Sleepless Nights

In July 2007, it was my first trip outside my homeland. The company booked my first flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Around 14 hours journey with Etihad Airways. At that time, I was 20 years old, barely able to communicate in English since my educations were in French. It was my first challenge abroad.

Reaching Dhaka was exhausting, did not sleep throughout the flight. Our hotel reservation at Washington Hotel was already booked. We took the luggage to our rooms and took a nap (supposedly) and woke up the next day, we slept more than 12 hours. My colleague called my room to get prepared for our first move after having our breakfast. We went to our customer office (Banglalink a Telecom operator), met the teams in charge, set the plan of our sites visits, then we took the car and started moving in the city. Dhaka peak hours in traffic were terrible, we spent hours in the car not moving at all.

We planned to visit different type of locations such as hub sites, backbones, data centers, greenfield and roof tops. Those sites were hours away from our hotel while we were within the city. We spent the whole days from site to site. We had to manage our food with water and peanuts. If chips were found on the road, majority were expired. Reaching the hotel in the late evenings hardly able to catch our breath. The food was totally out of expectations, I barely ate steamed white rice with boiled eggs.

Few days later, we packed our luggage and prepared our move to Khulna (around 250km). Our driver had to stop multiple times for fueling and rest while we were visiting sites on our way. While driving in the night (we could not stop and lodge due to unavailability of suitable hotels), the driver seemed to be tired. We asked him to stop and rest but he refused stating that he was trained to drive non-stop and for safety reasons. We kept discussing to keep him awake but unfortunately my colleague and myself slept in the bus. Then few minutes later we woke up finding ourselves upside down, the driver slept as well. Luckily, nobody was injured. We waited for the rescue which was arranged by the telecom operator teams managing the area.

We stayed in Khulna for couple of days, auditing sites and meeting the villagers working around the sites. Poor people and kids were jumping on the roads between the cars. With regards the food, it became worth after we left Dhaka. I remember eating peanuts, bananas and drinking coke for days. We kept working till late evenings and sometimes sleeping in our bus to be able to shrink our trip period and return home.

Our next destination was Chittagong, a very large city on the southeastern coast of Bangladesh. Our schedule was tight, so we had to carry our visits late evenings and sometimes after midnights. We had sleepless nights to meet our customer’s expectations. While in Chittagong, we had the chance to visit the beach side, stunning sunset but the food quality and diversity were the same challenge everywhere.

Finally, we came back to Dhaka after 10 days of sleepless nights. We then had to build our report to be presented ahead of our departure. I remember writing a report with pictures for around 300 pages highlighting our findings and snags. It took us more than 72 hours to complete the first draft.

The mission was accomplished and returned back home loosing around 12KG. It was an impressive experience being my first trip, every day is a lesson. Have you been in similar circumstances before?