Anwar's Diaries- Day 5

December 16th, 2016
After a long night’s journey, we returned to Dhaka from Khulna with the OBAT team. Our team grew in numbers with Dr. Rezwan Khan joining us from Dallas, TX and Arishaa Khan joining us from New York City. Our first engagement of the day involved visiting AWARD, another organization which works for the camp dwellers of Dhaka on different issues such as education, health, sanitation and so on. We had a great meeting with bright, young leaders/partners like Shahid, Khalid, Hasan and others. We also discussed how we can expand our work together to enhance impact.
Next, we moved to the National Institute of Neuroscience Hospital in Agargaon, Dhaka with Neaz Ahmed, the Founder of AWARD and Karimullah, a well known businessman in Bangladesh, currently settled in Germany. Mr. Neaz Ahmed invited us to visit kids who are suffering from brain tumors, cancer and other critical diseases. AWARD does amazing work for these kids and they prioritize personally visiting the kids to know their present condition and to take care of medical costs like medicines, bed rent, surgeries, food, gifts item for kids and so on. We are proud of AWARD for their work and are inspired by their dedication on these projects.
First meeting in the evening was with the Head Teacher, M. Shoukat Ali, and other teachers of NLJ OBAT High School. Currently, OBAT is running NLJ OBAT Middle School. However, due to the end of the contract with PLAN International, OBAT Helpers will be taking over the primary/elementary section as well, starting January, 2017. We have discussed further action plans with the teachers and are looking forward to extending capacity, quality and efficiency of our educational program.
OBAT is proud to operate the only existing English Medium school that caters to this population and the larger slums population in Dhaka. This particular school is an elementary/primary school.  We are glad to have established a connection with Queens School and College, where we currently have eleven students attending grade six. (After graduating from OBAT’s Dhaka English Elementary School, these students were admitted into the prestigious Queen’s private school, a great honor and accomplishment for OBAT).
For our final meeting of the day, OBAT was thrilled to meet with the Chairman of Queens School and College, Dr. K. F. Huda to discuss how we can expand and strengthen our relationship in the future. Our working dinner meeting involved discussing how we can take our partnership to the next level to provide students with the maximum learning potential.