Tofte and Sue Frykman visited Bangladesh between 28th Jan – 7th Feb 2008 on behalf of Quaker Service Sweden. Sue recounts something of the trip below, in diary form. It’s impossible to tell you about everything we saw, but we hope that the following account gives a flavour of our adventure in the poverty-stricken rice growing areas of Netrakona, Purbadhala and Mymensingh, in north-eastern Bangladesh.
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Tuesday 29th January 2008 The four hour drive north to Netrakona, from Dacca’s Zia International Airport, begins at snail’s pace. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning and the streets are already teeming with tricycle-rickshaws, bicycles, cars, motorbikes, buses and lorries, all loaded to the brim and vying for space. To say nothing of people waiting to dart across the road as soon as they spot a gap in the traffic stream! The sound of honking horns is deafening – and the car windows are firmly shut! But the landscape changes as we venture north and the multitude of half-completed blocks of flats, with antennae-like construction wires protruding from their heads, gives way to paddy fields, haystacks, fishponds and small rural settlements.
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Tuesday 29th January 2008 The four hour drive north to Netrakona, from Dacca’s Zia International Airport, begins at snail’s pace. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning and the streets are already teeming with tricycle-rickshaws, bicycles, cars, motorbikes, buses and lorries, all loaded to the brim and vying for space. To say nothing of people waiting to dart across the road as soon as they spot a gap in the traffic stream! The sound of honking horns is deafening – and the car windows are firmly shut! But the landscape changes as we venture north and the multitude of half-completed blocks of flats, with antennae-like construction wires protruding from their heads, gives way to paddy fields, haystacks, fishponds and small rural settlements.
We are in Bangladesh to visit Sambalamby Unnyan Samity (SUS), the self-help organisation that Quaker Service Sweden has been supporting in various ways since 1994. Rokeya Begum, the Executive Director of SUS, and her staff greet us at the SUS Health Centre in Netrakona – our home for the week - and order us to rest and catch our breath before lunch – and a week-long intensive programme of visits, meetings and encounters.
The Programme Support Unit Manager asks us to accompany him to the Model Farm, just down the lane from the SUS Health Centre. The farm was the first SUS project that Quaker Service Sweden supported, in the mid-1990s. We wander along the rough track, dodging the ever-present bicycles and rickshaws with their tinkling bells, and absorb the scenery and smells. In one direction paddy fields stretch as far as they eye can see, and in the other, palm and banana trees form the forest’s fringe. People living in nearby bamboo huts burn straw, wood, leaves or dried cow dung and cook their suppers. Children race up to us eager to shake our hands, practice saying “Hello”, “How are you?” “What is your name?” and “Goodbye”, and stare wide-eyed at these two white foreigners. As we walk S. tells us about the jute industry that is now on the decline and the difficulties that local people face from unemployment and regular flooding. This area was flooded three times in 2007 and homes, shops and farms were destroyed. So was the rice harvest, which accounts for why rice has now doubled in price. We pass a local mosque, its loud-speakers calling people to prayer.
Wednesday 30th January Today we go to Purbadhala, accompanied by M. one of the SUS staff members responsible for this particular project – a project that Quaker Service Sweden has been supporting for the last seven years. Our agenda includes a visit to a REFLECT (Regenerated Freirian Literacy through Empowering Community Technique) women’s circle, a pre-school, or ECD class (Early Childhood Development), a micro-finance group and a meeting with a woman’s Human Rights Group. A. is our driver and negotiates the potholed roads and village tracks with skill! He is a hero!!
Many of the women attending the REFLECT literacy circle (were nursing small children M. interprets for us. The circle facilitator tells us about the short-term (3-month), medium-term (6-months) and long-term (6-months +) goals the group had been working with. The short-term goals included installing fresh water supplies that are free from arsenic, creating sanitary latrines, practising family planning and health care strategies and creating a vegetable garden for home consumption to improve vitamin and mineral intake. Medium and long-term goals are related to early marriage and dowry issues and problems connected with health. Many of the women were shy and not used to meeting white strangers, but they warmed to us and expressed their pleasure that we had come to see how they lived and worked. The whole village turned out for a photo-call outside the dimly lit hut, complete with attendant ducks and hens!
