I very recently got an e-mail from friend in London asking what I'll do after I finish my placement at BRIF. Granted that's not an unusual question from you lot, and in fact I probably get asked it at least once a month. However, when Habib asked me the same question on Tuesday night I was, as you can imagine, a little more surprised.

If I'm mentioning this now it's because I've had a bit of a change of heart in recent weeks, and I'm quite happy about that. My previous view, as was no doubt painfully clear from previous diary entries and discussions I had back in Europe, was that I wasn't really "enjoying" life here and would leave Bangladesh earlier than initially planned i.e. some time next summer. In fact, my view went even further than that as it also included my moving away from development work, or at least postings based in developing countries. Why so? Well, with the benefit of hindsight I can now see that I was unhappy and frustrated by my working environment. More accurately, I had virtually no one to work with or through on a regular basis. This not only made information gathering almost impossible (language barrier) but also meant I had no one to transfer skills and knowledge to, which is after all why I'm here. All in all then, I couldn't get into the sort of work I wanted to, I wasn't having anywhere near the impact I wanted on project managers and staff, and didn't have any real colleagues around the office to help and work with.

Since coming back from my holiday however, and entirely due to the fortuitous presence of Anne and Shahid, I can delegate tasks and hence get more done. The big change though is being able to go out into the field and work with project managers and staff on problems affecting them on a daily basis. Why couldn't I do this before? Part of the answer lies in the language, though I readily admit my efforts in this department have been poor. The other aspect is that the only way of getting around is by motorbike, and I'm not insured to drive one. I suspected it might be a useful thing to learn before leaving the UK back in October, but VSO insisted (on 2 separate occasions and in writing) that it wasn't necessary and I didn't need to take lessons and get a license. How wrong can you be?! Anyway, the bottom line now is that we've got a good little team with the right language skills and some mobility, and my God we're getting some work done!

Something else that has developed lately has been my greater involvement in new project design and proposals. This week Shahid was working on a new project to facilitate the movement of women by making buses and rickshaws etc. more female-friendly. In the grand scheme of things that may not sound like much, but you haven't seen the sort of things women have to put up with moving around the place. And it's things like that that prevent women from working or visiting family, hence diminshing their independence and social participation. Anyway, Shahid asked me to help him put a concept paper together and we got into a session analysing the problems and identifying the root causes. It was great, just the sort of problem-solving work I love as it was about a real-world problem rather than some internal organisational issue. All of this got me thinking, and I realised that much of the work I enjoyed most in previous jobs was designing solutions to real, tangible problems having understood and analysed what was going on. This also explains my relectance to stay in exactly the sort of work I'm doing now i.e. organisational development, as while it's intellectually challenging it's not at the sharp end of operations, helping the organisation to achieve what it's really about. I suppose it's all the difference between being an operations manager in a company and an internal auditor. The latter certainly has a role to play in the organisation's success, but it's not as direct as the former's.

So anyway, Habib says he has some good contacts with various international organisations and could help me find a good job. My initial reaction was to say that it was too early to think about all that, and that we've still got a lot of work to do here. That's not to say I'm not giving it some thought, as this entry proves, but it's a whole new area for me so I don't even know what sorts of jobs are out there. Being realistic though, even if I did find something that appealed to me, I would like to try it on for size for 6 months first before committing myself further. In actual fact, I'm no nearer to answering the question I opened with. All I've done is add a previously excluded option to the list of candidates.