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First Guests Arrive at Panigram!

Posted by on April 14th, 2013

Last weekend Panigram launched our Panigram Apprenticeship Experience! Our guests enjoyed learning how we are building an eco resort out of mud.

Sasha learns our decorative painting technique and creates a gorgeous mural on one of our test mud walls.

Star, Sasha, Sapphire, and Asif learn how to make bamboo chik.

Star, Sasha, and Sapphire practice their new skills at chik making!

Sapphire learns how to make yummy pita out with rice flour, ghur, and coconut.

 Participate in your own Panigram Apprenticeship Experience!

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One Billion Rising Flash Mob in the Panigram Village!

Posted by on February 14th, 2013

On February 14 Panigram Resort joined with activists around the world for One Billion Rising, the largest day of action in the history of V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. Panigram organized a dance flash mob in their village as part of the One Billion Rising campaign. About 100 women, 100 girls, and 200 men participated in the dance mob as a call to end violence against women and for gender equality.

The mob was lead by more than 80 of the participants in Panigram’s English and hospitality training program and 30 of the resort’s female construction workers; the trainees and workers are all residents of the villages surrounding the resort. Many of the women in the program, who come from conservative Muslim families, were worried about dancing in public. At the practice session the ratio of men to women was four to one, however on the day of the event men and women showed up in equal numbers (though the men were less afraid to step up and dance!) Women in bright red burqa danced alongside young girls in pink dresses. Girls from the women’s college, high school, and primary school tied red ribbons around their wrist and joined the dance party in the town square.

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Media Internship at an Eco Resort in Bangladesh

Posted by on April 3rd, 2012

Title: Media Intern

Number of Open Positions: 1

Location: Jessore, Bangladesh

Duration: 8 weeks

Salary: 15,000 Tk/ month (room, board, and transportation within Bangladesh are provided; students are responsible for their own transportation to and from Bangladesh)

Job Description:
Panigram Resort will be a socially and environmentally responsible spa resort located in southern Bangladesh. We are developing a luxury boutique resort with a spa and wellness center that protects the natural and cultural heritage of Bangladesh, provides authentic and distinctive travel experiences to discerning travelers, promotes sustainable development, and improves the quality of life in the host community. The media intern will be responsible for photographing the construction of Panigram and writing blog entries for our website (2-3 blogs/ week). This intern will also be responsible for updating our Facebook and Twitter pages and will help us form the social media strategy for the resort. Interns also act as ambassadors for Panigram Resort in our host community and are expected to participate in other activities with the villagers such as Friday English lessons with children and movie night.

Panigram Resort is still under construction, so the interns will be staying in apartments in Jessore City, which is about an hour’s drive from the project site. The accommodation is very basic (no air conditioning, basic furnishings and bathrooms, etc.), but it is a fun environment as all of the interns stay together.

Interns are given some basic Bangla lessons when they arrive so that they can communicate with the villagers. The Bangladeshi people are very warm and hospitable and our past interns have formed some strong bonds with the community.

For logistic reasons, we require all of the interns to arrive on June 1 and complete the full 8 week internship ending on July 30; please only apply if you are able to attend on these dates.

Qualifications:
•    Film major
•    Photographer
•    Excellent writing skills
•    Has completed at least their sophomore year
•    Independent worker
•    Comfortable working in foreign cultures

To Apply:
Please send your resume, a writing sample, some sample photographs, and a cover letter explaining why you are interested in the internship to hr@panigram.com with the subject “Media Internship” by March 20, 2012. (Applications without cover letters will not be accepted.)

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English Lessons Resume in the Local Village

Posted by on July 17th, 2011

Through our days documenting the village neighboring Panigram, we have come to know many of the local children quite well.  As we walked through the village, they would follow us energetically and inquisitively, watching us sketch, listening to us speak, and examining every little move we made.  The children would point to animals, plants, food, or anything else that might (or might not) interest us, and relay its name to us in Bangla, laughing at our poor pronunciation a few times until we said the word correctly.  In exchange, we would teach them the word in English, which they were so anxious to discover.  These interactions were the first days of our English lessons, which have now officially located to the village school on Friday mornings.

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A Comprehensive Guide to the Bangladeshi Transport System

Posted by on July 6th, 2011

Our arrival into Dhaka on a hartal (strike) day left us naively optimistic about the state of Bangladeshi roads. 36 hours spent in the car over the following few days, on the edge of our seats whilst our driver casually avoided numerous head-on collisions, quickly set us straight. Native Bangladeshis, it seems, have an uncanny sixth sense for dodging, weaving and horn-honking: skills that are all entirely necessary on the narrow, overcrowded roads. Until fairly recently, however, our transportation methods have remained relatively luxurious, in comparison to the wide range of two, three and four wheeled contraptions that we have seen. Most vehicles resemble something close to a three wheeled car or a bicycle, with either seats or a trailer tacked onto the back, depending on what needs to be transported. Cars are a rare sight; the one lane roads are occupied by hordes of highly decorated rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, Easy Bikes (electric auto-rickshaws), trucks, buffalo-drawn carts, bicycles, buses, vans, nosimons (auto-vans) and pedestrians.

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Mud and Mangoes

Posted by on June 24th, 2011

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.

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Introducing the Interns…

Posted by on June 13th, 2011

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 »

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