One of our first tasks in coming into this new position with Teach Beyond was to hire a new national director. The Lord’s choice was obvious to us, even if it wasn’t to others. Shankar Shikdar and his wife Lusia had served the Lord faithfully and well their entire lives. He had come to Christ through ABWE’s work in Malumghat and her father was a lifelong educator.

As National Director we are hoping that Shankar will be able to expand our mission’s vision beyond William Carey Academy to other projects. We had heard that there were a couple worth investigating both in Dhaka and outside the city, so we took a flight to Dhaka and booked into the ABWE Guesthouse there.

During our time in Bangladesh, Dhaka was already 7 or 8 million people, and its infrastructure was groaning under the burden. Now at over 25 million it is in accelerating collapse with broken roadways and crumbling building.  The roads were so congested that it took most of two hours to make the two-mile journey from the airport to the guesthouse. We walked to a local restaurant for a meal and returned to the guesthouse without exploring the dark streets nearby.

The following day we took a longish drive to see a school in the area that wished to partner with our mission. The son of the school’s director was an associate of our mission and had recommended the school to us, so we judged it to be worth a look. It was not. The school was poorly attended and managed and showed signs of more than financial neglect. As charming as the few children still attending were, there was something clearly amiss in the school.

A visit to a nearby campus of a local AoG work was equally disappointing. The campus had a vast complex of buildings that could easily teach and house hundreds of students, yet there was only a small scattering of local children in a few ESL classes. The situation seemed puzzling to us, but as Shankar explained, AoG has soiled its own reputation in the country through endemic corruption and sexual abuse of its staff and students and locals would no longer allow their children to attend. What a waste of millions of dollars of the Lord’s money!

A visit to a computer training center in Dhaka the following day was a little more encouraging. Crammed into a space down a little side alley, the Christian entrepreneur there had managed to leverage his own technological expertise into a Christian outreach to young people eager to improve their computer literacy. Here was a project that we definitively could and should help.

We also visited a coffee shop started by a Bangladeshi Christian that was a great example of the ‘business as missions’ model that can be used effectively in countries like this that restrict Christian evangelism. The coffee shop was located in the diplomatic part of Dhaka which was the only part of town that actually functioned well. It was nice to get a decent latte.

The following day we flew out of Dhaka back to England. Recognizing that the two hour trip to the airport could well take three or four, we had the driver drop us off at the Marriot Hotel, a mere half mile from the airport. For the cost of light lunch and a few coffees we spent a pleasant afternoon on the hotel terrace catching up our emails away from the bustle and noise below. It was a nice respite from an arduous trip.

August 2022