Welcome to Bangladesh!

After an extremely tiring day of flying, we finally arrived in Dhaka airport at about 8am in the morning. We got picked up by the hotel and had our first experience of Bangladeshi driving, which is interesting to say the least! People seem to drive where they want when they want, regardless of who else is on the road. Some of the sights we saw out of the window were quite shocking. The city seems really bustling, and we drove through some really affluent areas, but also areas where families were living on the side of the road, with just material strung between some bamboo as their home.

We grabbed a quick snooze for an hour at the hotel, and then had some lunch before heading off to the WaterAid Bangladesh (WAB) office. We were greeted by some of the staff who gave us flowers as we arrived. This is something that was repeated more than once when we visited places - it's amazing how a country with so little is so giving and hospitable. The staff at WAB gave us some more insight into the issues faced by the country and the work that they are doing. There are 164 million people living in a country the same land size as the UK, and 36% of these people earn less than $1 a day - can you imagine living on $1 a day? Some of the challenges being faced by the WAB team are rapid urbanisation, as people flock to the cities, btu Dhaka in particular, as this is where the majority of jobs, industries and best quality schools are. Exclusion is also a big challenge, as lots of groups such as the ethnic minorities, disabled, and transgender populations are ignored. Arsenic is a massive issue, and can come and go in the same area, or affect a well one week, but not the next. I wonder how you can ever fight an ever changing enemy like that? Climate change is a big concern for Bangladesh - it's ground zero. 20 million people will get displaced by a 1m rise in sea levels. And each area of Bangladesh suffers with different challenges, be it saline intrusion, or flooding, or seasonal famine. WaterAid makes sure that it's solutions are tailored to the needs of the area, because there is no "one size fits all" solution.