Well, seeing as Habib was going to be in hospital in Dhaka for a few weeks I thought I might as well go down too. While that may seem like a shameless exploitation of an unfortunate situation there was actually a very good professional reason for going to town. Simply put, with him stuck in a hospital bed, I would have more luck of getting him to concentrate on the documents we need to finish than if he were healthy and in the office in BRIF!

Anyway, I called Habib on his mobile at the beginning of the week to see how he was, and as he seemed fairly chipper I suggested my coming to Dhaka to get some work done with him. On the phone he seemed almost pleased with the idea as I think he was worried about getting bored. Habib likes to flitting between many things as and when he likes, so being confined to 1 room and being dependent on others to get even the simplest tasks done can't be much fun for him. In the end I got to Dhaka on Monday having made several phone calls on Sunday to arrange meetings with some of our partners to make good use of my time. When I first started with BRIF I met our main international donors to get their views on the organisation and where they saw the main weaknesses lying. As I now near the end of my placement Habib came up with the very good idea of repeating the exercise to see if perceptions have changed at all, and if so in what way. I also wanted to get my pet project of implementing accounting software back on track so I made an appointment to discuss that too.

Tuesday morning I went to see Habib in hospital. I wasn't too sure about where he was as you never get very precise directions in this country. They don't really have clearly defined street names and house numbers, and those that do don't seem to have much logic to them. For example, some Dhaka-based volunteers live in Iqbal road but they don't actually live in the same street. The 2 streets are parallel to each other, but have the same name! Sarah's little street also seems to bear the same name as a main road that also runs parallel to it. Basically, you need to know the area to find things, which really makes a mockery of having a street and address system in the 1st place if you ask me. I digress. Once at the hospital, and already armed with Habib's room number, I soon tracked him down. I should perhaps mention that this was a private hospital and not one of the big government places so it was fairly small really and seemed quiet. When I arrived Habib was sleeping, so a lad from his house and his younger sister let me in and offered me some fruit while I waited for him to come round.

You may ask what these 2 people were doing there. After all, in my experience of hospitals, there are set visiting hours and even limits to the number of persons allowed in at any one time. Now, while I don't necessarily have all the facts it seemed to me that these 2 people were looking after Habib pretty much around the clock by preparing his food, washing him, changing his clothes etc. The nurses, of whom Habib did not have a good opinion, didn't seem to do much apart from take his temperature. I saw the cleaner more often than the nurses on the occasions I was there. The doctors were apparently doing a good job, and the operation to fix the fracture had gone well by all accounts. It did seem though that the patients (well at least Habib) had to rely on family and friends to look after them in a very basic sense while the hospital staff (cleaners excepted) contented itself to sticking to purely medical matters (and I use the term medical in its loosest possible sense).

I saw Habib a few times during the week, mostly to bring him any important messages that we'd received by e-mail and ask what he wanted to do about some of them. I should also mention at this point the amazing response we've been getting from all over the world ever since we launched the new web site. Not only have we had a flood of messages from people all over the place offering to work for BRIF over the next year, we are also getting expressions of interest from foreign donors who are impressed by our work and want to support us! To quote VSO's senior programme manager, that never happens! So while Habib's in hospital I'm holding the e-mail fort and responding to these offers of help and requests for more information. Some of the e-mails we get can be quite comical, but seeing as this is a public site I'll refrain from giving any details.

As far as my various meetings are concerned they went pretty well. I'm in a funny position in the development community here as I'm neither with an international NGO nor am I really a local employee. This enables me to remain fairly neutral when it comes to understanding the power dynamics of NGO relationships and who should be responsible for what, and so people feel comfortable telling me things that otherwise remain unsaid in the usual partner feedback meetings that are designed to address them. This air of neutrality is something I have to work at too, as it will only endure for as long as I remain objective and fair in my views and assessments. Hence, in my first partner meeting I found that I spent a fair amount of time trying (and not always succeeding I fear) to explain how things really work at the project level and what "partnership" actually means to a local NGO. The fact we discussed it and I was listened to is, to be fair, an indication of the openness of the meeting and the manager I was talking to who most people (including myself and Habib) respect and genuinely like.

In my other meeting with CARE these issues didn't really arise, as the key points made were already known and are slowly but surely improving. The problem that this meeting highlighted though is that the benefits of a change aren't always immediately perceptible to key decision-makers who are almost always that much further away from the front line action. I made some useful contacts though, especially in their finance department for my accounts software project (which looks to be in good shape by the way), but that wasn't the highlight of the week. As I was leaving the finance department an American lady who manages the huge project which also pays most of my salary saw me in the corridor and said hello. We got talking about a few things, and before I knew it she was asking what my plans were for after BRIF. I told her that I hoped to spend 3 extra months working in Dhaka, and wondered why she asked.

It turns out that she's looking to spend some spare project funds (a mere bagatelle of 2 million pounds by the way which is an astonishing amount of money) on analysing a number of key aspects of her project when it ends in March, namely partnership, approaches to community development, monitoring and evaluation, and working more with the private sector. It also seems that I am in a rather unique position around here as I a) have experienced partnership from a local NGO's perspective, b) would be seen as neutral in the eyes of others as opposed to being purely donor staff, and c) have private sector experience that no one else really does. This, in addition to my background in organisation consulting, means I might be a good candidate for facilitating the work she was describing! While she's yet to try the ideas on her boss she did take my contact details, and once I'd told her about my other possibility of working with VSO she asked if I'd be interested in something more lucrative! Well frankly I would, but actually the work we discussed sounded more interesting anyway so it's all round a no-brainer. Who knows, maybe next week I'll get a call to discuss things further? Either way, Sarah and I went to the BAGHA that night and got rather pissed drinking nasty cocktails from the 1970's (snowballs, port and lemon etc.) with a few friends. All in all a good end to a good week!