Less than a week to go...

There's less than one week to go until I head to Bangladesh with VSO on the Global Xchange programme and I have to admit that it hasn't really hit me yet that I'm going. I've got my train tickets to London sorted and a few toiletries ready but that's about it so far; so this week will be a mad dash round getting everything packed into the rucksack that I may or may not have yet.

Next Tuesday we'll all meet for the first time in London as we do our pre-departure training. Then it's a long plane journey to Dhaka with plenty of time to get to know each other and practise our Bengali (let's just say that mine could be a lot better!) We'll have a few days to acclimatise and then our team will divide into three and we're off to different areas of Bangladesh. I'll be based in the Chittagong Hill Tracts which looks like a beautiful part of the world.

Here's a map of where I'm heading next week.

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Fun things

These are the times when I love my current role. Part of my job is helping people de-stress and recharge by helping to organise fun things and doing little trips to places. I can’t go with them for all of them but I do get to help make them happen. If you don’t have a car the North Coast can be a challenging place to visit as the public transport system is dire (unless you’re heading to Giant’s Causeway that is) so I get to help make those little trips happen to places you can’t get to unless you’re planning to walk everywhere for a very long time or have a car. I’ve taken people to watch the sunset at Kinbane Head, dropped people off at Murlough Bay to walk back over Fairhead, gone to explore some caves in Cushendun and many other things. This may all seem pretty irrelevant but actually helps people unwind when the entirety of living and working at full capacity gets tiring. It’s about saying we care about helping you de-stress and we heard the wish when you said you’d love ...

Programme Videos

Here are the videos from each ICS team from the January-April group: Chardakatia: South-West Sat Vaia Para, Khagrachari: Chittagong Afjalpur: North-West

Challenges and Opportunities

One of my biggest challenges here is not having the space to let my guard down. I find it exhausting keeping my emotions to myself and for the most part I do a pretty good job at keeping them at arms’ length so I don’t get swallowed whole by them and I don’t spill them into community life. It feels pretty selfish of me to let this get to me but in many ways the whole point of community life is to support each other with those things which is probably why there are ongoing discussions as to whether to call this a ‘community’ or not. My problem seems to be that when I feel completely powerless that guard slips and the smallest of things will spark a torrent of emotion over something that is actually very small. Part of me know that this is not healthy means of existence at all (all of that has to go somewhere and if you’re a bottler and have been telling yourself to let something go for so long eventually that bottle will explode when it reaches tipping point) and the other part kn...

Ways to See the World

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