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I have now been in Bangladesh for six months delivering a VSO project in some of Bangladesh’s most disadvantaged communities. The project aims to empower women and youth through job creation and is supporting the development of two handicrafts startups. The project is now in its second trimester and handicraft training has commenced. 14 women are being trained in the production of jute bags, cushions and lampshades, the three products deemed most likely to be profitable by the project’s market survey. The project is working in two neighboring villages. Here the average household income is below the official national minimum wage. When household income is stretched to provide for the average 5 heads per household, the per capita income comes to less than half of the common international poverty line of $1 per day.
The project’s two villages are located in a notably conservative part of Bangladesh. Here, child marriage is not uncommon and girls in the community have been known to marry as young as 12. Many of these child brides end up leaving their education in order to take up domestic duties. This can be a frightening experience. Away from the reassurance of their natal homes, young girls may lack the confidence and authority to be able to assert themselves in their new environment. This project aspires to empower women and youth in these two villages by offering them the opportunity to gain more financial independence through the development of its two female friendly businesses. On top of the obvious monetary rewards of work, employment has other benefits in that it can be a place to learn new skills, build confidence, as well be an opportunity to expand one’s social network and build social capital. While female employment levels are low in this part of Bangladesh, the handicrafts sector has traditionally been an acceptable sector for women to engage in. The chance to opt for home based production also allows women the flexibility to be able to juggle domestic responsibilities with employment. Moreover, the women will not only gain employable skills through project provided training, I hope some of them will also gain a new found sense of confidence as first time breadwinners.
Seeing the progress of our 14 production workers has brought me and other members of the team immense job satisfaction. It is inspiring to see the support the women are giving one other in their learning journeys. Whenever I visit the training sites I see the women assisting each other to set the sewing machines or to master a particularly tricky new skill. The female production workers are being trained by three board level members of Rangpur Disctrict’s Women’s Chamber of Commerce. These women are successful local entrepreneurs in their own right and they have been able to share their experiences as pioneering female business leaders with the project’s women. Under the trainers’ expert tutelage, Fatema and her colleagues have already made amazing progress in their first five days of training. In the first day of training the women made simple purses. Above, Shajeda shows off her first finished product at the end of the first day of training. After just 4 days of training, the women are now making jute grocery bags with side pocket detailing and more sophisticated finishing.
The team will shortly be departing the community. It is sad to leave such an exciting project just as we see our beneficiaries start to flourish. However, I leave confident that we have firmly started the ball rolling on a project that will have a perceptible and positive impact on this community. A few days ago the volunteers came across what looked like a drag-queen performing troupe in the village. We were surprised, as the village is in a notably conservative part of Bangladesh where gender divides are very visible and child marriage is still common. The national volunteers in our team informed us that these were Bangladesh’s hijra, a self identifying term for men who label themselves as third gender. The hijra my colleagues met demanded money for their performances and their persistence bordered on the aggressive. We were interested to discover that behaving in an outlandish or aggressive fashion has become a negative stereotype for hijra in the Indian subcontinent. For, as with many ostracized groups, being rejected by society leads to a reduced sense of obligation for social niceties. The hijra are a largely secretive subculture within Bangladesh, with members both living and self-identifying as apart from mainstream society. They tend to live in small groups under the leadership of a hijra “teacher” who inducts boys identifying as hijra through a coming of age ritual when they reach puberty (BBC, 2000). Hijra is often translated as “hermaphrodite”, however non-hermaphrodites are known to join the community when they feel rejected or “othered” by mainstream society. They have developed a rich system of cultural practices which both solidifies them as a group and differentiate them from mainstream society. The most notable is cross dressing, both publically and in private, which is an instantly identifiable feature of the Hijra. In India and Pakistan, hijra have also developed Hijra Farsi, an exclusive language which differentiates them from the general public. Other exclusive practices, such as forced and voluntary ritual castration, are not unheard of in the Asian sub-continent (Catalyst Consortium). Bangladesh, along with other south Asian countries such as Nepal, India and Pakistan, have now legally recognized hijra