After years of grumbling about the time wasted doing drills I realized this week why fire practices are actually quite useful. Now don't get alarmed (no pun intended) but we had a fire in our brand new training room on the roof at the VSO office.

The day had started quite well too. The final touches to the room had been made over the weekend so we had an official opening ceremony complete with ribbon-cutting and cake around 11am. Straight afterwards we held our first meeting there and could really appreciate the extra space, light and comfort the room gave in comparison to the other room VSO uses for meetings on the ground floor. We broke for lunch at 1pm, and just when we were starting to drift back to the roof to continue our discussion about monitoring and evaluation someone started ringing a bell and shouting fire!

In the 18 odd months I've been with VSO I've never seen any fire procedures nor been instructed on what to do should one break out in the office. This it turns out was not an uncommon situation for the recent recruits, as we identified in our lessons learned meeting later, so I was blissfully unaware that the alarm system consisted of a hand bell in the stairwell that someone has to physically ring. There was also some confusion about the exact location of the fire extinguishers, but by this time I was more focused on getting me and my laptop out of the building.

What I found very impressive was the speed with which the fire brigade arrived. Literally within minutes of getting out of the building they were on the scene rolling out hoses and dashing up the stairs to deal with the fire. It didn't take them long to put it out either as luckily the fire hadn't spread very far from the faulty air conditioning unit that was the cause. There was though a load of smoke, and after they'd packed all their hoses away we could see that there was pretty much water and soot all up and down the stairs which negated all the positive effects the recent new coat of paint had brought.

As you can see from the photo the scene that met our eyes when we went back up to survey the damage was quite startling given that we'd only inaugurated the room 4 hours before! There was broken glass everywhere from where the firemen had broken windows to gain access to the fire which wasn't ideal when you're walking around in flip-flops. The offending air conditioner had only been installed a week or so earlier, and despite the British High Commission's recommended electrician certifying the wiring they still managed to miss the problem that caused the electrical fire to start.

So that was Sunday! The rest of the week was largely spent up North in Dinajpur where I was based before. I was there for 2 reasons; my final field visit for the micro-credit audit I'm doing for Tarango, and a lessons learned workshop with CARE and VSO about the initiative they ran of which my previous job was a part. The audit visit went quite well, mostly because I was able to finish it by lunch and get back to the air conditioned cool of my hotel room to escape from the heat. I've not mentioned the change in weather lately but it's now around 40 degrees and humid as hell so not ideal outside working conditions I can tell you. We tried playing touch rugby in it on Friday and we all nearly died.

The CARE workshop was fairly dire unfortunately due to the same old problems of poor planning, poor facilitation and poor structure. The idea of sharing with others what was learnt during a development project is an excellent one but so few organisations seem to know how to do it, let alone do it well. All in all I was glad to return to Dhaka and have a peaceful weekend of good food, a few beers, with plenty of sleep and rest after far too many hours spent in a car bouncing down bumpy roads listening to Bangla music. Zzzzzzz