Garment Factory

One of the 7th grade field trips at AISDhaka is to one of the garment factories in Dhaka. This was all about expectations and I was expecting the worst. After seeing how a lot of Bangladeshis live and that the majority live on about a dollar a day and all the news about sweat shops the picture in my head was not pretty. While I am sure that something close to what I was thinking is out there in Dhaka, what we actually saw was not so bad. The factory we went to made only bottoms and they make clothes for JC Penny, Walmart and Diesel among others. They employ about 2,000 workers that earn 4,000 taka a month. To put this into perspective that is about 47 US dollars a month for 6 - ten hour days a week. The environment was clean, well lit and cool. Here are some pictures:

One of the hundreds of pallets of fabric

This is one of those lucky shots where I just happened to be taking a picture at the right time. She is smiling at all the students walking by.

This is the cutting station. Fabric is layered on top of itself many times and then all cut at once. The cutter is a pretty tool machine. You can see it on the left hand side of the picture.

Here is a close up of the fabric being cut. You can see how precise the cutter is. The guy running it wears a steel mesh glove on his left hand and pushes the cutter with his right.

Ironing station:

There was an entire floor dedicated to seem checking. Each table is dedicated to a certain area of the garment.

This was one of the coolest parts to see. This machine sews the buttons on. The worker slides a button into the machine, lines up the shorts and then turns on the machine. It takes about one second for the  machine to sew the button on. The needle moves around precisely through each hole.

Pictures... Finally!

So we had quite a bit of baggage (there is a bike in a box missing from this picture

 Lola and Jessica enjoying the extra foot space and the luxury of Qatar Airlines

Lola running through the Dhaka Airport (the guy stamping our passports was in the process of taking a nap... seriously!)

This is the morning after we showed up from the window of our apartment.

One of the stair cases in our new school.

The view from the roof of our school. The fenced area on the right are tennis courts!

Lola's new room... pretty spoiled! 

 Our new room.

We were invited to a boat ride the other day. It was an amazing bus ride out to the launch. I tried to capture it but because the bus windows were really dirty and I was trying to take pics from a moving bus and later the lack of light the pictures that follow are the best i could do.

This is a great shot of the local building techniques. the bamboo supports the forms so they can pour a concrete deck or roof. I have seem the most amazing elegant solutions using very little technology. Just good old fashioned ingenuity.

 A barge pumping water. Another use for bamboo!

This is so elegant I wish I could have got a better picture to do it justice. Yet another use of bamboo. This is a fishing net that they lower and raise. Simple machines!

All of us waiting to board the boats, there are three of them. 

Jessica having a blast getting on the boat... Lola throwing a fit because she fell asleep on the bus only to be woken up to get on the boat. The humanity!