as a third gender in official documents. Hijra are also now recognized as an at risk group, in that they are eligible for priority in education in Bangladesh. Despite this, Hijra continue to have an uncomfortable relationship with mainstream society. Many provide blessings for newlyweds and newborns and play traditional roles as entertainers, however aside from these rituals hijra are generally ostracized from mainstream employment opportunities. This has seen hijra turn to risky professions or crime - such as petty theft, sex work or racketeering - in order to make a living. As a group, they are often paintbrushed as miscreants or deviants. While development initiatives targeting hijra do exist, outreach work tends to be sexual health focused (ICDDRB, 2009). By focusing interventions on sexual health, the development sector risks overlooking the very substantial obstacles of social prejudice and ostracism the hijra community faces. There is much space for empowerment-orientated work from the development community as well as opportunity for this largely secretive community to be humanized in public discourse through cultural exploration and sensitive inquiry by the Arts. The 2012 film Common Gender was hailed as the first film to tackle third gender as its main theme (Communication and Culture in Bangladesh, 2013). It remains to be seen whether similar projects attracting mainstream consumption will follow in its path. While hijra may be a legally recognized group in Bangladesh, they cannot truly become enfranchised until they can find a comfortable space of acceptance within society. Until that time they will be unable to realize the civil liberties, such as access to education and healthcare, which are rightfully theirs. A couple of days ago I found out that my host sister will likely get married at 12. My first reaction was to automatically assume I had misunderstood my host mother and grandmother. Early child marriage is not uncommon in Bangladesh, especially in rural areas like the village I am living in. I checked and double checked. My Bengali is pretty rough and it is not uncommon for my host mother and I to talk past each other. But no, my host family anticipates arranging a marriage for her when she is 12.
As a development worker, you acknowledge early child marriage as a widespread phenomenon. Prior to coming to Bangladesh, I worked in DFID’s offices in Scotland. The reproductive health team sat at the desk behind me, and the gender team across the room, a stone’s throw away. During this period child marriage was a buzz word that I heard almost every day. In fact, while I was at DFID, ending child marriage was one of the key campaigns in the groundbreaking Girl Summit that my colleagues organized. I even recently organized an event with team members in my Bangladeshi host village on the importance of continuing education that included a drama touting education over child marriage. I wonder if my host family heard about the event. If so, I wonder how they feel about it. For me, working in an office half a world away from project beneficiaries, the girls who undergo child marriage were just numbers to be tackled, victims to be saved. And the parents who perpetuate it beneficiaries to be educated, even perpetrators to be prosecuted. But living in Bangladesh and having developed affection for my host family, in particular my host mother, made this week’s revelation all the more uncomfortable, as it humanizes and personalizes what - according to my own moral compass - is ultimately a very wrong practice. Previously, I have blogged about my host mother’s own personal child marriage story. She herself was married at 12 to a man more than a decade older than her. She shared how scared she was at the time. The tone of the blog was sympathetic, but also hopeful in pointing out the successes of Bangladeshi government campaigns to keep girls in school and delay marriage. At the time I was surprised that my affection towards my host grandmothers was not diminished on learning about their condoning and arranging of my host mother’s child marriage. But the fact that the event happened decades ago made it easier to accept as a piece of history rather than a current reality. Yet my host sister’s marriage is up-coming and will be based on concepts of female duty and marriage that are being held now. My host mother dotes on her daughter and clearly loves her. And the warmth I feel towards my host mother has not receded. Yet, my host mother admitted feeling fear when she herself married at 12. I am having trouble reconciling that with the knowledge that she too is complicit in perpetuating this practice with her own daughter. "[In Bangladesh,] a total of 16,586,000 people over 15 years of age volunteered in 2010." Source: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2010 In Bangladesh, youth activism has long been acknowledged as a powerful force for positive social change. The strong sense of social responsibility Bangladeshi youth have has had a prominent role in recent history and was pivotal in the birth of the country itself. For, it was student activism which gave birth to the 1971 war for independence from which Bangladesh gained its nationhood. Today, the predisposed energy and optimism of youth is still being harnessed by Bangladeshi institutes for change. Grameen Bank, the pioneering micro-credit institution, recruits its bank managers from university graduates under the age of 27. It actively avoids recruiting those without previous work experience in banking, preferring fresh minded recruits free from traditional