We make our way – in the rain – to the next village to attend the pre-school class session. At this early stage the children learn through song, rhyme and dance. Each child is provided with a slate and chalk, paperback text books (bought from BRAC, another NGO), a pencil and ruler. Their parents make bundles of little sticks that the children then use as counters. They learn how to count up to 50 and learn the alphabet. Not only that, even at this early age they learn about democracy, health and human rights. Many of these children come from families that are too poor to afford any other form of schooling. The target group is mainly girls (some boys attend as well) as traditionally they are regarded as second-class citizens. This attitude is slowly changing thanks to organisations like SUS.
The class teacher often either originates from the same village in which she teaches or has married into a family that has influence there and can provide “premises” (a bamboo hut). Qualified teachers attend SUS teacher training courses to be schooled in SUS’ “holistic approach” methods. The classrooms are simple bamboo huts with sacking placed on the earth floor. Like the REFLECT circle women the children sit in a U-shape – regarded as being the best format for communication. A disabled child or slow leaner child (cerebral palsy) is included in this class – which consists of 30 pupils. Although he’d only been attending the class for a short time he was already showing signs of improvement as a result of the help he was receiving from the teacher and from his peers. The overall aim is that, in addition to working on their own, the children work in groups of three; the stronger and cleverer pupils helping the less able.
In the third village we visit a micro-finance group of women. Various members act as President, Secretary and Treasurer; the aim being to help the women to take responsibility and feel empowered to do something to change the circumstances of their own lives. The group meets weekly to pay off their loans (administered by a SUS staff member) and discuss problems and successes. Some of the women had borrowed money to buy a milking cow, a rickshaw (driven by their husbands), a rice-cooking machine or open a clothes shop – all activities in which they were able to make money to feed and clothe their families. Here i is important to add here that SUS doesn’t act as a bank to loan out money and charge interest on it, but instead operates a micro-finance “integrated and holistic package” that consists of a business opportunity, health education, human rights advice and literacy education.
Thursday 31st January We are given a guided tour of the SUS Health Centre in Netrakona (our home for the week being a room on the top floor of the building). Thursdays and Sundays are vaccination days, and pre- and post-natal clinics, counselling and health care for pregnant mothers are also available. The Bangladeshi Government provides the vaccines free of charge and SUS provide the staff and facilities and administer the vaccines. In other words it’s a collaborative project. Other medicines have to be paid for, however, or obtained at the local hospital. SUS emphasises the importance of safe home deliveries and as well as training people in home delivery techniques they also provide special safe and clean delivery packs and iron tablets for the pregnant mothers. One of the centre’s two doctors showed us the initial development stages of the operating theatre cum delivery room – which Quaker Service Sweden has also supported. An ECG and an ultra-sound machine have also been purchased to improve the Health Centre’s services. We also looked in on a physiotherapy session, where the physiotherapist was instructing a mother on how best to exercise her child’s limbs after his accident.
S. and Sh. accompany us to the Model Farm, this time for an “official” visit. The farm’s organically managed garden plots are now mainly for demonstration, with seed-saving forming an integral part of the work. Few training sessions are held at the Model Farm these days; energy instead being put into introducing organic methods and techniques in the villages through “on-the-spot” training. So far the farm has hosted training courses for over a hundred local farmers, although Sh. has plans to extend the farm-based training programme, especially as the farm is now making a profit from new-style rice-cum-fish farming combinations. SUS provides local farmers with seeds and on-site training courses – all of which are free for the participants.
Seed preservation of the different traditional varieties of rice is important, especially as the government is keen to promote the use of hybrid seeds. Using hybrid seeds is not regarded as sustainable, because it leads to more fertilisers being pumped onto the land in an attempt to achieve so-called bigger and better harvests. SUS is instead encouraging organic cultivation with traditionally resistant seed varieties, especially as this matches the sustainable approach they promote. We marvelled at the 46 types of rice seeds being preserved and distributed to local farmers – the seeds being kept in perfect condition in pottery jars lined on shelves in a cool and dark shed. Non-hybrid vegetable and fruit seeds are also preserved in the same way.
