When offered an assignment which allowed free licence to write about life in Bangladesh, I jumped at the chance: this was what my dreams were made of. At the time I was working with schools in India and was asked to make a side trip to Dhaka, to study, write and photograph the workings of development projects, within the capital and in rural areas to the South, West and North of the city. My February-March stay was to last for a month, before temperatures began to hit oven-like proportions.

During my travels through Bangladesh - both city and country - I came to admire the way in which women were involved, as if they, and not the men, were the real pillars of society. As project workers and beneficiaries, the women I met at the local level, were adept at doing whatever they could to support themselves, their families and their communities.

I was seated on a slim wooden bench inside a hot, sweaty, bamboo shed, with what seemed like 100 eyes gazing at me: this strange-looking creature from the West! Once things settled back to what I judged might be almost normal, I uncased my camera and began to photograph proceedings, which in turn set of another round of bubbling interchange. After things settled again, my eye – and my camera lens - were drawn to a particularly attentive young girl, seated towards the rear ...

Early on the second morning in Bangladesh, three of my hosts arrived to escort me out of Dhaka. We piled into a jeep, with driver and boss in front, travelling for half an hour or so through the morning rush hour streets. After some time, the outer city slums and townscape began to change to a tropical green of palms and paddy fields: a landscape that I would come to know well over the next four weeks.