notions of banking. Through these methods, Grameen Bank recruits employees with the stamina and enthusiasm to venture into the most marginalized communities in Bangladesh, sometimes working against the popular dissent of distrustful villagers wary of the idea of their womenfolk taking out loans. By virtue of their age, youth are less indoctrinated into established ways of doing or seeing things. Grameen Bank embraces this and systematically nurtures innovative thinking in its apprenticed managers by encouraging them to challenge the bank’s methods and suggest alternatives. Nobel Prize winner Dr Yunus, the bank’s founder, prides Grameen on its method of giving trainee bank managers both the responsibility and flexibility to be innovative. Once trainee managers finish their apprenticeship period they are to place their innovative ideas into practice by setting up new Grameen bank branches. Likewise, development bodies like VSO Bangladesh deliver much of their work through the principle of youth engagement. Through the establishment of youth clubs, VSO builds the capacity of young adults to deliver development work in their communities and be social activists in their own right. While in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, I worked closely with the youth club of the village I was living in. My friends and youth club members, Bidorshan Chakma and Ripon Chakma, run a Right to Information service for their local community during their free time. My next posting was in the north-west of Bangladesh. Here I worked with youth club president Gulap. Gulap feels strongly that early child marriage is a problem in his community and he wrote a short drama on the importance of continued education for girls over early marriage. The drama was delivered by a cast of UK volunteers to the delight of the audience of local children and their parents. The pull of social activism
“Volunteering is a tradition and an alienable part of Bangladesh people because they have deep feelings for helping others.” (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 2010) The above statement is undoubtedly true. I have been deeply impressed by the deep sense of social responsibility of the Bangladeshi volunteers I have worked with. However there are additional drivers that motivate youth to volunteer that can also be recognized. For, social activism and professional ambition need not be, and are often not, mutually exclusive. In 2014, I delivered a public speech on behalf of VSO at an UN hosted event in central Dhaka for International Youth Volunteerism day. Alongside myself were other speakers representing youth volunteering schemes from the UN and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. The desire to contribute positively to society was, unsurprisingly, a common theme. However, career orientated professional development was just as visible a theme in both the volunteer speakers’ narratives and in the marketing of the volunteering schemes by their host organizations. While in the field I attended volunteer recruitment and motivational events held by the youth clubs my team worked with. Again there was a strong emphasis on the opportunities volunteering offers to develop professional skills, with leadership, organizational and public speaking skills given special attention. It is worth pointing out that unemployment is a prominent concern in the social consciousness of this community as well as throughout the rest of the country (although, according to World Bank statistics, unemployment is actually lower in Bangladesh than in the UK, though on the rise.) Youth volunteerism as a development tool There has been a growing interest in development circles to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the role volunteerism plays in societies. Development research points to the positive psychological impact volunteering can have in engendering a feeling of social inclusion and developing self esteem. Volunteers are also recognized in the development sector as a powerful vehicle for social messaging. This is because grass roots volunteers are best situated to deliver development campaigns, such as sanitation & hygiene or female empowerment, in a language, dialect and form most suited to their local context. Moreover, development programmes have the bonus of greater community buy in and sustainability when it is the community members themselves who act as the delivery agents. As mentioned above, volunteering is also a valuable space for professional skill development. The rigidity of formal education often gives little opportunity for practicing interpersonal, organizational, public speaking, and other skills essential for career development. In volunteering, on the other hand, youth have more opportunities to create roles of responsibility for themselves, with the added benefit of gaining recognition from the local community. However, Bangladesh’s Bureau of Statistics findings suggest that volunteering is largely a male dominated sphere in Bangladesh. According to a 2011 survey, volunteering by men constitutes 76.3 per cent with women at only 23.7 per cent. Female participation could be underestimated since the survey questioned heads of households who are usually men. However, the reported gender disparity is large enough to be statistically significant. My experience working with Bangladeshi youth clubs in two different regions of Bangladesh very much corresponds with this. Even if female names make it onto youth club membership lists, active female members are few and far between. There is still much scope for the development