This is it kids, my last diary entry from Bangladesh! The next and last entry will be written and uploaded at my parent's house after I've flown back to the UK on Saturday, hopefully arriving in time for some Wimbledon finals action and with the 2nd Lions test safely recorded on a video cassette somewhere (hint hint Neil). In the meantime time let me tell you about my last week of work.

To be completely honest I've been really quite stressed about finishing here as between work, packing everything into my bag which can only weigh 23 kg and generally saying goodbye to people there's a lot to do. As a result I've been particularly industrious in the office these past few weeks so as not to have a last minute rush, and sure enough my efforts paid off as by Tuesday I'd basically got everything wrapped up. For the late comers or those who just can't remember what I've been doing these past 3 months in Dhaka I'll give you a quick summary.

The job had 2 main areas: 1) Review and make recommendations to improve the knowledge management systems for the volunteers, and 2) Define and carry out short interventions with different partner NGOs who need extra support. For the former I carried out a survey of a good proportion of the volunteers about what information they need, what VSO is already providing them, what it isn't and how they satisfy these additional needs. The results were thankfully quite predictable and straight forward so everyone, volunteers and VSO staff alike, could quickly understand and accept them. The main problem turned out to be that volunteers weren't sharing their knowledge and materials widely enough so that everyone else could benefit, and this despite the fact they had the opportunities and resources to do so. In the end it came down to the volunteers taking a bit of initiative to help themselves, and they readily saw that when I presented my conclusions to them a couple of weeks ago.

As for the short interventions, in addition to that audit I did which took me all over the country for a couple of weeks I also gave some beginners PowerPoint and Excel training to one NGO and looked into internal communication and coordination problems at a human rights lawyers association. While the first was pretty easy work, even a little boring, the latter was really quite tricky as I only had enough time to identify some issues without being able to go into any detail to test if they were true or just hearsay. This meant that I had to keep my conclusions and recommendations pretty high level and vague which isn't ideal, but the senior managers seemed to respond well to them and hopefully some good will come of it. During all this short intervention work I'd been working independently of the rest of the office really, so before leaving I organised a review session during which I presented what I'd done and the main lessons learned as a result. I also organised a similar meeting to share and discuss the knowledge management survey conclusions with VSO management but we just ran out of time and did it the next week on Sunday.

So that was work done and pretty cleanly too even if I do say so myself. Obviously I had to go out and celebrate a little bit, and as luck would have it the Australian club was having a BBQ with my mate Tom and his band playing acoustic. I'd never been to this club before which was a mistake as it's quite nice and has the cheapest happy hour in town with a can of VB costing 60 taka! The BBQ was fantastic too, and even though the office had taken me out for a farewell lunch where we all stuffed ourselves silly I still managed to find space for pork sausages, marinated beef steaks and some lasagne for desert. My fun weekend continued Friday with a lazy morning, touch rugby in the afternoon then an evening of pizza and cable TV staying in a flat that an expat had given us the key for while he's in Zambia for 7 weeks. It's a great really as all you have to do is feed his fish, and in reality you don't even need to do that as his cleaner comes in 6 days a week and does it for you!

The main event of the weekend though was the 1st Lions test match on Saturday at 1.10pm out time. A group of us have been tracking the TV listings for a few weeks to make sure all was well, and for a while it was looking good. Then suddenly and without any apparent reason they main sports channel for South Asia decided it wasn't going to show the test even though it had showed the previous Saturday games live. They replaced it with speedway which as you can imagine is not a big sport around here. Bastards. So we had a BIG problem. To solve this problem we had 2 plans: 1) get Sky Sports Hong Kong which was definitely showing the game, or 2) get a South African channel called Super Sports which also showed everything to do with rugby. Some of the expats remembered getting the Hong Kong channels when they first arrived, so Ian (fellow Welshman and big rugby fan) called up his cable provider to find out if he could get it back again. The guy said it used to be free to view but wasn't anymore and he would need a satellite dish which would cost 20,000 taka for the year plus 3,000 to install it. Ian started thinking this over as for less than 200 pounds a year he could get Tri-Nations, 6 Nations, Super 12 and everything so that would probably be money well spent. So he went for it.

That evening though (Friday) he got a phone call from the cable guy who told him to look at channel 46 and there was Sky Sports Hong Kong! The guy explained that is was completely illegal but it he was willing to pay 10,000… no 5,000 taka he could turn it on for a few hours for him. Ian said yes to 5,000 but for the 3 Saturdays and that was it! A few phone calls were made and come 1pm Saturday there were 7 of us gathered around Ian's TV with loads of beers in cold boxes around the room and 2 plates full of sandwiches. I was great, though the game of course was woeful, and unless someone stumbled across the channel by accident we were probably the only people in Bangladesh to see the game live! Bangladesh isn't a paradise by any stretch of the imagination, but when it comes to getting what you want for a few taka it really has few peers.