Home
This is the combined website for the Kansai Bangladesh Project and Fieldwork Bangladesh. The Kansai Bangladesh Project (K.B.P.) is working to create sustainable programmes with local people in Bangladesh. We send regular financial support and organise work visits to and from Bangladesh. Fieldwork (Bangladesh) is in the process of establishing itself as a local Bangladeshi NGO.
BANGLA REPORT 2010-2011 Dec 18 to March 18th.
Dhaka is a city of many people. Now there are too many cars for its crowded roads; more affluent people and more people in poverty. We arrived after midnight and on the 15km drive into the city centre on poorly-lit roads. It is the ramps, not the people, that capture our attention. Many road ramps to slow you down to an almost complete halt, at times. We pass the Radisson Resort Hotel on the left and, on the right, people sleeping on the ground near the road. A dream for some; destitution for others. Why have we come again to a country where the problems increase with every extra mouth to be fed?
DHAKA
In Dhaka we stayed at the Society for Environmental and Human Development (S.E.H.D). They provide accommodation, good food and many useful contacts throughout the country. We are always grateful to them for their support and plan to work more closely with them in the future. Thanks to Sunil Barua for coming up from Chittagong for a policy meeting. That he was delayed by a hartal or strike in Chittagong was an indication that little has changed in Bangladeshi politics.
We have a small office in Dhaka at SEHD. The rent we pay helps them to continue their investigative journalism activities.
RAJSHAHI
Our first visit is to Rajshahi to meet Zakarias Dumri and family who run Maasaus, an organisation to support the indigenous group, the Mahle. There are 150 Mahle villages in north-west Bangladesh with a total population of around 25,000. He met us at the Rajshahi bus station from where we took an electric taxi to Dumkurahat which is his home and centre of his organisation. We visited 3 Mahle villages and found them to be virtually landless. In one village the young people are conserving the Mahle musical traditions. We felt this was a worthy effort and will support them with some improvements for sanitation and some traditional musical instruments. We are sending a musician there from Hong Kong in November this year to play and to archive their traditional music.
DINAJPUR
From Rajshahi we went north to Dinapur to visit the campus of Dipshika at Rudrapur. Dipshika means a ‘shaft of light’. This year we were travelling with Scottish architect Douglas Murray who had found the work of Anna Herlinger on the Dipshika Campus. Her buildings received an Aga Khan foundation prize for design in 2008. Douglas was looking to see how local materials such as local clay and bamboo could be used in new ways. The working together of the buildings and the educational program of Dipshika was particualarly impressive in the Desi Building where young electricians are being trained. They all get jobs at the end of the training period.
CHITTAGONG
Our third port of call was to Chittagong, the main port for Bangladesh. Here we visited Baruapara, a suburb of Chittagong, traditionally a Buddhist settlement. where we met SACO and inspected the working conditions of the 25 or so wells we have had drilled there under the guidance of Sunil Barua. We ordered two more wells for the poorest part. We agreed to try to develop a child sponsor scheme in the area run by SACO. Interested persons please contact Sachiko.
BAISHARI
From Chittagong we took the bus over the new Karnaphuli Bridge to Baishari, our final destination, and a Union just inside the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Prior permission had to be obtained for our visit and we had a nightly police guard while we were in the area.
Stopping at the small town of Idgor on the way we ordered a photo-voltaic to give light in the evening at our Learning Centre in Baishari. Pre-payment meant 4 % off the price and the simple panel was installed on the roof the next day. It came with a large battery which was wired up to create a lighting system with 5 lights. We purchased an inverter which allows one to charge batteries in computers and mobile phones. This provides communication with the world at large.
In addition we improved the food storage facilities, decorated the office and guest house and set up a gardening exchange program. In future we will add bookshelves, lockers for the children and a further photo-voltaic panel to the roof.
It was a grey morning with shafts of sunlight highlighting the dust in the air as we shot up from Dhaka Airport. It was 5 weeks earlier that we had flown into a Dhaka where the issues were extra-judicial killing, high food prices, a crash on the Dhaka Stock Market, justice for war criminals 40 years on, the record of the Awami League’s first two years and Dhaka’s traffic congestion problem. Flying to Hong Kong we felt that while we had solved no problems we were satisfied with the lights for young girls in our Learning Centre.