Would you believe my flight back from the UK arrived 20 minutes early? The same thing happened on the outward journey - unheard of! Did you also know that in one of the duty-free shops in Heathrow terminal 4 there is a free bar serving little cocktails? Oh yes, and I felt a lot jollier boarding my plane afterwards I can tell you. So I'm now back at BRIF, with the rain and humidity (look at what it did to one of my T-shirts) and rat shit on my bedroom floor (I kid you not, some little bugger had a 3 week shitting party while I was away). The funny thing is though that I'm actually happy to be back, and I'll explain why after I've been through my week so far.

To be honest, as I was sitting at the departure gate surrounded by Bangladeshi families of fat spoiled children and submissive women, I was a little apprehensive about coming back. The last few weeks before leaving Bangladesh had been bad, both physically and psychologically, but despite that, and what a few of my friends thought to be a 50/50 call, I always knew I'd come back. My first test came on the plane and I partially failed. Foolishly I let slip to the pungently smelling Sylheti woman next to me that I spoke some Bangla, so I spent the remainder of the flight with my headphones clamped to my ears and my eyes either looking out the window or closed for fear of having her talk at me for hours. As a result of all this I've discovered that I actually quite like Diana Krall, and I'm still not sure how to feel about this...

We landed at around 5am, I got through customs quickly enough and by 6am I was in a taxi with my bag (and apparently all its initial contents) heading for central Dhaka. Funnily enough, I didn't have a mad urge to immediately find the next bus heading North to get to my office as soon as humanly possible. The plan was instead to spend 2 days resting in Dhaka with Sarah, and that's exactly what I did. Now, the more astute (or nosy) amongst you have already deduced that Sarah is not just another VSO volunteer friend of mine, but for the rest of you may the record show she is indeed my girlfriend and has been since November. Why haven't I mentioned this before? Well, to be honest, would you publish details of your love life on a public web site every week? No, I didn't think so. Nor do I. Suffice it to say that we had a great time, especially seeing as, what with her holidays and mine, we hadn't seen each other for 7 weeks. In the end it was only Wednesday morning when I finally got on a bus bound for BRIF.

I mentioned earlier that I'm happy to be back, and this realisation came to me during the bus journey. I was watching the countryside go past my window, the paddy fields, the people, the water, and I felt glad to be back. It really was that simple, but seeing as that doesn't make for good reading I'll try to pad it out a bit with some reasons why.

First of all I want to achieve my placement objectives. I've finished the overall assessment which is very broad, solid, and widely understood and accepted. However, we haven't yet done much to solve the problems we've now agreed exist and need addressing as our priorities for the coming months. In other words, I don't yet have a huge sense of satisfaction about my work here, but I also know that pretty much everything is in place for things to change in the next few months.

Funnily enough, my first day back on the job was spent at a CARE/VSO quarterly meeting to review and discuss progress since the last meeting. When you bear in mind that the last time we met up was 3 weeks before I went on holiday you'll appreciate that I didn't exactly have a plethora of success stories at my disposal with which I could wow my audience. Furthermore, having only just returned to BRIF, Habib and I had to prepare "our" presentation in the microbus going there in the morning. In the end I was glad that my professional experience to date has taught me the ability to think on my feet and make a presentation from virtually nothing. One person described my effort as brilliant, but then he has just joined BRIF and may not be entirely objective. Later on I learnt that certain persons had made comments to Habib about the apparent lack of tangible progress! I'm not worried as I know I'll get the job done in the time we have, but Habib is now really motivated which is a total result!

The second main reason why I'm confident about the rest of the year is the presence of another British volunteer for 6 months. She's called Anne, has nothing to do with VSO but has decided to give the next 6 months of her life to BRIF! If that wasn't enough, while I was away Habib also hired a guy to take care of planning, monitoring and evaluation. This is a very important part of any NGO due to the reporting demands of donors, and personally I'm delighted that I'll have an experienced person to work with over at least the next 6 months. Oh yeah, he speaks great English too and was the one who found my presentation brilliant so he must be a top bloke. So all in all I'll have 2 English-speaking colleagues around the office for the rest of the year at least, and one of them will even be my neighbour too!

To crown off this very positive end to my first entry back I learnt something amusing at dinner on Wednesday night in BRIF's canteen. It appears that some people now choose to eat their rice, vegetables, dhal and meat all together on one plate. This is not the traditional Bangladeshi way as usually they eat each one separately with rice. This new approach is known as "Keri's system"! There you go - my first significant change success. Now, if I could just get them to make good lasagne and brew lager...