Every year VSO Bangladesh, and I assume every other VSO country programme, holds a conference for the volunteers. Each conference has a theme and contains serious and useful sessions, but what it's really about is getting all the volunteers together for a laugh. In actual fact, the annual conference is often the only time that all volunteers can get together so we generally look forward to it (and the bar it usually provides).

This year's conference, under the theme of "celebrating diversity", was held in the north of Bangladesh in a town called Sylhet where Bangladesh's tea plantations can be found as well as some truly enormous natural gas fields. The conference organisers chose it for the former rather than the later, though they did organise an excursion to see a gas lake of all things. I'll spare you the details of what the different sessions were about, but suffice it to say we talked about disability in Bangladesh (much neglected topic here, but then there are other big problems to solve too), HIV/AIDS in Uganda (example of how even a poor country can prevent a national disaster and take control) and assorted internal questions. I've picked out 3 topics for your amusement and information this week, so here goes.

First of all, and it was even the kick-off session of the conference, was a discussion about how volunteers and VSO Bangladesh Programme staff can work better together. As a bit of background, and even in the few months that I've been here, the programme office has slowly but surely lost sight of the fact that the volunteers are the most important thing to their success as without them they can't actually implement any of the weird and wonderful strategies they conjure up. It seems blazingly obvious but they got a bit lost and the volunteers felt very unhappy about it. One of the contributing factors was the change in Country Director last year as they took a long time to find a replacement for the last one who left last summer (for Oxfam in Afghanistan would you believe). When she did eventually turn up in November there was a greater feeling of positive expectation among the volunteers who were really glad she'd arrived and thought things would finally get better. How wrong we were. In the space of 2 short months this young lady managed, and this is no mean feat, to alienate the entire volunteer population through a combination of inaccurate assumptions leading to wrong decisions and a relectance to listen to our opinions. This all has a happy ending as she resigned a week before the conference (officially for personal reasons...), and the now acting country director opened the conference with a workshop to identify problems and start healing the wounds left by the previous 6-9 months. For managers everywhere it's text-book stuff and would make a great case study on what not to do, but I think that we're now back on track to make things better.

Secondly comes an afternoon I spent with 6 other volunteers in the company of some local indigenous people. Bangladesh contains numerous tribal peoples who are dotted around the country, either in frontier areas or in the hills near Chittagong in the south-east. Their location is, at least as far as I'm concerned, a fairly good indicator of how badly these people are treated by the Bangladeshi state and the bengalis in general. For example, I know of one NGO project that has been working to allow tribal people in the north-west to have access to local restaurants and tea sellers. They now have access, but the restaurants etc. concerned only serve them using different cups and dishes so as not to "dirty" those used by bengali customers.

In and around Sylhet there is a tribe called Monipuri. They put on a traditional show of dance and music during the conference and allowed some us to get to know them a bit better. Initially, when I signed up for the visit, I had visions of remote ethnic villages using ancient traditions as many of them do. Instead, we visited a few small communities living in the town itself and had an opportunity to sit and chat with a few of them over glasses of 7-up and grapes! The part that interested me was the emphasis these people placed on education for their survival and success. Prior to the liberation war in 1971, and according to our hosts, most of the local teachers came from their tribe. I personally was struck by the level of learning compared to some other tribes I'd heard about who really struggle to survive and maintain their culture. They promoted education as an essential and vital part of their culture, and perhaps as a result are able today to maintain a rich heritage of language, song, dance and history. Other tribes have all but lost their culture as they are forced to assimilate, to bow to pressure from society and become like them. On the one hand it's a sad tale of intolerance for those tribes that are dying out, but the Monipuris seem to have found the solution. By educating themselves they are better equipped to prosper and ensure their basic needs of shelter, food and health are met. Having met that minimum they can then look to loftier occupations like their cultural heritage, a luxury (and I pick my words deliberately) that other tribes find it hard to afford.

The 3rd highlight of the conference for me is much lighter and more fun than the previous 2 - a good old game of footie! Yep, thanks to 1 of the volunteers who lives in Sylhet, we got a team together and played a 5-a-side game against a local team. Now, when I say a local team I need to point out that all the players came from Thailand and the match took place at a gas plant in the middle of a tea estate that boasts monkeys and jackals amongst its wildlife. It's not an everyday sporting tale I know but this is Bangladesh. The gas plant is owned by an American firm (Unocal) and has staff from their Thai plant who are training locals to eventually run it themselves. Our Sylhet contact is friends with some of the staff so when she mentioned we would be in town they leapt at the chance of organising a game. We put together a small rabble of players and drove off to the plant not really knowing what to expect. In the drive down we learnt that the opposition practice every day. Fortunately we had also been told that they were laying on a slap-up barbeque and cold beers so we didn't really care about being humiliated on the pitch. In the end we lost 9-3, and even held them to just one goal in the 2nd third of 15 minutes we played. My personal contribution was 2 goals (a solo effort straight from the kick-off and a beautfully crafted move that I slid home in front of a despairing keeper) and lots of empty beer cans. We eventually got a lift home around midnight and had to climb over the hotel gate (in flip-flops and pretty hammered) as we'd been locked out. Good evening really.

As I mentioned above, the conference is really about getting everyone together at least once a year. A key problem for many volunteers here is isolation, and I don't mean geographically. As I've learnt in the last few weeks, isolation and loneliness have nothing to do with being on your own. It's about not having anyone you can talk to who understands what you are and what you're experiencing. The cultural divide between myself and my colleagues here is such that I started feeling really quite lonely a week before going to the conference. At first I didn't know what the problem was, but then I noticed how much better I felt after speaking to some volunteer friends on the phone. The strange thing was that I'd only been in Dhaka a few weeks previously so had assumed that I had recharged my emotional batteries sufficiently for a month. If anything I'm glad that the feelings came when they did as I was able to realise that going to Dhaka is not enough to counter isolation. I'm also glad that the solution to the problem is as simple as a phone call to a friend, or a day's visit to a volunteer not too far away.

That in a nutshell is what makes this experience so hard and yet so rich - it strips you down to your most basic needs, ones you took for granted back home, makes you realise how important they are and what you need to do to satisfy them. Oh and the photo? That's me painting 12 pairs of flip-flops with the closest thing I could find to gold paint for the "Golden Flip-Flops" award ceremony I organised for the conference. Obviously.