The title sounds flippant, but my feelings are not. It’s just that “bye-bye” is an English phrase that translates. So if the country could hear me now, it would know that I’m leaving.

What it might not know — so I’m going to tell it — is how deeply it’s touched me.

Of course, “it” is really “them” — the drivers and the chiefs of party, the farmers and the fishers, the boatmen and the shopkeepers. I’ve been fortunate to travel to a place preceded by decades of good will, since Winrock International has been doing important work here since the 19980s.

Bangladesh is an old culture but a young country. Half its people are under 25, and it has the energy and drive to prove it. Things may seem a bit slower at home when I return. And that will be fine — for a while. But it won’t take long to miss the honking horns and the colorful rickshaws — the chaos and the color of this place,  and — most of all — the heart.