Off to School!

dear friends,
I apologize for leaving you all in the lurch for a few days. I recently returned from a trip to our village project in the district of Mymensingh. Only about 150 miles away from Dhaka, it is an arduous journey involving hot, crowded, dirty public buses and a road system choked with cars, trucks, motorcycle rickshaws, rickshaws, human and animal powered vehicles of various kinds, and pedestrians. Once off the road and moving along the dirt track that leads to our village,however, you come to realize the beauty of this country. Green fields of rice paddies are broken intermittently with stands of trees where simple clusters of houses are laid out as little courtyards. From these trees hangs fruits of various types, mangos, papayas, coconut, and the large, spiky jackfruit.
After about 10 minutes on this road, a large, white, concrete structure with red trim comes into view. It stands as the largest building in the village and juts into the rice paddies. This is the Susan Hubbard School and Children's Home, a project of The Basic Needs Program. For those who don't know, early in 2009 a village donated land in order for us to build this primary school for its children. In the space of that year, a 3,0000 square foot structure was constructed, containing 4 classrooms and 2 rooms for orphans (which we hope to adopt in the near future). In march of this year, we opened our doors to 34 primary school students from the village with no other access to education.
All this I knew, but I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Upon entering the school, however, I saw rows of students sitting at neat desks, in red and khaki uniforms each drawing some figures in their notebooks (I had interrupted art class). Upon my entrance, all the kids stood up, and I was overjoyed to see them perform the Bangladesh National Anthem and a small dance for me. So it was for real, we had actually built a school!
There is so much we want to do with this building. So far, we are only using 2 classrooms, so there is tons of space available for a clinic, the orphanage, and various agricultural and economic promotion programs. We are in our infancy, but it feels like we have at last made a first step towards improving the lives of the people of this poor village.