Kar ghor eta? Rahna ghor kothay? Ke ekhane thake?
Whose room is this? Where is the kitchen? Who stays here?
A woman outside of her mud home in one of the villages near the Panigram site.
Over the last couple weeks, we three interns explored a village near the Panigram site to learn about the Bangladeshi homestead. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, after almost two weeks of settling into our humble abode in Jessore, we interns, have become quite adjusted to our new lifestyle abroad. We eat our egg and ruti in the morning before our hour-long autorickshaw ride to the project site; a ride which often makes me think of getting pulled down bumpy sidewalks as a child in my little red metal wagon. Here, though, the sidewalk is eight feet wider and trucks stacked twenty feet high with local goods like hay, bricks, or goats (though not usually all three together…) fight at top speeds for the extra sliver of road beside me.
Millie waits for our driver Rafik in the autorickshaw.
We have a great group of interns this year, all architects who will be helping us construct our site office to test out our mud building techniques.
Bradley Kinsey
Bradley Kinsey
Raised on steak, potatoes, and public pools, Bradley was your quintessential product of the American midwest. While the suburbs of Chicago offered him a side yard and picket fence, the idea of varying topography and open space was all too alluring, so he packed up for the University of Colorado. While at C.U., Bradley’s appetite for new cultures was heightened as he studied abroad in Italy and traveled throughout Europe with the university’s snowboard team. When it was time to move on, Brooklyn, New York came calling to him with a similar lure as Colorado, being the pursuit of architecture and the excitement of a foreign land. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the third summer now that I have been fortunate enough to have interns. This year I have two Cornellians and a student from the University of Edinburgh, all architecture students keen to learn about mud buildings.
The interns spent their first night at my house in Dhaka. I immediately put them to work on an arts and crafts project, but jet lag caught up with them and craft time soon turned into nap time.
Jet lag catches up with the interns as craft time turns into nap time...
I decided to initiate a movie night in the village for a variety of reasons. First, it is a fun way to start teaching the people in the area (particularly the kids) English, as all of our movies will be English-language films. Second, it creates a great venue for broadcasting some of the public health messages that Panigram wants to disseminate to the community. And finally, it provides us with an opportunity to better connect with the people in the neighborhood.
I assigned our Social Program Coordinator, Josie, the task of making movie night happen. It wasn’t an easy assignment because there is no power in our area and I had no idea how to set up, much less create, a large, outdoor movie theater. I still don’t know how she did it, but Josie managed to acquire and test all of the equipment that we needed, including a small generator!
Because improving the public health is one of Panigram’s prime social initiatives, we decided to show a small film on the importance of hand washing at the beginning of the movie. Josie wrote, produced, filmed, and edited the clip. She also created a small clip with some vocabulary from the movie in English and Bangla.
As our first movie night came, many people in the community came to watch us set up in the school yard we arranged to use as our outdoor movie theater. Having never seen the projector in action, I was a bit nervous during the setup process, but Bipul and Josie seemed to know what they were doing as they hooked up the appropriate devices and cables.
Josie Vertz sets up the projector for Panigram's first movie night.
A couple of months ago a student from Cornell emailed me. She said that she had applied for the summer internship last year at Panigram, but unfortunately was not selected. She said that she really wanted to work for my company and was wondering if she could come do a winter internship with me. I thought that three weeks was too short for an internship, but I was impressed with her initiative, and I always enjoy working with students, so I agreed. Her friend Cat (another Cornell engineering student) decided to join her. Read the rest of this entry »
