SPEAK UP

A Day in the Dalit Villages

Just got back to my guest house in Khulna after 11 hours visiting 7 different Dalit villages riding on the back of a friend's motorcycle.  Visited most of the 20 girls in our Girls Leadership Program; that's what I think I'm going to call it rather than a sponsorship program since I want it to help develop girls in poverty in many ways to equip them to serve as well-equipped citizens in their communities. 

An exhausting, exciting day.  So fun to see the girls with their new books and school supplies, huddled together with friends in their makeshift schoolrooms, doing their homework and just being kids.  The last three girls we visited were sitting together doing their homework under a single, bare lightbulb, the only one that I could see in the village area.  Really fun to see.  They were all proud to show me their new books, read a bit to me in English, and laugh at my feeble attempts to read even the most basic Bangla.  I reminded all the girls of the three things I've told them to remember:  put in honest hard work at school, be courageous in doing difficult things, and know that an educated girl can do whatever she puts her mind to doing.  That's my three-prong mantra to them - study hard, be fearless, and believe that you can do so much more than your culture tells you that you can achieve or be.  So much fun.

Bangladesh - Behind the Numbers

When I was a kid growing up in Yemen, my Dad and I would challenge each other to name as many countries and capitals as we could, naming countries back and forth until we couldn't name any more.  I thought I was competing with my Dad, but he was probably just training my young mind to think globally.  For some reason I was always fascinated with Burma, a country that today is showing positive signs of change and freedom after a long, difficult history.  I'd get upset if my Dad named Burma before I did.  But a country that fascinated me in another way, and which I never visited until December 2010, was Bangladesh.  As a kid, all I knew of Bangladesh was that it was one of the poorest countries per-capita in the world; was the most crowded large-population country in the world; was predominantly Muslim, which limited opportunities for poor women in particular; and that the country regularly experienced terrible cyclones and flooding.  I thought it must be the neediest place on earth.