A bio-gas system is in operation at the farm, although at the time of our visit gas production was limited because the system needed cleaning out. It’s a very simple system – manure from the farm’s cows is shovelled into a concrete walled pit and pushed down a hole connected to a pipe. Rigged up to a simple gas stove the workers sleeping on the premises then use the gas to cook their meals. This technology was S’s speciality and he proudly told us that he’d given a lecture about the subject in Sweden in connection with a visit there.
Keeping cows for milk production and duck and poultry rearing are also practised on the farm – again the techniques and methods being transferred to local villagers in their own habitats. Homestead organic vegetable cultivation for nutritional benefits is organised in a 5-bed system for all-the-year-round cultivation – an effective system developed by the Agricultural University in Dacca. Cultivation like this, together with seed collection, cow and poultry rearing and fish cultivation are sustainable and transferable skills.
We inspect the new pond area taking shape next to the big paddy field behind the farm. Labourers are digging out the new fish pond behind the Model Farm - different levels being excavated to accommodate both rice and fish cultivation – known as “paddy-cum-fish-culture” – in reciprocal combination. Fish excrement fertilises the land and the fish eat the weeds in the paddy field area. Fish culture is being increasingly promoted in the area as it has proved to be profitable and requires little labour. The labourers – all men – hack out clods of earth and dump them in baskets. Two men then heave the full basket onto the other’s head (wearing a flat-topped straw “hat” on which the basket is accommodated), who then transports it to a growing heap of earth at the side of the pond area. But each carrier can only go so far and the loads are carried in relays to the dump. Each basket is extremely heavy and especially taxing for those having to negotiate the hill from the depth of the pond to field level. Each labourer is employed on a daily basis and earns 100 taka each day (the equivalent of 10 Swedish crowns).
Saturday 2nd February We pay another visit to Purbadhala, this time to visit a Non-Formal Primary Education (NFPE) class for children between 7-11 years of age and a private home where a peripatetic SUS physiotherapist is helping a mother to exercise her 3-year-old child suffering from cerebral palsy. The child, a girl, was lying on a mat outside in the sun and her mother was massaging and moving her limbs. These exercises have to be done 3 times a day for 20 minutes at a time. After only 3 months of physiotherapy the child is showing signs of considerable improvement and when the exercises were over the child started to move her arms on her own and tried to sit up and crawl. A bamboo walking frame has been constructed so that the child can practice walking with support. The mother was so happy to learn that QSS was supporting this work and that we’d taken the trouble to come and see for ourselves. It’s really quite amazing that so very little of our western wealth can make such an enormous difference to someone’s life....
On the way back to the car we pass a little bamboo hut “shop-cum-tea stall”, selling rice, potatoes, chillies, shallots, biscuits and sweets. The wife has been able to get a micro-finance loan from SUS to start the business and hubby helps out by making tea. This is only one example of how poor people are able to put their toes on the economic ladder, feed themselves and their families and gradually expand their activities.
We visit the static clinic, based at the SUS offices in Purbadhala. A physiotherapist helps severely disabled children with various exercises. M. explains that SUS try to teach people that disability isn’t a curse from Allah but a disease that can be managed and cured – a radical approach to many of these people. Each mother is taught how to help her child and they then practice the exercises together at home. One young woman came up to us with a big smile on her face. Her young son (whom she was holding in her arms) had been born with a cleft palate (a common problem resulting from malnutrition) and SUS had organised an operation. He was on the way to a full recovery and a normal appearance, and was able to feed properly. His mother was so proud of him. Just looking at her and absorbing her radiating happiness made my eyes water. Another much younger child was waiting for similar surgery, but would have to gain a few more pounds before an operation was possible.
We attend a Human Rights Group meeting, in progress as the SUS offices. These people (mainly men but an increasing number of women) ensure that conflict issues in the various villages relating to land, dowry, violence of all kinds, early marriage, polygamy, etc., are dealt with in the best way possible. They also organise regular Legal Camps in the different villages, where trained legal advisers (always a man and a woman working together) give advice to those needing help to solve their problems. The Human Rights Group reported that thanks to SUS’ initiative in this area they were able to develop the work further to reach more people and that it wouldn’t be long before they could organise and support themselves in these activities.
