Fair Trade and Ethical Business trip to Aarong

I'm very excited, because in the next week, I will be visiting Dhaka twice! I am traveling as a chaperone and participant for two events. I'll describe the Aarong trip here, and make another entry about the Social Business conference.

The first will be with Jenine, one of the teachers I've really connected with, and her class on "Fair Trade and Ethical Business." We will be touring the Aarong Craft Center, and Ayesha Abed Foundation. Aarong is a chain of retail outlets for fine Bengali crafts, and is an enterprise of BRAC, the largest non-governmental development organisation in the world. In Bangla, "Aarong" means a village fair. Aarong was founded in 1978, and currently supports over 65,000 Bangladeshi artisans, 85% of whom are women. Through a network of 647 production sub-centers and 13 production centers, Aarong has developed a platform for the underprivileged artisans across more than 2000 villages of Bangladesh, where they can utilize their indigenous skills to earn a living. Thousands of independent artisans also earn their livelihood by marketing their craft products through Aarong . Aarong's mission is to help sustain rural craftsmanship and find a wider market for their products nationally and internationally. They have gorgeous handmade crafts, of brass, jute, wood, candles, leather, handwoven cloth and silk products, jewelry, Jamdani sarees, and they specialize in Nakshikantha (a traditional form of embroidery rooted to the core of Bangladeshi village women). We are going to see where many of these items are made.
Tomorrow evening (Wednesday), I'll be taking a sleeper train with Jenine and fourteen of her students, and we'll arrive in Dhaka at 6:00am. Then, we'll get some coffee at a nice shop Jenine loves, and head to Aarong at 9:00 am, where we'll tour and meet with the Director. They are also providing a delicious lunch for us at a restaurant called Manikganj. Then in the evening, we'll freshen up at a guesthouse owned by the university in Dhaka, and then go out for a fancy dinner at El Loco, a Mexican restaurant. I'm curious to see what Mexican food will be like in Bangladesh! Then we take an 11pm sleeper bus back to Chittagong, to get home in time for classes on Friday morning.