In this upcoming exhibition in LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, Suyin Haynes recounts her experiences as a volunteer in Bangladesh over the past summer.

‘SNAPSHOTS: Experiences from Bangladesh’ is a photo exhibition that aims to bring some of the stories of the people that I met and places I visited when I volunteered in Bangladesh last summer to the LSE community and beyond. Over the summer of 2014, I took part in International Citizen Service with Y Care International – a DfID scheme that partners up UK volunteers with charities on placements abroad. Before I left, I was a strange combination of excited and nervous to say the least, but the experience was one that has definitely left a profound impact on my life and my attitude to the world around me. On my placement, I lived and worked in Bogra, a small town in northern Bangladesh, with the local YMCA and their development projects there for 10 ten weeks. The projects that we worked on ended up being hugely varied; from assisting in slum schools to discussions at womens’ microcredit groups, sharing experiences with young Bangladeshi volunteers to distributing flood relief packages – it is safe to say that no two days over the ten weeks that I spent there were the same in any way.

The aim of SNAPSHOTS is not to tell my story, but the story of the incredible people that I met and the extraordinary communities that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. Ten weeks might sound like a long time to volunteer abroad, yet I feel as though I only scratched the surface of life in rural Bangladesh, and these images offer a glimpse of that. Alongside the images are entries from the diary that I kept whilst on placement, which serve as captions for the photographs. These may not be the most eloquent descriptions of events, as I had not anticipated them to be made public, but I think it’s appropriate for a personal interpretation to accompany portraits of these personal stories. From the teenage boy in a roadside barbershop with a faceful of foam to the friendly farmer amongst the field full of rice paddy, each image has its own story to tell.

I don’t want to give too much away about SNAPSHOTS, but I would encourage you to see it whilst it is on display in the Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, LSE Campus on the first floor throughout next week. The main aim of the exhibition is to tell the story of these people through the immediacy of images, which I think can sometimes be much more powerful than words. If the experience of visiting this exhibition changes the perceptions of just one person regarding the negative stereotypes and generalisations of life and people living in the “Third World”, “underdeveloped countries” or the “have-nots”, then it will have gone some way to completing what I set out for it to do.

‘SNAPSHOTS: Experiences from Bangladesh’ is launching on Monday 26th January at 6.30pm in the Weston Café, 6th Floor Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, LSE Campus, and will be on display throughout the week. Suyin Haynes is a second year undergraduate in BSc. International Relations and History at LSE.