Ohhhh am I struggling to fill a page this week! I'll try waffling about 3 things and see where it takes us.

First of all, my week at work. I can't remember if I mentioned this before but we've finally finished translating the strategic plan they wrote last year, all 40 odd pages of flowery Bangla of it. Somewhat unsurprisingly it's not the greatest piece of strategic thinking you're ever likely to read, but there is a fair amount of good analysis and ideas that we can use. So I reviewed the document, underlining what I thought was useful or interesting, and added it to the new document I've started writing in parallel to the translation. After the first few translated pages it had already become clear that the internal analysis of BRIF wasn't up to much, and there was a pretty shaky stab made at identifying future external trends that are likely to affect the organisation in years to come.

Also this week it suddently dawned on me that we were soon due to have our next quarterly meeting with CARE about my placement's progress. At the last 2 meetings I've had neither much to say nor much of a presentation to say it in. This time I'd decided was going to be different, so I got stuck in writing my progress report along with a summary presentation in Powerpoint. Towards the end of the week I realised that a) the next quarterly meeting was to be on November 1st, and that b) this was the day after I got back from 10 days in Dhaka on VSO business. In other words, I had to review the presentation with Habib before leaving for Dhaka early Friday morning.

In true Habib fashion the only time we found to sit down and chat was Thursday night, and of course he was tired which made his already short attention span dwindle to almost non-existant. To make matters worse, he was keen to check his e-mail so I had to sit there as he deleted 3/4 of his new mail (junk) and ambled his way through the others. It was a tad painful but a testament to how patient I've become since coming to Bangladesh as I didn't suddenly yank out the phone cable from the modem and scream "we're having a meeting and it's already 9pm you bastard!". So we had our meeting, and 2 funny things happened. First of all, I went through where I was with the strategic plan and he seemed interested. He even said, and this is basically unbelieveable, that he wanted to finish it all by November 10th and would find a few days to work with me on it! I'll believe it when I see it but I'm going to push for that to become reality. Next we talked about the presentation to CARE, and here he was a lot less interested. Well, he wasn't interested until about 15 minutes into the discussion when the penny finally dropped that this was for the next VSO-CARE meeting. You know how you have to repeat something 3 times to some people before it sinks in? Suddenly he wanted to reread the whole thing and felt we could say more. "More what?" I enquired. He wasn't sure, but would e-mail me his ideas so I could update it in Dhaka (that never happened by the way, and the meeting got moved to December).

So I went to Dhaka. I was going down for a long list of VSO things that just happened to occur in the same week, starting with me getting involved in some of the induction sessions for the new volunteers and ending with a weekend away that Sarah was organising (more of that next week). Rather than staying in Friday night, Sarah and I decided to head out for some food and a few drinks in what we thought would be the relative quiet of the British High Commission (BHC) Club. It's a really nice club, much better than the BAGHA, with cheaper drinks and better food, though we don't tend to got here too often as the sort of people we like bumping into go to the BAGHA really. Seeing as we didn't want to bump into people we went to the BHC!

When we arrived all looked normal i.e. very quiet and no one about. As we neared the restaurant and bar area we could hear disco music playing outside, which is definitely not normal. Upon closer inspection we found that there was indeed a disco being set up outside, and it was for a joint birthday party with a 70's theme. So we got a drink and sat at the bar talking in an otherwise empty room. A few people turned up, dressed for a 70's party, and we said hello to the faces we knew. Then, a group of about 12 Kiwis walked in all together wearing your usual "night out on summer holiday" attire and proceeded to order drinks and play pool. It wasn't until the next day that my suspicions were totally confirmed, but they were indeed the New Zealand cricket team who are currently touring Bangladesh. I didn't recognise any of the players, but you don't get groups of 12 Kiwis just randomly walking into places in Dhaka unless something's up.

As it turned out the party had a free bar for most of the evening, and Sarah and I had absolutely no scrupples about taking advantage of it. We enjoyed ourselves but I found the music etc. outside to be very shit indeed. For a while there was a guy playing guitar and singing along to various songs with other talentless guests, and while I found it painful no one else seemed to mind. Someone pointed out that this was probably not that different to what happens in an average UK pub on a Saturday night, and most people like that. I concluded that I am a total snob and that maybe these expats weren't as sad as I'd initially thought. That said, most people thought the disco was pretty poor, so by the time we decided to call it a night around midnight we'd only managed to dance to 3-4 songs.

The last thing I wanted to mention was the workshop I attended on Sunday. It was a listening skills course run by VSO's Senior Programme Manager Clive (see photo) with the help of Harrison after lunch. In actual fact I'm only really mentioning it to justify the photo as nothing really exciting happened on it, and it made me realise just how good the communication skills course I'd been on in my first job had been. Ah well, it got me out of the house for a day at least.