It's been a good week, with lots of good work and some critical events in the life of my placement. The most important for me I'll save to last as I want to talk about THE workshop I ran on Saturday morning first.

One major difference between my work here and my previous professional experiences is the need to design and run workshops to get the job done. We use the term "workshop" to cover virtually any gathering of people here, so let me narrow it down a bit and explain why they seem to be such a major part of development work. Basically, and in my humble opinion, development is all about change and nothing but change. As a result, and even if the changes being proposed and implemented are beneficial to almost everyone, some people will find it all a bit scary and resist as change of any kind is generally an uncomfortable experience. Sometimes however, the change will tread on the toes of influencial or powerful people who can make or break the project. As a result, it is essential to involve the people affected by the change, directly or indirectly, as early as possible so they can shape and "own" the change hence reducing resistance and increasing the likelihood of the change lasting.

What I've just described is applicable to any situation involving change anywhere in the world, whether you're implementing a new accounts software package in Norway or advocating the use of condoms to fight the spread of HIV in China. What makes development work slightly different in my experience, especially as a foreigner, is that it is very easy to adopt an "all conquering hero" approach as one ex-VSO volunteer called it and force change on a group of people because you apparently know what's best for them and they're not educated enough to do it themselves. While it may seem you're getting the job done faster I'd suggest there are at least 3 very good reasons for not working this way:

1) Chances are you do indeed have some very good ideas, but chances are as well that you haven't fully grasped all that is going on and how the people involved feel because you are not one of them. Short of living with the future project beneficiaries as one of them for a reasonable length of time there is only so much you can really understand about these people's lives and how their community works. Involving them reduces the risk of getting it horribly wrong.

2) Again as a foreigner, and especially if you're white, people will generally avoid giving constructive feedback or open criticism about your ideas as they don't want to cause offence. Instead, they'll just drag their feet during implementation or not bother supporting the project once you've gone. Either way, things won't have improved in a sustainable way and the change will not take root.

3) As mentioned above, for the change to truly be successful the local community etc. must take it over and integrate it fully. This could involve anything from skills training to influencing cultural values, but the bottom line is that things must continue for the better after the project has finished and you've packed up your bags and ridden off into the sunset.

Soooo, seeing as VSO volunteers all generally work to bring about positive change, we need to work closely with the people involved on a daily basis. Sometimes though, when we need to discuss issues with a group, we will organise a structured yet open meeting to help people share their views and come to a collective decision. These are workshops as I understand them, and they are generally very successful in Bangladesh as the people have a strong sense of community and participation. Why then have I not really had much workshop experience before then? Well, I've certainly facilitated workshops, but I'd never designed them before and they're damn tricky I can tell you! They're a subtle mixture of keeping enough structure to reach the stated objectives while leaving participants enough freedom to express themselves fully and take the direction they want to. You also need to include different types of activities to keep participants interested, but not throw in exercises for the sake of it. All in all I find it really interesting work, and it's surprising how universal these things are i.e. what makes a good workshop in the UK would probably work well here and vice versa as it's all really about a bunch of people in a room working together.

What then of my workshop on Saturday? Well, I've finished my assessment of the organisation, and I've even got Habib's approval of what it says. Next then, I needed to share it with the rest of the organisation, starting with management and key external partners, to keep everyone on the same page and ensure we haven't missed anything important over the last few months that needs to be included in the report. Having got that common understanding and confirmation, the organisation needed to collectively decide what it wanted to do about it. I of course could have told them what I thought the top 5 issues were, but for these changes to work they must be done by BRIF management and staff rather than the token white boy.

And so it was, using a variety of props and sessions that I won't bore you with, that we came up with a tight list of 10 priority items. We did actually assess them individually but in the end the difference between them was so slight that it wasn't worth ranking them. Interestingly enough the 2 pre-workshop favourites (recruiting a 2nd in command and writing a strategic plan) didn't fare too well as the former didn't come out top (though there is no doubt in anyone's mind that it's the number 1 problem) and the second didn't even make the cut into the last 10! In true Bangladeshi style we awarded a bonus point somewhere and decided the strategic plan needed to be done anyway so all was not lost! All in all I think we got a good result, and the participants seemed to follow the proceedings quite well though I underestimated how much they'd struggle with the concept to using criteria to prioritise a list of different issues. I should have used a simple example to get the point across - you live and learn eh?

So where does this leave me now? Well, collectively we decided that the project coordinators should inform their staff of what the workshop was about and its conclusions rather than holding another workshop for them (phew!). The next step is a meeting with all the guys who are now the proud owner of a project or 2 to address the priority issues. I sensed some apprehension and the fear of the unknown when we asked people to take responsibility for these things, so while the issues themselves aren't too tricky, getting the projects up and running to address them might well be. But that's how Bangladesh works really, as it doesn't get easier as you go along, it just gets more challenging!

