We arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh Sunday morning 10:30a local time after 30 hours of traveling. That kind of travel I’ve done before but this time was especially rough. Mostly I was feeling indigestion and headachey. I’m not really sure why but dehydration and lack of sleep (I only slept about 4 hours) I suspect played a role.
Overall I was just blah. Once we arrived we applied for a visa and got our passport stamped.
After clearing immigration we needed our bags and discovered we were missing a bag with some training manikins and other equipment. This is kind of a big deal as getting appropriate equipment in country isn’t really possible. For the time being all we could do was hope the bag arrived before Tuesday; none of us were in any condition to effectively problem solve.
We were picked up by our local contact and driven to the hotel, a “short” mile away. Traffic in Bangladesh is, ummm different. There aren’t really rules and the road is merely a guide. It may have two lanes but at one point I counted 5 different types of vehicles occupying the 2 lanes across.
After nearly an hour, we finally got to the hotel around 1pm. There we settled in, grabbed some lunch and tried to power through until 9pm before falling asleep to reset our bodies. I crashed at 7:30pm…only to wake around 9p, 2a, 3a…I discovered later much of the team had the same issues.
Monday was kind of a relaxed day as we all adjusted to the time change and the impact of traveling halfway around the globe (one member of our team became really sick). On Sunday when I arrived and throughout Sunday night and Monday morning I was feeling pretty terrible, upset stomach, headache, etc. Monday I was still a little groggy but feeling much better.
We spent part of Monday visiting a local CPR training facility who we’re enlisting to help us. Our goal is to create a sustainable program here and that requires buy-in and support from the local community.
Although the owner/manager may have staged it a little, the facility itself was impressive and would suit a quality CPR or advanced life support course anywhere.
We drank tea
and just tried to learn what we could about his needs and stress our desire to help him. What we didn’t want is for him to think a bunch of Americans were dropping in to steal his business. We left cautiously optimistic.
Finally we ended the day with a little shopping and preparing for our drive to the hospital and medical school (where we’d be conducting the training) in the morning.
Our missing bag still hadn’t shown up…
