I was standing slightly behind Anamika Ahmed in a room full of people who looked as if they had dressed for this kind of competition their whole lives, quietly asking whether there was any way she could do all the presenting.

A year earlier, Sakib and I had spent much of our time around the BRAC Onnesha satellite ground-station lab. By 2018 we were no longer practically living there, but we still kept returning to work on random ideas. One of those discussions eventually brought the three of us here, to Bhutan.

A competition we did not understand

Around that time, Anamika, who was from my batch at BRAC University, approached us about joining a competition. Anamika was technical, but she also spent a lot of time in startup and technology-business competitions. She was one of the most confident presenters I knew. She could understand the engineering and then stand on a stage and explain why the idea mattered, which was not a skill most of us in robotics had developed.

That combination has carried pretty far. She later moved to Canada, worked as a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, and eventually joined Microsoft Canada as a senior software engineer.

The competition was the Regional WASH Innovation Challenge, organized by BRAC and UNICEF to find new ways to encourage handwashing with soap across South Asia. More than 780 teams submitted ideas, and 12 finalist teams were invited to present in Bhutan.

This was already unfamiliar territory for us. In most robotics competitions I had entered, nobody had to convince a judge that a line follower was good. It either followed the line or it did not. A fighter bot either survived or it did not. Even at SAUVC, the robot had tasks and points. The machine did most of the arguing for you.

Here, the idea itself had to be presented, defended, and made believable. Anamika understood that world much better than Sakib and I did.

Trying to make contamination visible

The challenge was to come up with a solution that could encourage better handwashing. We went through different ideas, and eventually I remembered an advertisement from when I was a child. It showed hands under a special light, making invisible contamination suddenly visible, followed by the difference after washing.

That gave us a direction. Instead of only telling children that their hands could be contaminated, what if we could let them see a visual before and after washing?

We called ourselves Team SWAT. I no longer remember why we chose that name, which probably means there was no particularly intelligent reason behind it.

Our concept grew into an automatic soap dispenser combined with UV-based visualization. While researching it properly, though, we discovered an important problem: UV light alone would not reveal actual germs on someone's hands. The demonstrations we had seen relied on fluorescent lotion that simulates contamination and becomes visible under UV light. BRAC's account of the challenge later described Team SWAT's proposal as a kit using harmless fluorescent lotion, UV light, and an automatic antimicrobial soap dispenser.

That discovery made the prototype much harder. We could build and 3D-print the dispenser, but without the fluorescent material we could not demonstrate the central idea. We could not find what we needed locally, and importing it before the competition would take too long.

So we stopped forcing the physical prototype and concentrated on explaining the idea properly. Anamika worked on the pitch and presentation, Sakib and I worked through the technical side, and I made a short animated video showing how the soap-dispenser concept would work.

The unexpected problem: smart casual

There was another part of this competition that made me nervous for a completely different reason. The instructions said we had to dress smart casual.

In robotics competitions, people showed up in T-shirts, shorts, team jerseys, and whatever was comfortable enough to spend a day fixing robots in. I had never cared much about formal clothes. Even a formal shirt made me uncomfortable.

Sakib and I had another problem: we were not completely sure what smart casual meant. Anamika clearly did, but for some reason two boys who were happy to admit that they did not know how to solve an engineering problem were too embarrassed to ask a girl what clothes they were supposed to wear.

So we asked another friend to take us shopping. I ended up with a shirt, trousers, formal shoes, and a jacket, then repeatedly tried everything at home in front of a mirror while wondering whether I looked normal. Sakib was better at this than I was. I mostly felt like I was wearing someone else's clothes.

The other reason we wanted to qualify

We liked the problem and wanted to build something interesting. But that was not our only motivation. We also really wanted to go to Bhutan.

The organizers covered the trip, which mattered a lot to us as students. I had also been watching videos of Paro International Airport, which sits in a deep valley surrounded by high mountains and is known for its challenging approach. Only specially certified pilots operate landings there.

Our itinerary took us through India and then into Bhutan. I had seen mountains from airplanes before, but usually from far above them. The approach to Paro felt completely different. I could look out either side of the aircraft and see mountains rising beside us while the plane followed the valley toward the airport. It was beautiful, but I was also nervous enough to spend part of the descent quietly hoping we would get down safely.

The airport itself felt unlike any airport I had seen in Bangladesh, India, or Singapore. We stepped out of the plane and the first thing I noticed was how little the place felt like a dense city. There were mountains everywhere. Even the drive away from the airport kept opening into another valley, another slope, another view. Transportation itself felt like sightseeing.