industry to explore youth volunteering as a space where young women can develop as leaders in their communities. I spent a brief period of time researching China’s sex industry while living in China in 2009. I visited two brothels in Beijing with an outreach worker working for a Christian NGO. Fashion in sub or counter culture is often a loud statement of identity that visibly discerns the wearer from the fray. In China I met with sex workers who, when they returned to their natal villages, used fashion to advertise their newly urbanized identities and assert heightened socio-economic status. It is worth pointing out that, aside from their partners and most trusted friends, these women’s family and friends were largely unaware of their trade as sex workers in the city. They were therefore able to display their newly urbanized selves without negative judgment. In popular Chinese thought urbanization is equated with cultural sophistication and the sex workers I met made conscious effort to display their urban status through fashion. Ethnographic anthropologist Tian Tian Zheng also found Chinese sex workers in Dalian city who attempted to shed their rural identities and remake themselves as urbanites through fashion consumption. Ironically, however, the sex workers I met primarily found urban fashion inspiration from the TV shows and magazines which their rural peers also readily had access to. For, these women rarely ventured outside their place of work and their main contact with Beijing’s population was through male clients rather than other urban women. The women were tentative to leave the familiarity of the brothels. It should be pointed out that there was no one actively stopping the women from leaving. The women managed the day to day running of their establishments without a pimp or madam’s presence. Nor was safety an issue as their brothel was situated in a fairly upmarket area of Beijing where crime is low. The outreach worker I was with explained that it was more an issue of the women feeling overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of a large city having come from small rural communities themselves. The NGO who arranged my visit was having difficulty attracting the women to alternative lines of work, despite offering free training in any skilled trade of the women’s choice (bakery, jewelry making etc.) At first I found this to be surprising as, while the sex industry is widespread in China - both geographically and throughout the social strata - sex work is still illegal and the purveying of sex is very much a socially unacceptable practice. This is reflected in the fact the women I met never directly referred to their trade as sex work and referred to their clients as “massage” clients, despite not having any formal massage training. Despite this, the sex workers I met were still largely unwilling to pass up the financial rewards of sex work for a more socially acceptable trade. On top of cultural authority as "urbanites", working in Beijing's brothels gave the women significant purchasing power. These two elements made these women confident consumers of fashion. In East Asia, outward displays of material wealth are given more weight as valid displays of socio-economic status than in the UK. Fashion consumption is a powerful display of socio-economic potency, as it displays both the wearer’s cultural saviness in being able to discern “fashionable” clothes and their economic power in being able to afford them. Of course, fashion is just one of the many ways to display purchasing power and urban tastes. And, it would be a logically very weak argument to equate sex work in China to women’s pursuit of fashion. However, like many of the juxtapositions we find in life, it is thought provoking to consider that through such a social taboo as sex work the women I met were actively reinventing and heightening their social statuses. Personal adornment is an obvious form of identity shaping, an ages old and universal phenomenon. It is not surprising therefore that garment fashion should be a popular form of self expression and tribal identifier used by the tribes of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. In the Hill Tracts, traditional forms of dress and their unique designs identify different tribal groups. The women of the largest tribe of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Chakma, wear untailored woven cloth wrapped around their waists. A horizontal strip of patterned design at the bottom as well as the top of the wrap identifies the Chakma from the dress of the Tripura tribe, also local to the Hill Tracts. A patterned strip of cloth, similar to a narrow shawl or wide scarf, is draped around the shoulders or wrapped around the chest. This dress is called the Penong Khadi. I recently spent three months working with the Chakma community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts on a VSO development project creating tribal textile enterprises. As well as a creating jobs, this project is leveraging the commercialization of tribal textile production to propagate and help preserve waistloom weaving which has until recently been a dying art form. The waistloom is tribal textile production in its original form. For the Chakma, weaving is very much considered to be a female only past-time and waistloom skills have traditionally been passed on from mother to daughter. By marriage a young woman will have produced a design piece displaying the different designs she has learned how to weave. The waistloom is painstaking work, however, and requires decades of practice in