Mei Chen was not sure she was the right person for the job. 'I'm an engineer, not a teacher,' she told us in the weeks before her trip. 'And I've never been to Bangladesh. I was worried I'd be more of a burden than a help.' She is not the first volunteer to feel this way. She is also not the first to be proven wrong.
The KINDRED Learning Centre in Dhaka's Mirpur district is a converted community hall that now runs five days a week for girls aged 12 to 18. Its digital literacy programme — funded by a partnership with a Singaporean technology company — had been running for six months when Mei arrived, but the lead tutor had left for another role and the programme needed a temporary replacement.
Two weeks
Mei taught HTML, CSS, and basic Python. She was not expecting the girls to be hungry for it. She was expecting polite engagement. What she got was eighteen teenagers debugging code past the official end time, arguing about the best way to centre a div, and staying late to show Mei their personal projects — a weather app, a recipe website for their mothers, a simple game.
"On the last day, one of the girls — Fatema, she was fourteen — showed me a website she'd built for her family's small embroidery business. It had a product page, a contact form, everything. I've been coding for twelve years and I nearly cried."
Mei came home and immediately signed up for a second placement, this time for a month. She has also started a fundraising campaign among her colleagues at her technology company, raising $18,000 in eight weeks for the Learning Centre's equipment fund. 'I went to give two weeks,' she says. 'I got back something I don't quite have words for yet.'
Join us
KINDRED places skilled volunteers in programme communities for two-week and four-week placements throughout the year. We need teachers, healthcare workers, engineers, agronomists, and business skills trainers. Travel costs are self-funded; accommodation and in-country support are provided. If you'd like to apply, visit our Get Involved page.
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