The air was hot and humid. It was just July 9th, 9:30am and I already felt like I were baking in a suana. I searched the crowd of unfamiliar faces at the lobby of the 20 storey Grameen Building. The old friend from the U.S finally showed up. We took the elevator straight to the 8th floor.
Orientation
After a brisk introduction to the interns of the day at a large "intern-seasoned" table, we were ushered into a media room to watch a few videos to get a crash course of Grameen. We were assigned a cordinator and were asked to pencil down a few personal objectives of our internship. (note to future interns: keep this list short and sweet. Just say you are there to learn about Grameen methodology. Boy, did I get into trouble on the first day for complex objectives!)
At the "table" I met Remi Meunier, Philippine Janssens and Kivanc Camber. The old friend aka as Hamidur Rashid and I decided to dive into an overnight field trip out of Dhaka that very day, since there were going to be strikes the next day and we really didn't want to get stuck in Dhaka. We were really impressed by how effecient the cordinators and supervisors were in arranging a trip for us in 2 hours.
Since Hamid was living outside Dhaka and wasn't quite prepared to go on a trip that very day, we had to go shopping for sandals, t-shirts and Bangladeshi pajamas to serve as pants in less than an hour! We rushed back to the office and were chaperoned by our cordinator to a village called Manikgonj, an hours and a half away from Dhaka.
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