As important as this workshop is for the future success of my time here, something else happened on Tuesday that I consider to be a turning point in my placement. As I think I've mentioned before, there has been a question mark hanging over when CARE will stop paying 2/3's of my salary and basically enabling BRIF to have my services. On Tuesday the 3 VSO volunteers concerned by the CARE-VSO initiative along with VSO's acting Country Director met with CARE in Dinajpur as part of the normal quarterly review process. After a lengthy discussion about CARE funding in general it was finally clearly stated that our placements will not receive any funding beyond March 31st 2005, a full 8 months before my 2 year placement is officially set to end.

In all honesty I had been anticipating this response as all the other echoes I'd had from within CARE pointed in the same direction. That said, there was also a feeling that money could be found elsewhere within CARE to support the remainder of my time if I made the right approaches to the right people. And so it was that I came to a decision point about my future here. When I look at my situation from a professional point of view it seems clear that I don't need the full 2 years to achieve my objectives. I even believe that it would be better to set an earlier deadline to generate a sense of urgency about my work rather than running the risk of things sliding as there'll always be time to do it later. Personally, I also need to keep busy and don't see how I could keep myself occupied for 2 full years without going beyond an adviser's role and actually starting operational work that couldn't be maintained by others. Secondly, I believe there's a limit to how much change an organisation can incorporate at one time before a period to consolidate and breath is required, and 2 years for BRIF would be too much.

On a purely personal level, and this is much more important than the professional aspects, I'm also not convinced I want to live like this for 2 whole years! To be perfectly honest, I'm getting a tad pissed off with finding my kitchen flooded every time it rains (down the poorly designed chimney) not to mention the small turds that magically appear overnight (I've now seen a dung beetle in action whilst eating breakfast) and the evidence of some animal attempting (and sometimes succeeding) to steal my food. As beneficial as this experience is to me, there's no point in being masochistic and depriving myself of so many people and things I love when I can accomplish what I came to do in less time. Whereas before the idea of living in the UK after here seemed a very unlikely possibility, I now wish for nothing more than to be close to my family and friends not to mention decent food and rugby! So there it is, I've decided to finish my placement with BRIF when CARE's funding stops next March. As to whether I come home straight away or maybe do a 1 month or 2 working for VSO or another NGO (preferably in Dhaka) remains to be seen and probably won't be resolved until next year anyway. I may even stay on an extra month with BRIF if the work requires it.

To take this decision forward I've arranged a meeting with VSO's acting Country Director for next week to tell her about my situation. The discussion with Habib about all this went well, even if it was a tad bizarre. The workshop happened on Saturday morning, and it left many people thinking many different things, including Habib. He came knocking on my door at 11.15pm and asked me to come to his house for a chat (I'd just come out of the shower in an attempt to cool off until the electricity came back on). He started talking about the workshop, then threw in CARE's funding, and suddenly he was saying we should aim for March 2005 to finish the priorities we'd defined that day! This all sounded too good to be true, and it was. In actual fact, and I'm still not 100% sure I've got this right, but I think he was actually saying that we could then do other things not in the top 10 during the time after March up until my 2 years are up. I gently said that I too wanted to aim for March next year as a deadline, and would consider staying an extra month if required but not an extra 8 months. I told him that I found life here quite hard, and while he tries to understand I know he can't fully grasp why, in much the same way this web site doesn't do enough to help you to understand life here.

So there it was, an agreement on the remainder of my placement that was quite painless. Before I knew it we had stopped talking shop and were following a gas-lit lantern across the village to watch a guy fishing in the paddy fields. Apparently the fish are attracted to the light at night and are hence easy to catch by then being hit on the head with a bamboo stick. Habib gave it a go himself and promised we'd go fishing one night too. I'm actually looking forward to that one! Walking back to the campus he mentioned moving the office to Saidpur, a large town nearby, if he gets funding to build an orphanage. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me that maybe he sees moving to the city as something that would make me happier here, and to be honest I don't know if that's true...

Anyway, getting back to this meeting on Tuesday, on the way there we were forced to stop the car as some local people had basically dumped lumps of earth on the road in 3 lines straight across it. They were transferring earth from one field on one side of the road to another field on the other (don't ask why) and were pissed off with the speed of the traffic that was going past as they tried to cross. As a result, and in a moment of true Bengali logic, they decided to dump earth on the road to make 3 speed bumps! I kid you not, it was the dumbest thing I've seen in a long time yet it made perfect sense in a weird sort of way. The bumps they'd made were actually too high to go under a car, but the many buses that use the route had reduced the bumps to nothing in certain places. Habib and his friend who was driving couldn't believe what they'd seen. It just made me wonder what else I could possibly see on the roads here!