The Personal Touch Counts
This work is about helping people meet their most basic needs, but it’s also about the importance of human connections. If I had any doubts about that, they were totally resolved during our recent monitoring day in the Pallabi slum of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Our partner organization in Bangladesh is Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), a highly professional and competent organization. With the funding they receive from Water 1st each year, they staff four project offices, Pallabi, Kamrangirchar, Demra, and Halishahar-Bander. Each year we visit each office to see completed projects, both old and new.
On the day we visited the Pallabi office earlier this month, we did all the usual activities. We saw a completed school water and toilet project. We visited a minority community that had no water access and now has four water systems and toilet blocks. We saw a few older projects and noted they were still serving the beneficiaries well.
We returned to the office for our usual debrief. One special activity on the agenda was to give the office a calendar that a church group from Olympia, Washington [Grace Covenant Church] had sent them. The calendar had photos of families at the church. It was intended to strengthen the personal connection they hoped to establish with the Pallabi office staff. The church group decided in 2010 to adopt one of the project offices in Bangladesh in addition to contributing funding. They sent a photo of their missions committee with us in 2010 to give to the Pallabi staff with the message that this group of people from the United States was thinking about them every day, thanking them for doing this important work, and praying for their success in meeting the most basic needs of the poorest in their community. I was happy to see the photo from 2010 was prominently displayed when we walked in the office. That suggested that they would like the calendar we were about to give them.
After presenting them with the calendar, we had our usual meeting, in which we asked questions about their year and presented our findings and observations from the visit. The whole staff cheered when they heard that we thought they were doing excellent work. Read more…
