When our Congress appropriates funds for “development” projects in other countries (for example, securing clean drinking water in Ethiopia, or HIV prevention in Botswana), the government will award contracts to other companies who can bring those projects to life. The company that I worked for primarily worked on programs supporting democratic reforms across sub-Saharan Africa. Though my colleagues and my job in DC were interesting, I missed the deeply engaging hands-on learning from the days I had spent in West Africa, and I yearned for further opportunities to live in and learn from the wider world. The following year, I was awarded a Fulbright research grant to go to Bangladesh to learn the Bengali language and study rural primary education.
Bangladesh was another place that changed my perspective and my life in its own ways. I spent four months in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s bustling capital city that then had 16 million residents (and now has nearly 22 million), going to language school to learn Bengali. Learning a new language with a new alphabet and a lot of sounds that don’t exist in English or the Romance languages I had previously studied proved significantly challenging, but I made progress with a lot of practice and patience from locals. I then spent 11 months living in a village a ten-hour bus ride outside of the capital to undertake my education research. Bangladesh provided countless moments of extreme frustration and fantastical wonder, and Bangladeshi people extended unimaginably generous hospitality to me.
As my time in Bangladesh drew to a close, I was drawn back to the company that I had worked for on the gap year program.
