Fact Finding Mission

I leave on Friday for Dhaka, Bangladesh. I'm on a mission into the unknown. There are injustices going on in the world everywhere, and I no longer feel like I can sit at home and ignore them all. I picked a place that hit my heart. The people look like me, the schools look like the ones my parents went to, the girls in the village wear the same school uniforms as my cousins, the food tastes like my aunts cooking. So that's where I'm going to start. It could have been any where in the world, really, but after searching a few different paths this is where I ended up.
My bags are packed with my western ideas, my feminist sense of equality, my 10 years of higher education, along with my personal fears and insecurities, my lack of knowledge of the local language and customs, and the fact that things change really slowly sometimes, if at all. But I am going with my eyes and ears open. I do have an agenda, sort of. I want to see if it is possible to improve the lives of rural women through the use of sustainable architecture and recent improvements in construction technology. This may turn out to too foreign a topic to even be explored.
Maybe they are not even interested. Maybe they will view me as a freak. Maybe they will laugh at me or feel sorry for my children that have to suffer without their mother for two weeks (who in reality will be living large with my husband enjoying large amounts of chocolate and television and no real bedtime). But maybe there is a villager who wants to learn something new, who doesn't like how life has always been and dreams of something different, who will welcome a different perspective. Maybe, just maybe, something good will come out of my crazy idea to make a difference.
Follow me on my journey as I travel through the unknown and maybe we will all learn something from it.