Field Day and Happiness

Yesterday was absolutely amazing!

I woke up and made my way to the bottom floor of the guest house at Matlab for breakfast. The chef brought out some traditional bangladeshi dishes (chapattis with vegetable sabji, Bengali kheer) as well as a hard boiled egg, toast with butter and orange jelly, and fresh bangla bananas. What a spred!

 

With a very full stomach, I made my way over to the hospital where I met with the Maternal and Child Health (MCH) nurses I had met the day prior.



Walking from the guest house to the hospital

View from my balcony

The nurses walked me all across the Matlab campus and into the different wards while teaching me of the many practices and interventions throughout each hospital area. Amongst the places I went to at the hospital, the Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) ward was my favorite!



Mother in the KMC with her premature baby

Colorful blankets drying outside the KMC

The view from behind the KMC ward overlooking flooded rice paddies

At the KMC, preterm and underweight neonates are placed on the bare chest of their mother between her two breasts which act as a natural incubator for the baby. Upon entering the room, we were to take our flip-flops off and put hospital-issued flip-flops on to ensure a clean environment for the critical status of the premature neonates. The room was hot and humid to accommodate the tiny babies and left me dripping in sweat after just a few minutes of standing in the room.  The nurse told me that the mothers spend 16 out of 24 hours every day laying down in this position to ensure the life of their child. Because this is such a demanding task for the mothers, they receive support and encouragement from the nurses in the ward.  In many developing countries such as Bangladesh, availability of incubators in village areas is unheard of. KMC is practiced in an array of developing countries and has proven to save the lives of many preterm babies. Just another simple life-saving solution for the developing world!

Front of the KMC ward

I also visited the Neonatal ward, MCH ward, delivery room, diarrheal disease ward, breastfeeding counseling room, Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) ward and learned of the many interventions Matlab has to offer to its patients in these areas.

Poster with different delivery positions

Delivery room

Part of the hospital

Neonatal ward

After making my way around the hospital, Dr. Fazal brought me to his office and offered me a trip to visit two of the field sites in the area. Happily accepting his offer, I hopped in a van with a nurse and male village based community health research worker. We bounced around inside the van while it flew down the narrow dirt road that led to the first field site, a village based community center. When the van came to a halt, we climbed out and walked along a dirt trail past make-shift homes and women washing clothing in a small dirty lake. When we arrived to the little village community, there was rice, corn, peppers and other crops laying out in baskets and on tarps to dry.

Small path leading to the village

Rice, corn and other crops drying in the sun


I stepped inside the small community room that was made out of metal walls, a tin roof and dirt floor. Inside, mothers sat with their children on plastic chairs and wooden benches that surrounded a small wooden table where a village health worker was filling out papers, administering vaccinations, and educating the mothers. I tried paying attention to the nurse and worker I traveled with while they explained the protocol to me, but the children outside kept sticking their smiling faces through the windows and giggling.

 

Courtyard area in the village

Adorable Bangladeshi boy that kept following me

After walking around the village area a bit more, we headed back to the van to make our trip to the second field site. The second site we went to was down another road that was extremely narrow and elevated from the water filled rice paddies below. The site had a totally different set up. It consisted of three small brick buildings that had been there since the 1970's: two clinical wards and one office building. This small complex is one of four subcenter clinics in the Chandpur area surrounding Matlab. Each subcenter caters to about 28,000 patients.

Entrance to the office building

Training/Meeting room



Take-home delivery package for village deliveries

Entrance to the clinical building

The van ended up having to maneuver off the side of the narrow dirt road multiple times on the way to and from the subcenter clinic so rickshaws, CNG's and tractors could drive past our van that were coming from the opposite direction. The only problem was that the road consisted of a dirt mound built up from the rice paddies and had no shoulder to pull onto so that cars could go by. This ended up being quite interesting!

View from the traffic jam

Hogging up the road

One of many traffic jams on the narrow road

My little fan club

When I returned at 1:30pm and met with Dr. Fazal to review the field sites, he mentioned that he was leaving Matlab to return to Dhaka at 3pm. He asked if I wished to return as well and I decided to take him up on the offer. I had planned to leave Matlab the next day, but riding back with the doctors was cheaper because there were more people in the car to share the fee with and I had seen the aspects of Matlab that I had wished.

After lunch, I made my way back to the guest house to pack up my things. I began thinking to myself... "Do I really want to leave today? have I really seen everything I wanted?" As my thoughts continued I entered my room to find 3 more black spiders crawling on the wall. decision MADE. No way in hell was I spending another night in that room!

The ride back took a total of 6 hours due to immense traffic in condensed areas along the way. I enjoyed wonderful conversations with the 3 doctors I traveled with throughout the excursion. Conversation topics consisted of love, arranged marriage vs. American-style marriage, what happiness truly is, psychology and sociology, the difference between sacrifice and compromise, the simplicity of the Bangladeshi culture, and so on. When I got back to Dhaka I took a nice, hot shower and enjoyed a huge spoonful (or two... or three...) of the natural peanut butter I had bought the week before. I never thought I would miss Dhaka, but I sure did. It was good to be back!

This story im about to tell is somewhat out of place in this post, if considering chronological order, yet it speaks volumes of the Bangladeshi culture and I cannot omit it:

 

On our way to the second field site at Matlab the community health worker asked me what I thought of the culture and the country so far. I told him the most astonishing thing to me about Bangladesh was the happiness of the people. I mentioned how so many people were undoubtedly poor, yet they were so rich in all of the valuable ways in life and all adorned genuine smiles everywhere I went. He replied by holding up his pen and saying to me, "Youre exactly right. We are very happy to have anything, even if it is close to nothing. For example I have this pen. I love this pen and it works great, and that makes me happy. If I had 50 pens this one would lose its meaning to me. Just because one pen makes me happy does not mean I would have more happiness with more pens"

Breathtaking view from the first night at Matlab

Cheers to the joyful people of Bangladesh! May we all withhold the gratitude for the simplicities in life that these beautiful people embrace on a daily basis

-C