And warm and genuine hugs and hand-shakes with my Bangla colleagues who make me feel utterly welcome and at ease, followed by lunch in Moja Restaurant (pictured) where we put the world to rights. Chicken kedgeree – the Bangla version being scented rice with an egg in the middle, and skinny chicken on top – followed by a black tea with the street tea wallah: “wrong char, chini na” (black tea, no sugar) and he returns my Bangla attempt with a big red toothed smile that says ‘thank you for trying to speak my language’.

I was anxious to come back at first. It was an emotional rollercoaster being back in the UK, seeing close friends and family, re-familiarising myself with the London hedonism, remembering all the horrible and incredible things London has to offer. A memory at every tube stop. But possibly an anxiety from the consistent hangovers that changed my physiology and attitude from confident/happy/content to worried/sketchy/chubby in the course of a month. The culture clash couldn’t be more pronounced.  When I was being chased around dressed as a giant banana by two gorillas on the Saturday night of Secret Garden Party festival, my mind suddenly took me to another life, which put me into the west part of the Sundarbans, where Tiger Widows (ladies who have lost their husbands to tigers, and are ostracized from their community due to superstitious belief which places the blame on them) try and feed their children in the face of the hardest adversity you’ll ever encounter. And I thought to myself how utterly unfair it is that I can be here, doing something totally selfish with no purpose apart from giving me pleasure. Whilst I don’t have a worry in the world and can indulge in something so futile as getting drunk at a festival, these ladies have nothing but pain, grief and hopelessness.

And leaving friends and family, again, was hard. Flights are too much for me sometimes, and this plus my hangover had the chin wobbling at the end of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.  A new life hero.

And here I am. Round 2 of Bangladesh. I have a trip down to the Sundarbans coming up at the end of September with my new team, and a trip to India to meet with other NGOs planned for early November. The project is about to start some incredible work with the communities surrounding the Sundarbans – the people most affected by the tiger, and who have the future of the tiger in their hands – which is using innovative marketing techniques to change threat behaviors to the tiger.

I’ll keep you posted.
Dekha hobe for now