The cold was another surprise. At times the temperature was around freezing, colder than anything I had experienced before. I was used to Dhaka winters, so simply walking outside in Bhutan felt new.

I used to make a video almost every time I travelled somewhere. The video I made from the Bhutan trip is very much a student-era travel video, but it still captures the food, mountains, hotel, and how excited we were simply to be there.

The hotel was far nicer than the places Sakib and I normally stayed during student trips. We were students who usually travelled as cheaply as possible, so even the bathrobes became entertainment. We made tea, wandered around the property, looked out toward the mountains, and behaved exactly like two students who had suddenly been placed somewhere much fancier than they were used to.

Pitching Team SWAT

The next day, all 12 finalist teams presented their ideas. UNICEF's account of the finale records that the top 12 teams from across South Asia presented in Bhutan to Sachin Tendulkar, UNICEF Regional Director Jean Gough, and BRAC Senior Director Asif Saleh. Three winning teams would each receive US$5,000. For a cricket fan from Bangladesh, having Sachin Tendulkar standing there made an already unfamiliar competition feel even more unreal.

Walking into the competition venue made the difference from a robotics event obvious immediately. Everyone around us looked formal, composed, and comfortable with the idea of standing in front of judges. I was wearing the clothes I had practised wearing at home and still wondering whether I looked strange in them. At a robotics competition I would have been looking for the practice track or checking a robot. Here, I was checking my jacket.

When our turn got closer, I tried one last time to escape the part I was dreading. I stood behind Anamika and asked whether she could just present the whole thing herself. She told me that would be a bad idea. If only one person spoke, the judges could easily wonder whether the other two had actually contributed. We were a team, so the judges needed to see all three of us as one.

So I presented too. Anamika looked completely at home explaining the problem and guiding the pitch. Sakib and I did our parts, but I was much more aware of the room, the judges, and the fact that I was speaking than I ever was while standing beside a robot. I wanted that part to finish as quickly as possible.

Then the judges started asking how the idea would actually work. They were curious about the UV setup, the dispenser, and whether the system was technically practical. That changed everything for me. Sakib and I stopped being the two uncomfortable engineering students in a formal room and went back to talking about the part we understood. Technical questions were not what we were afraid of. Those were the questions we wanted, and we answered them confidently.

The judges responded well, and we became increasingly confident. Our use of fluorescent visualization felt technical and unusual compared with many of the ideas in the room. By the time the winners were going to be announced, I had convinced myself that our category was probably ours.

We had also become friendly with a Pakistani team whose idea was Wottle, a portable water bottle designed to function as a handwashing station. Their solution was simpler than ours, but they had something we did not: a working prototype.

When the technology-related winner was about to be announced, I remember telling Anamika that I was sure it was us.

It was not. The Pakistani team won with Wottle. I was disappointed for a moment, but the result also made sense. We had an ambitious idea and a polished explanation. They had a simpler idea the judges could physically see and test. Our own prototype had become dependent on material we could not source in time.

A very short trip

The whole Bhutan trip was fast. We arrived, competed the next day, and were already preparing to fly home after that. But we never treated the competition as the only thing happening around us. Whenever there was free time, we went outside, looked around, tried food, talked to people from other teams, and tried to take in as much of the country as we could.

We spent a lot of that time with the Pakistani team. They had brought food from home and shared it with us, and at some point they stopped feeling like the team we were competing against and simply became people we were hanging out with in Bhutan. That made losing to them easier to accept. We wanted to win, but the competition did not need to turn everyone else into an enemy.

The schedule gave us almost no room to explore properly. We would finish something related to the event, go outside again, stay out late, then remember that our flight home was already getting close. Before leaving, we rushed around trying to buy a few souvenirs because we had somehow managed to visit a new country without finding enough time to spend the money we had been given for the trip.

What Anamika pulled us into

We came back without winning, but I did not remember Bhutan as a failed competition. Anamika had pulled Sakib and me into a world where the room looked different, the people dressed differently, and the machine could no longer do all the talking for us. I had been nervous about my clothes, nervous about presenting, completely comfortable with the technical questions, certain we would win, and then wrong.

At the same time, the competition was only part of what made the trip memorable. We flew between mountains, experienced the coldest weather I had known, stayed somewhere far nicer than our usual student trips, made friends with people we had just competed against, and tried to explore Bhutan whenever the schedule gave us a gap.

That became one of the things I liked most about travelling for competitions. We took the work seriously, but the trip did not have to disappear around it. You could build, present, lose, learn something, meet people, look around a new country, and come home with a story that was much bigger than the result sheet.