We arrived in Dhaka for a week's training not really knowing what to expect except the heat and humidity that Bangladesh experiences during their summer (or 'hot season'). During that week before we moved to the communities in which we would be living and working, we met the Dhaka University students who would be working with us for the first month and received basic training with regards to the Bangla culture. As part of that training (and possibly the most usful bit), we received a short Bangla lesson (basic words/phrases that we might need during our time there). Just wish I had learned more of the language, as what I did learn proved very useful!
The Work
We moved to our villages about a week after our arrival to Bangladesh and met with our local youth clubs to discuss what projects they needed/wanted us to focus on and what they wanted us to achieve during our time there. I was based in Kirttankhali, a small village in the Bagerhat district of the southwest region. The focuses of our project were primary health care and WaSH (Water and Sanitation and Hygiene).
During our time working with our communities, we enabled latrine installations and repairs of a pond sand filter (to give the locals safe drinking water). We also cleared a pond area and cleaned another pond sand filter. We held toothbrushing and hand washing sessions with young children and small community gatherings where we talked about waste disposal and nutrition. Over the course of three days, we ran blood grouping sessions, during which approximately 300 villagers learned their blood type. Such knowledge is useful in cases of emergency when someone may need blood (particularly when women give birth, since they practice traditional midwifery). We also organised a child marriage and dowry rally and a large event (called a Community Action Day or CAD) on disability and sanitation. The disability and sanitation CAD consisted of a rally including a girl in a wheelchair from Kirttankhali, several guest speakers, a drama that our youth club wrote and performed, a handwashing session and a cultural evening of local music and dance.
Not long after our arrival in our villages, we discovered that female menstruation is a taboo subject so teenage girls don't understand it and often believe there is something wrong with them when they begin menstruating so are afraid and embarrassed. Consequently, we gave a talk at the local girls' school to girls aged approximately 14-16 to inform them and reassure them that what is happening to them is perfectly normal and a part of growing up. As part of the session, we gave the girls the opportunity to ask questions anonymously, which proved successful as they felt comfortable asking those questions.
As VSO requested, we helped start a school gardening project at the girls' school, providing the girls with seeds and digging a plot in which the seeds were planted. We also gave two required talks on volunteerism, though, at the moment, the only volunteering opportunities there are in the villages are through joining the youth club or participating in the school gardening project and, as the villages we were working with are subsistence farming communities, when the kids are not at school, they are busy helping their families on the farms (and may even miss school on days when there is a lot of work to do on the farms, such as during the rice harvest).
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| Blood Grouping Session |
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| Disability Rally |
The Life
While we were in our villages, we stayed with host families and learned that when women get married, they move in with their husband's family. Consequently, families consist of several generations living under one roof.
In our villages, the women tended to do the cooking and other household chores, while the men were out working in the fields or taking produce to the local market (Chitalmari). During the heat of the day, we found it was difficult to get transport (which was on 'vans' (normally electric or pedal bicycles with a wooden platform attached to the back)). This is because the villagers tended to take a nap or take shelter indoors as working when it is 40ºC with 98% humidity is very difficult.
The Banglas were very hospitable and were always saying hi to us (the only foreigners, or 'badeshi' around). We also gathered crowds of inquisitors wherever we went, which was sometimes entertaining and sometimes frustrating, but all part of the experience. There was a very laid back lifestyle and nothing ever started on time so we quickly learned not to expect events to start until about an hour after they were meant to and stopped worrying about punctuality ourselves.
In the Kirttankhali area, most of the villagers were Hindu. Consequently, there were many festivals while we were there, and Hindu festivals mean lots of drums, colourful dress and food (and Banglas love their rice). Not long after we arrived, there was Holi, the Hindu festival of colours, where people throw paint at each other. And because we were the only badeshi (non-locals), we were the targets of most of the paint and it really dyes your skin. The blue was more obvious than the red, so we ended up looking like smurfs for about a week after!
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| Left to Right: Elana, me, our host mum (whom we called 'Didi', which means sister) , Zoë |
The Climate
We were in Bangladesh during what they call the 'hot season'. Consequently, throughout our time there, the temperatures rose from around 30ºC to, by the end of the three months, 40-43ºC with around 98% humidity. We were witness to a few spectacular thunderstorms where you could see many lightening bolts and, because the soil is clay and most of the time it was so hot and dry, when it did rain, the soils would flood quite quickly and become sticky mud almost immediately, which we experienced more towards the end of our time there, as monsoon season was about to start. About three weeks after we returned to the UK, one of the Kirttankhali youth club members told me there had been a cyclone that had destroyed the wooden shack that the youth club had been meeting in. He also sent me a photo of it (below).
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| Destroyed Youth Club building, photo courtesy of Akash Mondal |
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