UP | uncultured project

It hurts. It hurts bad. Five games – no wins.

After the first couple of loses, I casually joked to a friend and current Notre Dame student, that Notre Dame hasn’t won a single football game since I left. Did I take the Luck of the Irish with me? I was joking – okay? You guys can start winning now, please.

You probably don’t come to uncultured.com for hard hitting, up to the minute financial news. But, if you didn’t know already, the Canadian Dollar now is worth more than an American Dollar. There are a few reasons as to why this has happened: there is the strong Canadian economy, the US economy (with the war, increasing debt, etc) is possibly weakening, or it might be an attempt by the US to be able to increase its exports while decreasing its imports. Whatever the case, I’m pretty happy about this because the project will be able to benefit from this.

I arrived here in late June and I am currently devoting my entire time (read: no job) to this project. So I’m basically running on my personal savings and donations from family. To make things less of a financial burden for those that had donated to this project – instead of giving me X amount of US dollars, I asked them to give me X amount of Canadian dollars instead. The less money I asking of them – the better I felt. Turns out that decision was win/win. Because – 4 months since coming here – the Canadian dollars I’ve held on to are now worth more. Which means my personal expenses cost me (relatively) less and I now have more taka to spend on the project.

As a Canadian, I’ve lived all my life with the fact that the Canadian dollar was always worth less than the American dollar. Not only that, in all my previous trips to Bangladesh – it was often very hard to exchange Canadian dollars. We would usually convert our money into US dollars before coming to Bangladesh. Canadian dollars just weren’t a commonly accepted currency for exchange in Bangladesh. Now not only is it easy to exchange – it’s starting to become the currency of preference. Isn’t that great, eh?

In a country like Bangladesh, its hard to tell where the corruption ends and the legitimate difficulties begin.

Take this recent water crisis in Dhaka. I wanted to wait a couple of days to be sure, but it seems that – for those living around me – the water shortages are over. Both my house and the neighboring apartments have had continuous access – without interruption – to city water for over 48 hours. But here’s the thing: no pipes needed to be replaced, no pumps needed to be repaired, and no city capacity had to be increased in order for this to happen.

In fact, the only thing that happened was that I showed up at the Water Authority with a camera and started asking some questions.

Click the jump for more of on this including a picture of one of the city’s tube well stations….. Continue reading ‘Dhaka Water Crisis: Corruption in the Pipes?’

I don’t know what to be happier about. The fact that Notre Dame had just been able to score its first offensive touchdown for the season, or the fact that the water supply where I’m staying has stabilized enough that I’ve been able to get tap water for the past three hours.

Notre Dame avoids having the dubious record of 4 games without an offensive touchdown and I now longer have to go across town to take a shower? Maybe the luck of the Irish is coming back.

If you’re wondering how I’m keeping track of the Notre Dame football game live – I’m using a combination of score updates from ESPN and also listening to an audio stream from my family’s Slingbox back home.

[Update: Well, we lost 31-14 to Michigan State. That makes an unprecedented four-in-a-row loss. Oh, and the water over here went out again too. Some luck just doesn't last long enough.]

I have to admit – I’m reaching my breaking point. It wasn’t the weather that got to me, or the riots, or the curfews, or the cockroaches, or even having to deal with a hospitalized family member. But, a recent developing water crisis might be the straw that breaks my back.

Click the jump to read more of my dehydrated rambling. Continue reading ‘Dhaka Water Crisis – My Breaking Point’

While I’m over here trying to make one difference at a time in the battle against malaria, it’s good to know that the Fighting Irish are doing their best to make sure the war against malaria is one we can win for good.

Recently, the Gates Foundation gave the University of Notre Dame $20 million dollars to continue research in the fight against malaria. This funding also helps to create test areas and partnerships in Indonesia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. They will not only be collecting data but also making sure that we can stay one step ahead in fighting mosquitoes that carry the malaria virus. For example, one of the biggest concerns is that insecticides that work now (like those embedded in the PermaNets I have distributed) might not work in the future as mosquitoes develop a resistance.

This funding will stretch over five-years and will involve the Notre Dame Center for Global Health and Infectious Diseases as well as the Notre Dame College of Engineering. I couldn’t be happier. Some of my best friends from Notre Dame are engineering students. In fact, my roommate before leaving Notre Dame was an engineering grad student. It’s a comforting thought that, while I’m out here doing my part, back on campus some of my friends and people I know are in the same fight.

While, I know we’ve been having a hard time winning lately on the football field, the fight against malaria is one battle the Fighting Irish can’t afford to lose.

You can read the official Notre Dame press release about this here.

God knows I love Notre Dame. But, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have pet peeves about the place. Recently, since coming to Bangladesh, one of my pet peeves has turned into an issue that boils my blood. Notre Dame has a beautiful, lush, and green campus. They need to water it to keep the place green, of course. In that effort, there are over 65,000 sprinklers on campus that are dedicated to doing just that. I can understand the need to water all that grass. What I can’t understand is the need for the sprinklers to water all the sidewalks too.

When the sprinklers pop up, there doesn’t seem to be an inch of sidewalk that is left dry. I am not the only student who has noticed this either. On the Notre Dame Facebook network, the group “ND Students Who are against Watering Sidewalks” currently has 97 members while a group that asks the simple question “Why are we watering concrete?” has nearly 500 members. On campus, watering sidewalks is something I would laugh at off as either a product of some efficiency study or just part of a plan to make sure no student arrives dry to class. But, since coming to Bangladesh, this has been less and less of a laughing matter to me.

For the past 6 hours, I haven’t been able to flush my toilet because I don’t have running water at the moment. When I’ve needed to wash up, I’ve had to do so using buckets of water I had saved from earlier in the day when there was some running water. Saving water and washing up from a bucket has become a routine for me and is a daily fact of life for many people living in Bangladesh. That is if you are lucky enough to have running water in your home at all. By the turn of 21st century, just over half of the people in Bangladesh had access to clean water and sanitation. That means that – as bad as I have it now – over 70 million people in this country are much worse off. Globally, one in five people don’t have access to clean water. Thankfully, this number has been lowering in recent years.

I know that the problem of water in Bangladesh doesn’t get magically solved if Notre Dame stops watering its sidewalks. But, this kind of useless consumption of resources seems to betray the ideals of that Notre Dame seeks to uphold. Afterall, this is the university that inspired me to fly thousands of miles to try and make a difference – all while having to live in a place where I have to wash my hands out of a bucket and schedule when I can flush the toilet. Right now, I’d give my left arm for the same access to water that our campus sidewalks are getting at this moment.

[Update: Looks like the facebook group "Why are we watering concrete?" is now over 500 members and climbing. Big thanks to Jessica Kim for the pic.]