Monday meetings and Mexican

My primary reason for going to Dhaka was to attend a product selection meeting on Monday. Through the years MCC Job Creation has started 10 different handicraft projects that are currently quite successful. In the last few years MCC Job Creation has decided to let these projects manage themselves as it wants to focus more on developing new partnership organizations. These 10 older handicraft projects have formed an organization called Prokritee that is currently trying to become an NGO. When it does it will soon be released from MCC. Prokritee has designers, marketers, and export staff to aid the handicraft partners. Three times a year Prokritee picks some handicrafts from their projects and from partners that are currently in the Job Creation Program. MCC’s Job Creation Program has a partnership with Prokritee for Prokritee to export the Job Creation handicrafts. Prokritee currently has buyers from Ten Thousand Villages, The Body Shop, and other companies in 20 different countries. (You may have noticed tgat MCC is trying to work primarily in partnerships – it is a bit confusing and quite challenging in practice. MCC happens to be the only NGO in Bangladesh that works in this manner. MCC’s agriculture program has been working in partnership for awhile and has been very successful. MCC’s job creation program has only been trying the partnership model for a year, so it is a big experiment for everyone. Handicrafts and agriculture are completely different.)

I am on Prokritee’s committee to select the handicrafts that will be sent to potential buyers. We had a table that was about twenty feet long that was covered with handicrafts, and we could only select enough to fit into a box that was 1’x1’x2’. This box will be sent to twenty countries from Japan to the U.S. for buyers to view. It was an enjoyable job seeing all the new products and picking the best ones. It will be interesting to see how we did after the customers look at the products and decide whether to buy them or not.

Monday night the Geisers dropped Carolyn and me off at the only Mexican restaurant in the country. The restaurant was in the wealthy section of Dhaka, and many of the female foreign patrons were in Western dress (jeans and a shirt - can you imagine!). The interior of the restaurant made you forget that you were in Bangladesh until you looked out the window and saw a rickshaw. I believe that Mexican food is probably my favorite, and I had been craving it for a while. Carolyn and I ordered everything from nachos and cheese to fried ice cream. It was delicious and a little more spicy than normal.