Cookstoves on Boats

While on our survey of the Sundarbans, we got an awesome opportunity to check out the traditional fishing methods. The simple boats were wonderful to watch and the blue nets provided a very calm and peaceful landscape of the region. Upon inquiring we found that these farmers spend almost a week in the waters, fishing and then traveling back to the port to drop the catch and claim their money.

Ok, the point of this story is that when we saw smoke coming from the boats, it wasn’t that they were on fire. They were simply cooking. Check out the picture. A clay cookstove on a boat! It’s impressive. I had to take this picture and also comment that we saw many such cookstoves as we visited many villages in Bangladesh. None of them used the latest in rocket elbow technology that my friends at Envirofit ( http://envirofit.org/clean_cookstoves.html ) are developing. My fellow classmates of the Powermundo team ( http://www.biz.colostate.edu/ms/GSSE/ProgramOverview/Projects.htm ) should also consider Bangladesh as their next market.

The Many Faces of Grassroots Business Development

Enjoy watching our many faces from one focus group to the next and from one village to the next, as we interview 100s of farmers to identify if small engines is a business opportunity in Bangladesh.

Bangla Chronicles - Day 27

Ever since I got back from our last trip, I havn't had a chance to write about it. This trip was definitely the most gruelling and difficult, so far. More details coming later, but in the meantime here is the map that shows our next trip (zoom out to view the whole journey). We spend the next one week on our last field trip. We plan to also visit the Sundarbans (the only natural habitat of the Royal Bengal Tiger). We were told that we will also get to see some crockys and river dolphins. Hope we do, so we can share pictures with you all.


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Bangla Chronicles - Day 15

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The next field trip has finally been scheduled and our plan is to visit the Eastern (north to south) regions of Bangladesh. This will cover the areas of

1) Sylhet - Srimongal (tea garden region), Sylhet (hilly areas) and Sunamganj (called Haor in the local tongue, which means that this region is completely flooded during the monsoons),

2) Comilla - Chandpur and Noakhali (both Char regions) and

3) Chittagong - this is where I'm hoping to see some ship breaking (see pix), follow this link for videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZiKBKnesnU).





During this trip, we will be joined by one of our professors from CSU. This trip will cover a diverse geographical region of Bangladesh from the low lands that get flooded to the high lands where the mountains start to rise as you head towards India.