18 OCTOBER <strong>2010</strong> VOL. 4, NO. 2 Beyond
COMMUNITY 19 The Chittagong community welcomes AUW into its midst, and AUW students show their appreciation. If desks, blackboards, and books are the building blocks of any university, then a greater sense of community, and the caliber of the individuals who make up that community, are what separates the mediocre from the extraordinary—and bring a university alive with the pulse of intellectual collaboration and discovery. This community of learning, especially <strong>for</strong> exceptional universities, is rarely restricted to campus boundaries, but instead reaches outward, sharing its best and brightest with its neighbors. As the <strong>Asian</strong> <strong>University</strong> <strong>for</strong> <strong>Women</strong> welcomes new students to M.M. Ali Road each year, it continues to strengthen its bonds with the surrounding community. In fact, Chittagong was chosen as the site of the <strong>University</strong>—with plans to eventually build a permanent campus just beyond the city limits—precisely because the port area’s diverse population presents limitless potential <strong>for</strong> enriching the students’ experience. Within AUW, there are students from 12 countries throughout Asia and the Middle East; just outside the <strong>University</strong>, there is a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, a church, and a mosque. Yet despite the diversity of the city’s population, the opening of AUW in Chittagong was nothing short of an anomaly. Nonetheless, the community greeted the <strong>University</strong> with open arms. When AUW’s Access Academy was first established in 2008, the <strong>University</strong> partnered with local residents to create a host mother program <strong>for</strong> the Access Academy students, the majority of whom had never be<strong>for</strong>e lived away from home. The host mothers introduced the young women to Bangladeshi culture, often taking them on trips to different sites throughout the city, inviting them to their homes, and sharing with them the local cuisine. These Walls Many of the host mothers learned of AUW through Mrs. Monowara Hakim Ali, the president of the Chittagong <strong>Women</strong> Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a <strong>for</strong>mer member of AUW’s Bangladesh Board of Advisors. Mrs. Hakim Ali founded the Chittagong <strong>Women</strong> Chamber of Commerce in 1989 to counteract the lack of Bangladeshi women in the workplace. The organization seeks to empower women in Chittagong to assume roles beyond the home by granting them the skills and the support to trans<strong>for</strong>m their daily hobbies, such as knitting and cooking, into profitable businesses. LEFT: A traffic jam of cars, trucks, rickshaws, and CNGs (named <strong>for</strong> their fuel source: compressed natural gas) makes <strong>for</strong> organized chaos during rush hour in Chittagong.
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