Chittagong

On Wednesday the 7th of February - the team left our warm and cozy beds at 4am to go on a road trip down to Chittagong, the major port/trade city of Bangladesh. We were scheduled to do 4 days of events promoting Cisco/Sun Academies, meeting with private sector investors for our job placement website, in addition to meeting with students to register them on our community website for job placement...along with an IT Roadshow/Competition.

It was an extremely long and somewhat fruitful expedition. =) More on that later, when I post pictures.

One thing that stood out during the trip was something that one of the instructors at the International Islamic University of Chittagong mentioned regarding the current State of Emergency in Bangladesh. We had asked how difficult it would be for the university to get budgetary approval to fund equipment purchases for a new Cisco Networking Academy or Sun Academy.

As you can see, for the last month - nothing is difficult (with the caretaker government and state of emergency in place)

Local citizens of Bangladesh are very happy that the new interim government has deployed armed forces to help keep the peace. (Sort of contradictory to how most American citizens would feel if a State of Emergency was declared and military was deployed to "keep the peace".)

The weird thing is that people are more inclined to follow laws here now that they know there are repercussions and that they will be held accountable for their actions. (Imagine that??!!!)

It's just interesting how different things are. But I'm glad that things are peaceful and appear to continue to be peaceful for the next year as they re-establish voting laws and regulations for an upcoming election.