A bit of News

Before we get into the general ins and outs of what we've been up to we thought we should let you all know that after much thinking, praying and talking we've decided to stay in Bangladesh for a further 12 months as of August this year.

We're planning on returning to the UK at the beginning of June for 2 months and then we'll be coming back to Bangladesh again in August, God willing. We'll be coming back to work with Oasis again but our roles within Oasis might change slightly.

We're also planning on having a Bangladesh evening in the middle of June where you can share in the experience we've been having (hopefully bringing this blog a bit more to life). When we've confirmed the date and finalised the details we'll publish a new posting.

So, now on to what we've been up to over the past couple of weeks. It's been back to business as usual. Again, Andy's been putting in some late nights and a bit of weekend work as he and the team desperately try and get the product finished within the next 2 weeks ready for our boss to take back to the UK (sorry can't disclose details about the product, we're trying to keep it under wraps for the time being).

Nic's been doing some contract drafting for the business and on the anti-trafficking front we're currently working on 13 cases of girls who have been trafficked to India that we're now trying to bring back. All of them were sold into the sex industry and have been severely exploited, either in the brothels, or by pimps and almost all of them have now been arrested and are residing in a government home in India.

In case you thought you mis-read that, you didn't - those girls really have been arrested. Some of them have been arrested for commercial sex work, or for illegally residing in India (clearly if you're trafficked, your not going to be able to bring identification documentation with you, even if you have it in the first place).

Anyway, we're now working with partners in India to get a repatriation order from the Indian government to bring the girls back across the border and then work to reintegrate them back into society.

No doubt when we're back in the UK we'll enlighten you as to the experiences of some of these girls but for now it makes pretty harrowing reading, so probably best left off the blog for the time being.

We've also been pretty involved in church over the past couple of weeks. Last week there was a women's day at church, which Nic supported and which was really great. It was so refreshing to see the women sharing their problems and supporting one another.

Nic also helped teach at a slum sunday school that the church runs. It has now moved to a Saturday, which is great cause it's now something we can support. It was most amusing because the kids, who probably ranged from age 2 - 10 had the attention span of knats but we did some drama and some activities, which they loved. It was great fun to see them engaging and enjoying themselves, safe and secure from their ordinarily fairly troubled lives.

We've also been in the middle of a heat wave here. Apparently temperatures peaked last Sunday at 44C. That has meant very frequent power cuts and even water shortages. At the church flat they were without water for 3 days! At our place we've lost water a bit in the evenings but nothing too drastic. We're into a good bucket-filling routine now.

The rise in temperatures has caused a massive increase in diseases in the city. Loads of people are coming down with fevers, flus and chronic diarrhoea. The government hospitals are full to bursting and a lot of people can't afford the treatment in any event. Not a pretty sight!

Thankfully this weekend the rains came, which has brought the temperatures right down and has reduced the power cuts and water cuts (phew).

You may recall that our house-helper's house and rest of the slum got destroyed in a fire a few weeks ago. They are slowly managing to rebuild their houses and help is filtering down. It's still not ideal as they're still sleeping under plastic sheets but hopefully it will only be a couple of weeks before the houses get rebuilt.

All the house owners are having to rebuild their own homes, so the speed at which they can build is slightly affected by the rate at which they can buy materials but little by little help is coming.

I think that's about all from our end.

Hope you're all well and enjoy the Bank Holiday

Love Andy and Nic x