Visit to Rajshahi

Last week I was very privileged to travel to Rajshahi, which is a University town on the West of the country. My colleague and I left on Sunday 25th January by coach from Dhaka in the afternoon. We travelled on a lovely AC coach, which totally reformed my impression of coach travel in Bangladesh - lots of room, not too many people, a film on route, complimentary bottled water and even a nice service station on the way; can't be bad.

The trip was supposed to take 5 hours but in the end it took about 6.5 hours because the fog was so bad; I've never seen such thick fog as here - something to do with the humidity during the day and then the cold at night.

Anyway, we arrived late at about 10.30pm and then took a rickshaw to our friends' flat, which is in a hospital compound.

The following day we went to visit a shelter home, which was mostly for trafficking survivors (but not exclusively). We also visited two drop in centres for street children (mostly children of sex workers) and a social community centre for an excluded Hindu community. These projects were great. The kids at all the centres were amazing. At the shelter they performed a cultural song and dance for us and we in turn taught them "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" as well as "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands", which seemed to go down pretty well. As always I was very struck with how content the kids seemed on the surface but knowing that if you scratched away even a little bit there would be a how world of hurt, abuse and pain.

One of the girls there, who can't have been more than 8 years old had been ganged raped, another young lady had had acid thrown at her by her husband when she was 7 mths pregnant and another girl of about 13 arrived at the shelter whilst we were there having been trafficked from her village and then drugged to a state of unconsciousness so that she could be married and then trafficked on. I don't write these stories to cause alarm but I suppose to try and capture some of the awful injustices going on in the world and maybe to give you a deeper insight if you are praying for these issues. With issues like trafficking it can be easy to take an academic view of it, especially in the West when we're not so directly staring the issue in the face, so sometimes it's helpful to hear the reality of the problem.

I know before I came out here I felt one step removed from the problem and I guess it didn't play on my heart and mind as much as it should have done but now that I'm beginning to hear and understand the stories my heart is moved to respond. In fact sometimes it gets so underneath my skin that I feel desparate to go and get all those precious survivors and bring them back to their homes but unfortunately it's not that easy. Fortunately we have a God who is bigger than any trafficker, so I continue to pray that God would intervene in what seems like an impossible situation.

When we went to the drop in centres I played a few games of Carom (very big here) with the kids and chatted to some of them. Whilst the facilities were very basic it is wonderful that there are places like that for kids to go and play, learn, rest and get fed. The alternative is that they would be on the street, probably having to find some kind of work like shoe shining, begging or street cleaning.

The social centre was really fun. It was in the slum area of town, down one of the narrow passageways. It's basically a small concrete unit with a steel roof - about the size of a single garage and it was jam-packed with kids and became even more jam-packed as word got out that the foreigners were around.

We chatted to the kids, heard some Hindi songs and taught them the same English songs we'd done in the shelter. That went down really well- they thought it was hilarious! After that we went for a tour of the slum, which was really interesting. The slum wasn't the worse one I've seen; the houses were fairly spacious and clean and the walls were made of concrete. Having said that the sanitation was still significantly lacking and the houses really were crammed on top of each other.

It's always a bit of an event when foreigners visit - the kids were all running ahead of us to tell their families and they were hanging of us, shaking our hands, blowing kisses and all sorts - I felt like the Pide Piper of Hamlin! It was a truly amazing experience; just great spending time with such happy, welcoming people.

The following morning we travelled back by train to Dhaka. Ironically the train's are slower than the buses but the timings are a bit more reliable. The journey took us just over 6 hours, rather than the 5 the bus takes. Unfortunately our carriage was right at the end next to the kitchen. It was kind of interesting because you could see them cooking away on the floor on the stove - the way they would in a normal kitchen and then there was a steady stream of men coming in and out trying to sell tea and curry-based snacks.

Anyway, all in all a very positive and enlightening trip.

Please continue to email us, comment on the postings, or write us a facebook message. We may not always reply but your comments are always appreciated.

Read more...