Long time...

So a few things have transpired to make this post horribly late. The most important would be that I have been on the road for 8 out of the past 9 days. The second most important would be that my computer decided to delete one of it's loading files so that it wouldn't work at all. Luckily, once I got back to the Dhaka office where I am currently, it only took our IT Administrator about an hour to fix. I love Vista. I also love sarcasm.

My first travel was to Dinajpur. I got to see a couple of partner organizations that I hadn't been to before. I also got to see an HIV/Aids training going on with a group of men that were probably an age range of 20's to 50's. It was really refreshing to see how extremely interested they were in the subject. Sometimes my job has me so much focused on looking into possible weaknesses of our program that I begin to forget all the amazing things that we do.

Upon returning from that trip I had one night of rest before we spent the next night in a ferocious game of Littlest Pet Shop Monopoly with the Koreans. With ended up being next to last, but I was pretty proud of my effort because I only ever was able to purchase 3 territories. I even almost outlasted another person which would have put me in 3rd place out of 5. That didn't finish until about 11:30 pm and I did some more stuff until 2 am when I finally got to sleep. Later that morning I got up at 6 to pack for my next trip. Unfortunately, my lack of sleep did have some adverse effects on my cognative abilities at that point in the morning. I somehow ended up convincing myself that it made sense for me to wear shoes on my trip. Mind you, my current trip is a 9 day adventure to 3 different locations. Also, I have only worn shoes twice in the past 5 months or so. I didn't even bring sandals along because I thought they would take up space. My rationalization at the time had something to do with hiding money in my shoes (which I have never done before and still haven't done) and the idea that I could wash 1 pair of socks while I wore the other (unessasary if you don't have to wear them in the first place!). These are the kinds of things that make sense in my mind on four hours of sleep. I also managed to forget my extra short sleeve button up shirts that I was going to wear for work purposes despite the fact that I set them on my bed right next to my bag. As a result of that I'm pretty sure I've worn the same shirt for at least part of the day on 5 out of the last 6 days. Luckily I did manage to pack two T-shirts thinking that I would wear them on the weekends. (Also a success was that I managed to pack plenty of clean underwear, I can't imagine what I would do if I messed that up instead.)

The start of my larger trip took me to Mymensingh to see the city and see what other wings of MCC are up to. I must say, it was a really refreshing weekend. The town was beautiful and the projects we do there are absolutely amazing. Many of the activities we visited are suppliers to Ten Thousand Villages and their stories are pretty amazing. Maybe I will take time later to advertise their products on here with the stories behind them as I hear they become available in Ten Thousand Villages. After that trip I headed straight to Comilla again with a co-worker. We spent the last several days there visiting with farmers and some previous agriculture partners we have had. It was hot, humid, and miserable enough to make the beauty of the area not worth it in my mind. I gathered some intersting information and found getting other information very frustrating. It didn't help that I still hadn't caught up on sleep yet. I also had an interesting evening my last night there. At about 9:15 or so I decided to wash my clothes and take a shower. I am pretty terrible at washing my clothes by hand (but that's really not important to this story). While I was taking my shower it started raining. I was not alarmed by this and was actually pretty tickled that the power didn't go off. The previous two nights it had rained and both times the power went off for a period of time during the storm. Unfortunately, that high didn't last long. I walked out of the shower to realize that I had left my window open and a half inch of water was standing on my bed. I quickly went over the options in my sleep deprived mind and quickly decided that telling my hosts was out of the question. It was about 10 at this time and I just wanted to go to bed. If I told them, they would make a big fuss, find me another room, and it would be a huge ordeal that I didn't feel like messing with. So I decided to quietly deal with it on my own the best a could. I pulled the covers off the pillows a set the pillows wet side up on a section of the floor that wasn't drenched like the bed. I hung up the covers. I then took the sheet off the bed (they only give you one here) and used it best I could to mop up as much water as I could. I then wrung it out in the bathroom before taking down the mosquito net and using the mosquito net frame on the bed as a drying rack. I then used the towel I had just dried off with to soak up a large majority of the remaining water on the bed. Luckily, I noticed that the foot of the bed was dry and they had given me an extra towel. I threw the extra towel over the dry part of the bed and curled up into the fetal position on top of it for a decent nights sleep. In the morning everything was dry enough that you couldn't see that it was wet, so I put it all back together the way it was and pretended like it never happened. Other than a big puddle of water under the bed and a slightly damp mattress, they are probably none the wiser to my night of mayheim.

Since this adventure I have come to Dhaka where I am finishing out the week working in the office before staying the weekend. I have borrowed a pair of sandals from my boss who is in the States right now. I hope he isn't upset with my for it but I would say he likely isn't. (I doubt MCC would let him fire me for such a thing even if he was.) I'm also saying goodbye to another co-worker for the second time in about a month of time. That's always a sad event and two more co-workers will be leaving us next month.

I haven't heard any recent time lines for moving into the new house lately but I'd be willing to guess that we don't stand a chance until at least late this month. We are going to henna my beard tonight which should be pretty funny and a good picture to publish on here later. I'm going to shave it off tomorrow. I'm ready to see it go.

Hope you've enjoyed the catch up.