Two flights, roughly 8000 miles and 22 hours away from home, two solid hours of sleep, the first season of Game of Thrones completed (wow), an unfortunate situation that led to a mother and her young daughter being removed from the plane in NYC, the resulting flight delay, running through the airport in Abu Dhabi to make my connecting flight to Dhaka 20 minutes before its scheduled departure time, an unexpected upgrade to first class on said flight, wonderful conversation with my seatmates, missing my friends and loved ones, and a level of excitement so high that I’m probably at risk of a heart attack – my journey hasn’t even really begun yet.

As I sit on the plane roughly 3 hours away from the country I will be calling home for the next three months I am at a loss of words. The only word that I can think of that even remotely explains the feeling I’ve had coursing through my veins over the last 22 hours is … EXCITEMENT. I am excited to finally be meeting Shahed Kayes, the man whose hip I will be attached to during my time in Bangladesh, I’m excited about the work I will be doing, the people I will be meeting, the pictures I will be taking, the new friends I’ll make, and the lives that will be touched along the way.

I arrived in Dhaka at 4:30 a.m. on June 26th eager to get out of the airport, into Bangladesh and on to meeting Mr. Shahed Kayes of the Subornogram Foundation. After a brief three and half hour wait in the lobby of the airport, I found that while I’d thought I’d seen traffic jams having lived in the New York/New Jersey area for the majority of my life, I really hadn’t. No lanes, no lights, cars pulling in to and out of spaces so tight that they defied the laws of physics and just a general feeling of chaos I couldn’t help but to smile: finally my journey had begun.
Hopefully this brief intro has set the tone and gotten you as excited as I am for all that will be going on this summer. During my first few days here in Sonargaon, Bangladesh, Shahed and I have been running around visiting schools and partner organizations, making speeches, being interviewed by Bangladesh National Television, partaking in pre-wedding festivities, etc., and my next blog entry will begin to profile the work we have already begun doing. Stay tuned!

Sonargaon, Bangladesh.

Sonargaon, Bangladesh