Jul 26, 20182 min read

"This disaster is going pretty well"

The other day there was so much rain we were all wondering if this random boat in the middle of the street was actually going to start floating away....

I'm now in unchartered territory. Until now, the longest that I've ever been in-country for humanitarian work has been 4 weeks. This past week I hit the one month mark, so it's all up in the air from here on out. Thankfully, I'm still loving my job... and every day I wake up excited to go to work.... which is up 4 flights of stairs to the office... then down 8 flights before I'm climbing into the 4x4s to begin the long journey to camp. My teams are awesome and we pass the time with Bengali language lessons. So far I can speak basic greetings, ask simple questions, discuss the weather, and name the days of the week... with some other random one-offs.

This week there has been "veshi bristy" (heavy rains). In fact, there has been so much rain in the past few days that yesterday we were hitting record rainfall readings of 463mm in a 24hour period. Thankfully, as there was a local election yesterday, we were given movement restrictions (due to the potential risk of protests, fighting, etc..) and were unable to leave our building... but even though we were lucky enough to not get caught in the torrential rains, we were getting constant reports of roads being flooded, flash floods occurings, roads becoming impassable, long traffic jams, and numerous landslides occuring.

But speaking of the last few days and all the rain occuring, it's also been "veshi kada" (very muddy) in the camp... and unfortunately, it resulted in an accident for one of my co-workers and she ended up breaking her ankle :(

So... long story short... as she needs surgery out of country, I was the lucky one chosen (with less than 24 hours notice) to accompany her on the journey and currently find myself sitting in the business lounge of the Dhaka airport... with a REAL cappuccino on my right hand side, and a delicious slice of blueberry cheesecake sitting on my left, awaiting our business class flight to Singapore... all expenses paid.

As my bff Marc always says: "This disaster is going pretty well."