State of flux..

I woke up feeling heavy this morning. My heartbeats were fast and I was worried for no specific reason. I got up and meditated for half an hour. That made me feel slightly better. We had a lot to do during the day but because of the political unrest in the country due to the upcoming prosecution of a war criminal, Dhaka office asked us to limit our movement so today was another day in which some of us were stuck in the office. Despite the inconvenience we still got some work done and all in all this week’s been super productive and we are almost ready to launch our livelihood trainings!

As VSO ICS we are working in three different areas – Sexual Reproductive Health, Governance and Livelihood in 4 different villages. Since our arrival in the community, we had an inception day with our PNGO, visited some local government institutions, local health providers, conducted a needs assessment survey to identify which 5 trainings we could arrange and held three awareness sessions on adolescence. Our social and media team also created a YouTube channel and uploaded our first ever video as well as Instagram and twitter accounts. They’re also discussing a documentary project. The youth club development committee’s on the process of selecting facilitators for the SMS story project to improve English speaking skills.

This week I’ve been more involved with the Livelihood group. So far we’ve chosen five trainings which were meant to start next week. The process is quite complicated with the start of Ramadan, our Mid Phase Review followed by the Eid. For the trainings, we needed to work out the dates, find trainings, meet trainers, select modules, book venues, negotiate, negotiate more, fix the date and the time and finally the registration process could start.

Governance team’s been doing well too. They’ve working on Model UP for the youth club members which consists of three sessions. One of them on the roles and responsibilities of local government bodies, another session on debate skills and lastly the real stage for Model UP which is an adaptation of Model UN.

SRHR team’s already been conducted three awareness raising sessions on Adolescence and Youth SRHR reaching out over 250 young people and started a campaign a campaign on “Say no to Eve Teasing and Child Marriage” getting those young people involved in.

Morning went very slow. When the lunch time came, the rest of the team was still in the field. Police again stopped them complaining about their frequent movement. That was odd as we were not allowed to go around unless the police was informed which we did on a weekly basis by submitting our weekly activities which is so restrictive and frustrating sometimes but it had to be that way.

Each ICS project is one year long which is divided into 3 cycles, each cycle lasts for 3 months. As one cycle ends the current team leaves, after a month the second team comes for the second cycle. However in our case there was a longer gap (5 months) as the previous cycle was evacuated abruptly for the safety and security reasons without saying their goodbyes to the community. When we first met the youth clubs here, they all expressed their disappointment and upset about this sudden departure no farewell, no calls they said. They heard people laughing at them for wasting their time cooperating with VSO ICS. We apologized and explained the security issue and how it wasn’t in the hands of neither the volunteers nor the organisation.

We came here with hope. To help and serve the community. Our first contacts were youth clubs, young, lovely people who had the energy and potential but needed some guidance, some capacity building. We didn’t have magic sticks to make everything better for them or lots of money to give away we could only share what we’ve got, what we know and create bridges. This time it was gonna be ok! We were not gonna leave…

But we did. It happened so quickly contrary to the slowness of the morning. Our project coordinator came. He looked tense. The air was heavy, hot and sticky. I was called to the doorway. He said we had to leave. We were given 2 h to pack and be ready. I did NOT see this coming at all. No one did. I cried a bit. I cried because we were about to let down those communities for the second time. I knew it wouldn’t be possible but I had to ask “Can we please at least say bye to them in person”

We couldn’t..

I didn’t cry afterwards. We packed, hugged, took some photos and said goodbye to our neighbours. The car journey was depressing. The driver was fast and furious, I was feeling sick and uncomfortable. Whilst  listening to BACH, watching the never- ending trees on each side of the road, I was both mesmerized with the richness of this country with its greenness and hospitality and disappointed by the red that was spilt too often and the hostility.

I felt very unwell but as Mr  Goenka said during the Vipassana course which I believed “This will pass”.

I repeated this several times “It will pass”, “It will pass”, “It will pass”