Remember I told you last week that a new British volunteer called Anne had started working at BRIF? Well, we've now also got a Korean! Unlike Anne this chap's only here for 10 days to work on a work camp that BRIF periodically organises, but it does rather change the place I can tell you. For example, only a few weeks ago my walks to the Plan office to use the Internet were the scenes of excited children and wary adults. Now, when I head over there with Anne for example, I can almost ghost by unnoticed as poor old Anne gets all the attention. You see, Anne is quite fair skinned with slightly auburn hair and this really foxes the locals. For them this is not a natural hair colour so must be henna-dyed, though when they look closer they realise that all is not as they initially assumed. Add to this her freckles and you've got a small riot on your hands.

The henna hair thing is something I've never really understood. First of all, it's the men that dye their hair not the women. I struggle enough with the concept of wanting to change your hair colour to be ginger at the best of times, but seeing middle-aged men with what looks like a dead red squirrel on their heads is simply bizarre. They even do their beards, which I suppose makes sense if you're doing your hair, but of course they do it in such an incomplete way that it all looks quite comical. When I first arrived in Dhaka and started noticing the phenomena I seriously thought about adding a section to the web site dedicated to the best (i.e. worst) henna heads I'd managed to photograph. In the end I just couldn't be arsed carrying my camera around with me all the time on the off chance I might glimpse a bad barnet.

Let me come back to my new Korean friend. First of all he's called Yung Sok, he's only 18 years old and he likes beer. I know the later because he came back from Dinajpur with a crate of Heineken and that's no mean feat I can tell you. Apparently, the idea of not drinking beer is alien to Koreans, so one wonders why they don't have closer ties with Britain... Another thing that Yong Sok swears is very Korean is cleaning. When I got back from Dhaka I noticed that the kitchen was looking a tad spicker than before I left, and sure enough he'd cleaned the water filters and had a go at getting the floor to shine. He admitted defeat on the later, and I could have told him it was a fool's errand had he asked my beforehand. Even Anne had got in on the act and given the toaster a scrub. Now, I can already anticipate some of your comments about all of this pointing to my own lowly hygiene standards but not so. May I remind you that the caretaker cleans my kitchen every week or so, and as far as the water filter was concerned it was due for its bi-annual clean. I will admit however that the outside of the toaster did look a bit grim, but I didn't really care as it wasn't that part that was in contact with food.

So yes I went to Dhaka for the second half of the week. As always I'd engineered a legitimate professional justification for it all with 2 good meetings on Sunday, but really it was all about saying goodbye to Ann and Bjart. You remember, the couple of volunteers living north of me with whom I went to Darjeeling last New Year and who produce wonders from their kitchen? Well, their 1 year placement came to an end last week so we just had to give them a fitting send off i.e. a big party. Sarah was in charge of organising it all, and as everyone commented she does organise a mean party our Sarah. Seriously, she has a talent for these things and it all involves lots of little lists written down in a pocket-sized note pad that never strays more than 1 meter from either her hand or her bag. Anyway, the party was on Friday night so we were all rushing around doing little jobs and decorating the venue for most of the day. It was all worth it, the little presentations etc. went done really well and we even had enough booze. There are however 2 flies in this otherwise very appetising bowl of soup. The first is that not everyone has paid for their contribution to the drinks, and as chasing people for money can be quite an unpopular task I said I'd do it. No no, I was quite sober when I volunteered. The second fly, though in my mind it's more of huge cockroach, is that one of Ann's gold rings went missing during the party. It's box was found in the kitchen even though it had been earlier stored in the bedroom, and naturally Ann was upset. I mean, you go to the trouble of organising a party for your closest friends and only invite other friends and volunteers, and despite that something valuable goes missing.

As I'm sure you can all appreciate, it's always quite emotional saying goodbye to dear friends regardless of who's leaving and who's staying. I'm going to suggest that this is even more the case for volunteers in Bangladesh as our support networks are quite small. In other words, our opportunities to meet and become good friends with like-minded people are quite limited as the volunteer / expat community is itself small. In the case of Ann and Bjart it was perhaps even harder as they were part of a very tight group that has been together since their induction. There's something special about going through your adventures in Bangladesh with the same people from start to finish, as they totally identify with the same experiences and issues as you do, and generally at the same time. You can of course benefit from the wisdom of experienced volunteers, and then pass on your own pearls to those that arrive after you, but that doesn't come close to the feeling, even the knowledge, that there is a group of fellow volunteers with whom you have a special link, who know you better than the others and with whom you took your first steps in Bangladesh. Knowing that they're moving on to better things helps a little, but Sunday was still a very emotional day for some of us.