one of my lengthy and rather tedious applications to AUSAID's 'Australian Youth Ambassador's for Development' program was successful! The project that I will be working on will be in the climate change adaptation area with the NGO Concern Universal Bangladesh. As far as I know, it will involve keeping the organisation up to date about relevant international, national and local climate change policy and funding developments,as well as best practice projects in community adaptation to climate change.