Week 1 in Bangladesh - Thakurgaon

This week in Thakurgaon we got our first taste of service learning with RDRS and their programs. A lot of the week focused on the Adabasi people, an indigenous group that has been in this region for thousands of years but with the arrival of the Aryans and the caste system being imposed have been very disadvantaged historically. Due to Christian missionary efforts the Adabasi are primarily Christian which further makes them a marginalized people. RDRS and the government have a variety of programs and initiatives to better their economic and social position. We got to visit a group of Adabasi women who benefit from microfinance options available through RDRS, a youth forum, and a few community federations as well as the Singra Shal forest. What I liked most about learning about the programs offered to the Adabasi was that they were comprehensive in addressing a lot of issues and difficulties they face.
The microfinance loans are offered at a lower interest rate than regular loans and a second loan can be taken out after the first has been paid back (usually at this point the women are operating sustainable businesses) to further their children's education or buy land which I thought was nice in that it allows the women to identify and work towards what matters to them most. It was also interesting to learn that the women of the community are the majority of the people taking out microfinance loans as well as making financial decisions within the household which is the opposite of mainstream culture here.
The Adabasi communities here are fairly remote and so RDRS offers education within the schools that is comparable to what is offered in government schools but also includes some cultural education so the students don't lose their culture as well as sexual education which surprised me. With a majority muslim culture I hadn't expended any sexual education especially for unmarried girls.
Something that stood out the most for me this week was our visit to the government run Upazila (District) health complex. It is a 50 bed hospital that serves a population of 225 000. They had very impressive vaccination rates (as high as 90%) and low rates of communicable diseases like HIV despite such a large and diverse population. The vaccination system was interesting to learn about with the WHO paying for the actual vaccines and the government footing the salary of the field worker who will go into the field to vaccinate rural area populations. As well they had a very extensive reproductive health program that offers women a variety of family planning/birth control options (with their husbands permission) and even offered monetary incentives to the women in an effort to control the population. The culture was completely different though with the director of the hospital referring to himself as the monarch and the patients having no rights to privacy or to question the provider which follows the social hierarchy that seems to be entrenched in every institution. Though the entire hospital was interesting what stood out for me was one woman we saw who we were told had self-administered misoprostol in an attempt to abort her pregnancy. She had lost a lot of blood and was receiving a blood transfusion and it struck me that she was so near to me in age and I came to realize I just as easily could have been in her shoes had I been born here. Her situation is most likely not an uncommon one which struck me as so sad because to take such a risk with her health I could only imagine her desperation and circumstances. Though the situation of girls and women is changing here for the better this woman represented the fact that there are still some strict social mores that are worth risking everything to follow and that the culture isn't changing fast enough obviously. Seeing her will stick with me for a long time.

This first week has been a lot of things and if the next few are just as busy and eye-opening I am going to have quite the time adjusting to a quiet summer back home.