Calcutta Day 9 - August 5, 2010

After a delicious breakfast at Flury’s, we headed to the office to continue our work with EMC. A crow kindly wished Rob a good morning and personally bonded with him by generously plopping some lovely excrement on his shirt. How nice of the bird. As Rob calmly asked us for a wet wipe or some sort from Grace and me, he described that it looked a bit like curd…or perhaps it was curry? Either way, how wonderful.

Rob working with Subhasis on
microfinance software tool

Organizing our thoughts w post-its

We are done with observations so had a bit more flexibility this morning as our first meeting was not until 10:30. Rob and I spent some time with Subhassis who runs EMC’s relatively new microcredit program. When I came last year, this program was only a couple of months old, so while it is still in its early phases, it was neat to hear how at EMC’s microcredit program has indeed grown and is impacting women and families. Rob spent much of the day with Subhassis lending his experience in microcredit while Grace and I continued to process some of the observations we had captured from the visits. We had a short debrief meeting with Ilora who heads up the NFE programs to share the process we took as well as some high level observations and thoughts. We feel like part of the EMC family – greeting friends who work there, wandering into and out of others’ office. They have truly treated us like family and I am so grateful for that.

We went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner tonight – it was pretty good. Bengali’s love their Chinese food. It’s got hints of Indian spices in it and I’d have to agree it is quite tasty! Rob and I were the only Chinese people in the room. Afterwards we went to Barista coffee shop to get some work done. A productive and enjoyable day and evening.

Oh, and we also tried some street food today.  We had some that others had bought for us in the past, but this time we bought them all by ourselves. Delicious and interesting.