Back to Dhaka

After a long day, we are finally back in Dhaka after a great trip to Matlab.

Yesterday, we had originally planned on going into the field, but due to logistical reasons, we were unable to. We woke up in time for breakfast which was as delicious as the other food we had at the ICDDR,B guest house, and spent most of the morning doing some work. Maia did an excellent job of restructuring our website which you should definitely check out. In the afternoon we got in touch with Dr. Fazul (the doctor who showed us around the day before) and he gave us a tour of their lab and their computer room. The lab was not very large, but it seemed to be very well stocked to run all different kinds of tests to identify different pathogens. There was not a whole lot to see in the computer room itself, but we learned how all of the ICDDR,B’s data is collected through one integrated database. We also saw some information on the PDAs that all of the ICDDR,B’s community health workers use to collect their data to great success. After the tour, we headed back to the guest house to do work for the rest of the day. The only other interesting thing that happened was we met the ICDDR,B’s gender equality officer. She was staying at the guest house also and joined us for some of our meals. She wrote a lot of the non-discrimination and sexual assault policy that the ICDDR,B uses and was in Matlab to give a gender training about a wide number of issues such as workplace discrimination issues and differences between femininities and masculinities. She was an interesting person, and we were able to see her at a couple times.

Today we started off the day with a couple field visits. The first field site was a village that is within the ICDDR,B’s surveillance perimeter. Dr. Ali who we talked with about the demographic and health department was our guide. To get to the site we needed to hop onto a motor boat for about a 15 minute ride. It rained a lot last night, so it was pretty cool out, and seeing Bangladesh by water was very interesting. A lot of people were swimming or fishing in the water, and there were several boats irrigating nearby rice paddies. Before long we arrived at the Barri we were touring. Barris are essentially small clusters of houses that make up larger towns. We met one of the ICDDR,B’s community health workers and were able to observe her collecting data from a couple different families. Seeing the use of a PDA in action was encouraging as it shows the potential for different technological interventions in this field. For the second site we were visiting we had to return back by boat to the ICDDR,B campus and switch over to a van to drive there. For the second part, one of the ICDDR,B’s field research officers was our guide. Her job outside of showing people around was to ensure the quality of the services provided by the institute’s workers in the field. She took us to a clinic that was set up to provide contraceptives to women as well as consultations to women who were pregnant or who had recently given birth. They could choose form a wide range of contraceptives to use, and if they needed it they could be referred to the hospital for the treatment of any complications. From the field clinic we drove to one of the ICDDR,B’s subcenters where they provide services for pregnant women. They could go for checkups, and there was a delivery room as sonogram for pregnant women. Overall, it was quite an impressive system they had set up that seemed to work quite well.

After the field visits we said farewell to the Drs who had been helping us, ate lunch, and began the drive back to Dhaka. The return trip was much more arduous than the trip down there due to rush hour afternoon traffic. We left around 1:30 and did not arrive back to Dhaka until after 6. I managed to finish an entire book during the drive though that had a small surprise in it. It was the book Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. In one of the chapters I came across the following quote: “They knew about it about as much as a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh”. I thought it was quite ironic to come across that line while doing research into cholera epidemics while in Bangladesh. When the book was published in 1979 not a whole lot of people cared about cholera outbreaks here internationally which is what inspired the quote. Things have changed now. Many people are doing work with Cholera, but it is still out there causing a great deal of hardship. It is still a major problem, one that we are trying to face.


If you want to see any photos check out the slide show at our website: www.villagezeroproject.org. We have gotten a few up there and there are more on the way.