A day of rest in Bangladesh; a day of tourism for us, with a trip on the Dhaleswari River in the morning. There are no luxury airconditioned pleasure boats for tourists – this was just one of the leaky boats with an ancient diesel engine waiting on the river bank for casual trade. The owner was quite happy to take us for an hour long ride up and down the river for 50 Tk/head.

At one stage, the propeller appeared to foul something – the boatman simply stopped the engine, and lowered himself over the stern and disappeared into the foul smelling black water to fix the problem, with just one hand visible holding on the side of the boat. We felt a bit effete with our array of pre-voyage inoculations.

There was a constant stream of boats carrying human or freight cargoes. The principle seems to be that boats are hired, and then filled to within a centimetre of sinking so as to get value for money. As usual, we had lots of smiles and waves from passers-by. The river banks were full of nautical activities – repairing, painting, building ships.

Safely back on dry land, and a wander round the old town. The Shakari Bazaar is the centre of the minority Hindu community, with narrow streets crammed with all sorts of shops and workshops. After lunch I left the party and went by CNG (the ubiquitous three wheel mini-taxis) back to BRAC University for the OpenOffice.org event. The CNG ride felt a lot safer than it should – I couldn’t help thinking of dodgem rides at the fairground.

The local OpenOffice.org team had done a good job of herding together a sizeable audience despite it being the half term break. I talked about OpenOffice.org the product, and also the importance of native language translations in ending digital exclusion. There was a good question and answer session, with the audience demonstrating a good understanding of the issues around open-source adoption. Speakers from the university and the localisation team took up the theme, and demonstrated the work-in-progress OpenOffice.org in Bangla.

The organisers seemed pleased with the event – I’ll be interested to hear how many additional volunteers come forward as a result. There are pictures of the event here and the slides are here.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Fairtrade, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.