SPEAK UP

"I Can Not Be Defeated" - The Struggle for Hope in Rural Bangladesh

Here is the text of a letter, some personal details edited for privacy, from a girl we are sponsoring to stay in school in rural Bangladesh.  There are thousands more like her needing help - that's why we are building the Girls Education Program. 

Some of her language is profound but a bit flowery, a reflection of some of her education spent memorizing eloquent passages in English, some of which she doesn't fully understand.  But the gist of her message is crystal clear - she needs help to pursue her dream. 

Dear Sponsor,

I am 17 years old, and I read in Class 13.  My college name is Kumira Mohila College.  My subject is sociology.  I want to be a professor.  But my parents are very poor.  Their financial condition is not well enough.  My father is a farmer and mother is an illiterate woman.  She does all the house hold works with her own hands.  My father earn a little amount money.  But it is not enough for my family.  My father is a landless farmer who used to work on other people's land.  My parents are illiterate.  So they do not have any knowledge of science and health and nutrition and education.

A Recipe for Hope

Imagine this demographic situation:  Take 170 million people, more than half the population of the USA, and squeeze them into a space one-third the size of California.  Give them a per capita GDP of $1700 per year, 1/28th that of the USA.  Make the land prone to regular cyclones and floods, natural disasters that kill thousands and displace and destroy the livelihood of many more.  High population density, extreme poverty, natural disasters.  It's a recipe for disaster.

Now imagine that you are a young rural girl in that country, where the conservative religious and cultural climate makes it very difficult for you to break out of traditional expectations: early marriage, dropping out of school at age 13, complete submission to your husband even if you are abused, illiteracy.  Add in being a minority Hindu in a predominantly  Muslim country, and being a despised descendant of the Hindu untouchables where even your name sets you apart as lower caste, and the recipe for disaster becomes much worse. That's the situation facing the rural Dalit (untouchable Hindu) girls in Bangladesh: overcrowding, poverty, discrimination, early marriage, lack of education, and an epidemic of unreported abuse. 

Let's Help Jailed Bangladeshi Girls

I met with a Bangladeshi human rights lawyer today to discuss situations where the poor here in western Bangladesh need legal advocacy, and was only somewhat surprised to hear that there are 7-10 minor (under age 18) girls being held in the local jail after being arrested for underage prostitution.  (Side note: All prostitution is technically illegal in Bangladesh, and I've never heard of the police being so concerned as to actually go and arrest or remove minor girls held in prostitution.)  After being arrested either from local brothels or having been found engaged in street-based sex work, these girls have no place to go back to, are often too ashamed to give their parent's real names, and are therefore just kept in jail indefinitely. 

It's a local version of what happens all over the world to trafficked and prostituted minors - with no good options, caught between legal confusion and society's disdain, and with few marketable skills or legitimate job opportunities, they stay locked up in jail or miserable government shelters, their youth and any remaining hope wasting away day by day.  With nowhere to go and no one to care, they are victims again and again of an uncertain, chaotic justice system.  And those are the lucky ones; the unlucky are often trafficked right back into the sexual exploitation they were supposedly "rescued" from in the first place. 

How to Change the World

Thoughtful, comprehensive education of poor girls is the most effective, efficient long-term strategy to fight global poverty.  Nothing else compares to educating girls in terms of an overwhelmingly positive impact on nearly every measure of social improvement: improved child and maternal health, increased family income, reduced domestic violence, better housing, improved education for subsequent generations, increased life span, reduced family sizes and overcrowding, appropriate marriage ages, gender equality, increased per capita GDP, and more. 

Simply put, educating poor girls impacts everything.

If you had a million dollars, and wanted it to work beyond your lifetime to affect future generations, you would best invest in the education and empowerment of girls in poverty.  Nothing else will give you the long-term bang for your buck.  Read the stats from a hundred NGOs and government agencies - really, nothing else comes close.

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.

Pimps in Dhaka - We're Coming For You

It's beyond disgusting when grown men approach me on the street and offer me minor girls for sex.  It's happened in many Asian cities - in Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Mumbai, among others - and now in Dhaka.  Last week I was in Dhaka for a few days, continuing with some meetings to lay the groundwork for our office there, and walking out of a hotel I was approached by a 40-something man who asked me if I needed anything.  I knew instantly what he was offering. 

Scholarships for Dalit Girls

As I discussed in an earlier post, there are thousands upon thousands of Dalits in Bangladesh, some would say several million.  Dalit is the term given to the descendants of the formerly so-called Untouchables, the lowest of the Hindu castes.  While the caste system is officially illegal in both India and Bangladesh, and much of its formal problems have been eliminated, Dalits in both countries still face discrimination, and many are caught in an endless web of poverty spun by years of oppression.

Many Dalit girls drop out of school after the 4th grade, at ages 10-12, and many are soon married off while still young teenagers.  Without an education, an undervalued by a society that tends to see poor girls as a burden rather than a treasure, these girls are essentially destined to lives of deep poverty.  It's been the same cycle for hundreds of years and is unlikely to significantly change anytime soon.  Girls drop out, get married, have kids early, their daughters don't get an education, and within 15-20 years an entire new generation is mired in the same poverty.  If girls stayed in school,

The Untouchables

I spent the day yesterday with my friends from Dhruba, a Bangladeshi NGO based in Khulna which serves the needs of the Dalit community in southwestern Bangladesh. This area is home to at least 50 Dalit villages, communities of 200-400 people each, extremely poor farmers and laborers. Mostly Hindu. We must have spent 8 hours on the motorcycle yesterday, going from village to village meeting with entire Dalit communities who had gathered for the occasion in the flimsy bamboo structures that serve as local schools. It was an incredible day, filled with stories of both abuse and discrimination and the ever-present, hopeful smiles of young kids, the future of their communities. They have an uphill battle, because in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, the Dalits are at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder, kept there by a combination of discrimination, poverty and injustice.

It’s often hard for people in well-developed countries to relate to the mindset created by the past caste system, but

A Place to Call Home

As I roamed around Khulna on my daily walk this morning, my mind raced with a few simple, haunting questions – in a city with so many residential schools, so many majestic, old houses and businesses, why isn’t there a beautiful place for girls who have been removed from the brothels to call home? 

Why do the 17 girls who were removed from the brothels and live in the Alingon Home have to live in a home which, while a thousand times better than their shacks in Banishanta, barely functions to serve their needs?   Why isn’t the most important thing in Khulna