Don't Drink the Water
One of our major funders requested that we do an environmental impact assessment in our working areas. I finally have enough credibility and language to be assigned to taking the environmental scientist to the field to show her around the slums. Between AIDS workshops out of town and the "country situation" it has been AGES since I got to go into our Dhaka working area, so I was happy to take her.
We started in Sutrapur, one of our most developed fields. In spite of the poverty, the local organizations are strong enough to insist that the government, their employer who lets them live in this area, provide decent-ish toilets and water supply. Our adolescent groups encourage people to keep the little lanes clean, and the trash is picked up regularly.
Though I had not intentionally planned it this way, the slums got progressively worse. Maniknagar has crazy population density- 22,000 people living in just over a square km (less than a mile). Lalbagh has serious problems with heroin addicts. We have only been working in this area for 4 years (as opposed to over 10 years in Sutrapur). There was trash everywhere, and the local governance bodies are not very strong. The people living there seemed much more volatile, but I suspect that was because we went with only one staff, instead of three, so there was no one to tell the crowd following us to bugg off. The group following us foreigners through the slums got so rowdy that we shut ourselves into the house of a group member. When they nearly broke down the door, we decided we had seen enough and headed home.
It is good for me to get a little scare like that. I'm quite sure that there were enough of "our" people around to stop anything from getting out of hand, but suddenly I have more patience when the director tells me YET AGAIN that I should not visit the field because there is "a situation" today. I see anew why I can't traipse in to see how my adolescent groups are doing, and a regain an appreciation for how much my visits must disrupt the working lives of field workers.
I still wish I could visit more though.
Here are some interesting facts I learned while translating for our environmental scientist. Between 200 and 500 people use each of these water tanks for washing clothes, dishes and themselves. Drinking water is gotten from hand pumps in another location.
More people don't grow their own vegetables, like the squash growing on the latice above Joys head, because the smoke and heat from the cooking fires kills them. Also, the dirt in the pot from whence the plant grows is not enough to produce good vegetables.
We only work with about ½ to 1% of any given slum population but we affect many times that many people with our ideas, and through the activities of our various groups.
Kids like to play cards everywhere. But when it rains for more than 2 days, the barely covered drains/sewers they are playing over flood and get all over the walkway. Most houses have a 1 to 2 foot cement step in front of their door, depending on how high the water usually rises.
We started in Sutrapur, one of our most developed fields. In spite of the poverty, the local organizations are strong enough to insist that the government, their employer who lets them live in this area, provide decent-ish toilets and water supply. Our adolescent groups encourage people to keep the little lanes clean, and the trash is picked up regularly.
Though I had not intentionally planned it this way, the slums got progressively worse. Maniknagar has crazy population density- 22,000 people living in just over a square km (less than a mile). Lalbagh has serious problems with heroin addicts. We have only been working in this area for 4 years (as opposed to over 10 years in Sutrapur). There was trash everywhere, and the local governance bodies are not very strong. The people living there seemed much more volatile, but I suspect that was because we went with only one staff, instead of three, so there was no one to tell the crowd following us to bugg off. The group following us foreigners through the slums got so rowdy that we shut ourselves into the house of a group member. When they nearly broke down the door, we decided we had seen enough and headed home.
It is good for me to get a little scare like that. I'm quite sure that there were enough of "our" people around to stop anything from getting out of hand, but suddenly I have more patience when the director tells me YET AGAIN that I should not visit the field because there is "a situation" today. I see anew why I can't traipse in to see how my adolescent groups are doing, and a regain an appreciation for how much my visits must disrupt the working lives of field workers.
I still wish I could visit more though.
Here are some interesting facts I learned while translating for our environmental scientist. Between 200 and 500 people use each of these water tanks for washing clothes, dishes and themselves. Drinking water is gotten from hand pumps in another location.
More people don't grow their own vegetables, like the squash growing on the latice above Joys head, because the smoke and heat from the cooking fires kills them. Also, the dirt in the pot from whence the plant grows is not enough to produce good vegetables.
We only work with about ½ to 1% of any given slum population but we affect many times that many people with our ideas, and through the activities of our various groups.
Kids like to play cards everywhere. But when it rains for more than 2 days, the barely covered drains/sewers they are playing over flood and get all over the walkway. Most houses have a 1 to 2 foot cement step in front of their door, depending on how high the water usually rises.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home