East Pak Volunteers, Staff and Friends: Bangladesh Revisited Twice

At the 30th we walked across the Arlington bridge and I pestered Dr. Yunus about Grameen Bank and my desire to get a similar program going in my city.

He finally said: "Tom if you want to know more, come to Bangladesh". So a few months later in 1992, my daughter Anne-Marie then 17 and I headed over for a two week sojourn. It changed her life as she finished college four years later and joined up to go to West Africa (Guinea Bissau) for two years with PC, and later my middle daughter did the same to Cape Verde off the coast of Senegal.

We attended Dr Yunus' seminars in Dhaka and then went to Chittagong to live with the bank employees and went out with them on making their rounds. It was a fantastic experience for both of us.

Then in 2002, I went back again to "close the garden gates". I started with PC Dhaka (which had a photo of some of us on the wall), then visited several of the Bangladesh 1 and 2 volunteers at their work sites, mostly teaching teachers of English. The young people there would all have fit nicely with all of us, they were idealistic, intelligent, hard working and doing some great things as secondary projects.

The Paddlewheel steamer, the Ostrich, is now diesel driven so I could not descend to watch the colliers shoveling coal into the boilers or enjoy the great rhythm of the pistons surging up and down while the oiler squirted oil on the bearings.... it could make an engineer cry for the love of it. The people are still wonderful and engaging, and appreciative of the vestiges of Bangla that I brought out of the depths of my cranium.

I fulfilled another fantasy after a month in Bangladesh, heading to the north on the train, and crossing the no-mans-land into North Bengal and India. Then the toy train to Darjeeling, having been put back into service after mudslides took it out a couple of years earlier. From there to Calcutta and the intensity of traffic and people. It was all good.

Tom McMahon, Pak 1

1961-63