Neat.

Hossain Zillur Rahman runs his Power and Participation Research Center out of a rented house in Dhaka. It has a rustic 70's décor that evokes images in my head of Robert Redford's rural legal office in The Candidate. He and his twenty employees are working to put research on development into action. And they're not just trying to generate wealth or boost GDP; they want to bring up true quality of life for Bangladesh's plentiful poor. That means crossing the boundary out of pure economics and into local governance, technical schooling, and even, after 1998's floods, emergency primary schooling for children and women in disaster relief camps. It is a true exercise in interdisciplinary studies.

And Bangladesh has proven to be quite a classroom for learning to use every resource available to deal with the completely unexpected. Mr. Rahman's holistic approach just makes sense here. You never know exactly what you'll encounter next, and you just can't survive with too narrow a view. One day a cow in the street rams your taxi. Another day your heart is broken by the cute little kids walking beside you, holding your hand, begging for money. You must be vigilant here: not for danger, but for opportunities.

The lion's share of our time is spent teaching English to college-aged students at Grameen Star computer education centers. When we arrived there was no curriculum in place and we were asked to design one. But while we were working on that there were still classes to teach. The result was a hodgepodge of lessons aimed at encouraging speaking and responding to student questions with whatever assorted knowledge resided in our heads or was easily accessible via a Google search. One day I taught the difference between "hanging out" and "gossiping". Another day my classes learned Simon and Garfunkel's Feeling Groovy. Another day I spent 5 minutes convincing an adamant dissenter that there are only 50 states in the Union!

Flexibility is always necessary. We saw our planned research on microcredit with the Grameen Bank morph into a broader study of attempts to use information technology to help the poor. We started to ask questions: what information does a rural villager need? Can IT triumph over a corrupt government? Does information technology even matter in a land with virtually no phone lines? Help came from all directions. The senior program coordinator at UNICEF gave us some direction. The exceptional librarians at the Grameen Trust library, who gladly traded resources for English lessons, hooked us up with a local sociologist interested in our topic. Whenever I worried most, things fell most neatly into place.

A life of surprises is often frustrating, occasionally daunting, normally humbling, and, in short, thoroughly educational. And once in a while, it just plain delights you. Meet Yves Marre: the first man to pilot a river barge across the Atlantic, flight instructor to a doctor in the Amazon, inventor of that parachute-fan contraption used so often by people dropping in on Super Bowls, and currently the captain of a tour boat and overseer of the creation of the Floating Hospital of Bangladesh using a river barge he sailed here from France! Neat.

Now that's interdisciplinary.

-DB.