Scouting Trip in Dhaka, Bangladesh
October 1, 2010
So I’ve done a terrible job updating this blog, but I’m gonna change my ways. A lot has happened since January when I last updated, but rather than trying to recount all that’s going on in a single post I think I’ll update the backlog stuff a bit more gradually.
In a nutshell: I’m currently sitting in a hotel room in Dhaka, with a full itinerary over the next week or so. I’ll be meeting with a lot of women microborrowers and their families, to try and decide who we should next cover for the film. I’m excited, and looking to be inspired. I hope I don’t overwhelm anyone, and I hope I’m able to connect with the women. That was what I liked most about the scouting trip to Paraguay, and what I was saddest about the lack of when we were on our full shoot. Or rather, I guess when it wasn’t just me, it was more difficult to get as personal. Anyway. I’m kind of going off on a tangent.
Dhaka has something like 17 million people, and the traffic (as you can imagine) is really crazy. We’ll mostly be at MFIs in the countryside, with one exception. I flew from JFK to London, then to Manama, Bahrain, and now I’m here. I left on Wednesday and got here Friday (but travelled like 11 hours into the future with the time change). The trip wasn’t bad; I slept a lot, and almost all the people I encountered were nice. The airport in Bahrain was crazy inefficient, though. I have to remember that not everyone in the world is as interested in efficiency as I have come to be in the past year.
I’m rambling.
More soon…