We are taken to a Legal Camp – way out in the countryside. These gatherings usually happen on Saturdays as the legal advisers are free from other official duties on that day. The local Human Rights Group Secretary is also present and ensures that everyone who needs help gets it. In the short time we are there people recount their stories of polygamy, torture and problems with land to the legal advisers who then give them the relevant guidance.
Sunday 3rd February D. SUS’ Finance Manager, accompanies us to Mymensingh. Mymensingh is a big city and quite different to rural Netrakona. Problems here include prostitution, drugs, AIDS, and so on. We are taken to a slum area where SUS has set up two REFLECT circles for poor adolescent girls. Their activities have only been in operation for a few months but already the girls (aged between 13-16 years of age) have discussed nutrition, adolescent problems, reproductive health, dowry, early marriage, etc. Some of the girls perform a spontaneous play for us about the early marriage issue. They also sing, dance and bring their embroidery to show us. A sewing teacher is available to help the girls, who then try to sell the garments they make in the local market. The materials often cost more than the price they are able to get for them, however. SUS activity in this area is low-key at present and they are looking for donor support to help develop the work here. Working in a city environment is a new venture for SUS, and will pose considerable challenges. As Quaker Service Sweden is due to phase out of Purbadhala soon we wonder whether this new direction might be something to recommend to Friends for consideration.
Tuesday 5th February A light and cool breeze fingers through our hair as we sit on the terrace overlooking the paddy fields. Netrakona is waking up to another day. We are scheduled to meet the SUS Management Group this morning and discuss their visions for the future, or at least up to 2015. All kinds of things up at this meeting, which is both vibrant and energising, and include: how to develop sustainable programmes with very little outside donor support, how to work towards a gender-balanced society, how to continue to provide a community-friendly service, accountability and transparency, how to make use of natural resources and not damage the environment, capacity building of SUS staff and management, IT development, etc. They tell us that they don’t regard Quaker Service Sweden as a mere donor agency, but as a development partner. R. emphasises that Quaker Service Sweden and SUS share similar values and visions, especially when it comes to peace and justice. Time and time again during this trip I have been strongly reminded that Quakers in Sweden are very much involved in peace and justice work in the world –through Quaker Service Sweden’s engagement and commitment in Bangladesh, Burundi, Ramallah and St. Petersburg.
We meet the SUS Human Rights and Legal Services staff in the afternoon. It is clear that the SUS human rights work has been catalytic in empowering local officials and citizens to take an active interest in what is happening at the local political level and ask pertinent questions. The staff are keen to point out that they are aiming towards justice and fairness at family, society and state levels, and are trying to both inform people of their rights as well as provide human rights services. Despite local opposition and threats – mainly from officials who are afraid of losing power and favours – the SUS staff are committed to continuing to create open dialogue for change.
We go for a walk with H. later in the afternoon. The SUS staff won’t let us go anywhere on our own “for security reasons”. We walk along the wide brown River Mogra and across to the more rural and residential part of town. When it gets too dark to see where we are going we decide to take a rickshaw home. H. waves one down and negotiates both the price and the possibility of taking three passengers instead of the more usual one or two. He is successful and we all climb in; H. perches at the back and T. and I squeeze onto the narrow seat. H. envelopes us in his arms so we don’t fall out, and off we trundle; our thin and sinewy driver negotiating both the bridge and the potholes. There are no headlights on a rickshaw, only a little oil lamp underneath to indicate its presence. It’s really quite amazing how the drivers manage to see where they are going and avoid other rickshaws! Needless to say the ride home is something of an adventure. On arrival at the Health Centre H. pays and I look on and wonder how on earth he can distinguish which notes to give the driver in the pitch black of night.
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But night turns to day and it is time for us to leave SUS and Netrakona and return home. Apart from smiling faces amidst hardship, unceasing generosity and open friendliness something that will remain in our memories is the unwillingness of the SUS staff to say “goodbye”. No, they say, we won’t say goodbye because it’s too “final”. Here we say AbAr dacha habe; “we’ll meet again”.
But night turns to day and it is time for us to leave SUS and Netrakona and return home. Apart from smiling faces amidst hardship, unceasing generosity and open friendliness something that will remain in our memories is the unwillingness of the SUS staff to say “goodbye”. No, they say, we won’t say goodbye because it’s too “final”. Here we say AbAr dacha habe; “we’ll meet again”.
