To say you can get into some bizarre, if not down right surreal conversations, out here is of course an understatement. Take Tuesday for example, when I actually discussed with 2 colleagues a dog's (or cat's) right to freely enjoy a sex life and so satisfy that most natural of urges.

These conversations don't usually just start up, and rest assured there was a relevant context here too. As I near the end of my time here I'm pushing harder and harder to finish of the key documents I'm supposed to deliver, and above all else the strategic plan. Thus far we'd managed to discuss and define pretty much everything, except the details and objectives of our Rights and Social Justice programme. While we've done projects in this area before it's been rather sporadic, so the decision to have one of our 3 main programmes in this area was a bit of a departure and required more thought than say our Education or Rural Economy programmes. In a nutshell, I was having a hard time getting Habib and his managers to come up with some coherent and clear guidelines as to what the programme would be about (after all, rights can be a very broad subject at the best of times). As for getting some specific and measurable objectives down on paper, well...

Determined to get this done in good time, I arranged for Habib's trusted managers and I to thrash out these details in a meeting in his bedroom on Tuesday afternoon. This wasn't our first meeting the subject, and apparently the time since our first attempt had been put to good use as some very interesting and coherent ideas came out of the discussion. By the end of the afternoon I'd drafted a series of guidelines for the programme as well as some tentative objectives for the next 5 years. Come 5pm I dragged the same 2 chaps back to Habib's bedroom, having discussed my draft with them first, and by 6pm we had an agreement! Marvellous!

So you can see that Tuesday was a day rather dominated by thoughts of rights and justice. Just after lunch, I was standing out the back of the office by the kitchen where our adopted dog Lucy usually hangs out and scavenges for left-overs. Sure enough she was there, crunching away at a bone with a speed that suggested she fully expected someone to take it from her at any moment. Then, Shahid walked over and said that, according to a volunteer who had been at BRIF in January and who was a doctor, Lucy was pregnant. I hadn't noticed anything, so tried looking a little closer at her belly to see if I could discern any evidence of this. In the end I decided she did look a little more swollen than I remembered, but then I find that the human mind is always quite good at convincing you of things when you go looking for them.

At that moment any dog appeared. This was the bad brown male dog of the village, and no one, including me, really likes him. It's not anything I can really put my finger on, but he just seems to be a bully. My esteemed colleague Anal, having finished his lunch and joined us, commented that he was Lucy's boyfriend and hence the likely father. I replied that he was more likely to be her rapist, and so the discussion of rights began.

In a nutshell, I was arguing that dogs (and cats) in Bangladesh are very poorly treated i.e. not feed, not cared for, often beaten or tormented in some way, and all because they are generally feared. My Bangladeshi colleagues were saying that, while this is generally true, that didn't mean that we had the right to have our pets operated on or kept in confined areas as we do in the West so that they suit our society and hence can't satisfy their natural sexual desires when they need to. OK I said, but surely it is better to satisfy the more basic needs of food, shelter, health and attention than let these animals roam free and shag whenever they liked. Yes they replied, we can see that there is a hierarchy of needs, or freedoms, but the freedom to have sex was also a basic one. At this point we stopped and went to our meeting, but I was slightly frustrated at not having found the right angle to win this argument.

That angle, if you can call it that, was supplied by Sarah when I told her about this strange little discussion. We had talked about the sexual freedom of dogs and cats, but what about women in Bangladesh? Women here are not allowed to have a free and satisfying sex life. They must look to marriage and their husband to provide this for them, and even then it's not anywhere near sure that he really cares about her feelings or needs. The more traditional amongst you may feel that such things are best left to the sanctity of marriage, but then why should men here be allowed to go to prostitutes in such large numbers while women are kept inside? Funnily enough, I believe my colleagues are right about the essential nature of having a fulfilling physical relationship, but I find it odd that they don't use the same logic and understanding when it comes to their own species. It would also be too simplistic to say that this is par for the course in a Muslim country, but take a look at some of the attitudes of Christian fundamentalism and you may find something rather similar. Either way, it's still poor old Lucy who's up the duff with more puppies for the children here to "play" with in there rather sadistic way.