order to master it. The current generation of young Chakma women have little interest in learning and waistloom skills risk dying out. Kochishona is a resident of the Chakma village my team worked in as well as a team host mother. She is considered one of the best weavers in her village. She learnt when she was 10 years old by watching her mother. When she sees a pattern she likes she can memorise it and recreate it in her weaving. She sums up the difference in the handloom and wasitloom in the amount of brainpower needed. Production of beautiful waistloom designs require a lifetime of practice and many generations of collective knowledge. Detailed planning and sustained attention is required to render a complete piece. A slip of concentration and one mistake will ruin a whole piece. Likewise, mistakes slash-down sales value. The Penong Khadi is the main produce of the tribal textile industry. Once considered antiquated and unfashionable, the Penong Khadi has been resurrected as a special-event dress of choice for young women. At religious events, weddings and other celebrations, Penong Khadis are donned in a variety of different colours and designs. The re-popularization of the Penong Khadi has meant that, despite waistloom production decreasing, demand for tribal textiles has increased. The introduction of the handloom to the Hill Tracts has meant that this demand can be met cheaply with industrial scale production. While it cannot compete with the waistloom in terms of quality of product, the handloom has allowed the Penong Khadi to become a popularly consumed fashion product. Meanwhile, while waistloom was traditionally only for personal consumption, waistloom produce has undergone a renaissance as a luxury alternative to handloom products. Rangamati is the heart of the tribal textile industry and UNDP project officer Sukhesur (Polto) Chakma tentatively dates its weekly waistloom fabric market as being only a decade old. It is now a dynamic centre of tribal textile commercialism, and a hotspot for waistloom weaving women to network with the merchants who spread their goods across the Hill Tracts, across Bangladesh, and abroad. As far as I am aware, there has not yet been a major concerted effort to preserve or teach this popular knowledge within the Chakma or other Chittagong Hill Tracts tribal communities. Yet waistloom woven products are becoming luxury goods with willing consumers in the Hill Tracts’ tribal communities. Tenzing Chakma is a Chakma fashion designer; with fashion house Sozpodor, Tenzing Chakma was the first to bring branding to Chakma textiles. He uses traditional waistloom products with innovative designs for his high-end fashion label. His pieces are in high demand from the Chakma community across the globe as well as from Chakma royalty. For his fabric Tenzing Chakma commissions waistloom weavers from Rangapani - a satellite village of Rangamati town and major hub for waistloom weaving. Unlike with the handloom, waistloom weavers are not employees of textile mills but self employed entrepreneurs in their own right. Weaving takes place in the home and can be considered as less of a full time job but more of a way of life that fits around domestic responsibilities. The waistloom is also the daily practicing of ancestral heritage, weaving into their products intricate designs that have been passed down through generations of women for hundreds of years. For these women, the waistloom can both be understood as business and cultural practice. Bangladesh is a contradiction. In some ways, when it comes to female power figures, Bangladesh is ahead of the curve. Both leaders of the two main political parties, one of whom is the prime minister, are female. Although both women arguable rose to power on the back of their political lineages as the daughter and spouse of political leaders, it is still notable that it is the face of a female prime minister who graces the walls of schools, government offices, and businesses in Bangladesh. 20% of Bangladesh’s Parliament seats are held by women. That is twenty more seats being held by women than mandated as minimum by constitutional quota. (In the UK 29% of MPs are female.)
It was Bangladeshi Dr Yunus, grandfather of microfinance, who started up Grameen bank which deals in micro loans exclusively for women. Social crusaders like Dr Yunus reflect Bangaldesh’s vocal women’s rights movements and Bangladeshi women’s initiatives, like Grameen bank, are being exported throughout the world. Yet, Bangladesh’s rates of early child marriage are still some of the highest in the world. According to UNICEF 66% of girls are married before they are 18. This is despite the fact that Bangladesh law dictates that women have to be 18 or above before they can get married. I am currently living and working in a rural community in Bangladesh with a mixed team of Bangladeshi and UK volunteer development workers. Early child marriage is a noticeable reality of life here. My team is working with local youth clubs to deliver community development initiatives. The youth club members (overwhelmingly young adult males) raise early child marriage of girls as a pressing issue they would like to address in their communities. My host mother herself was married at 12. Her husband is more than a decade older than her. She was younger than many of her friends were when they got married. I asked her if she was scared when she got married. She says she was scared, but she slowly got used to it. I explained that in the UK some women get married at 40. She sucks her teeth in surprise then gently bobs with laughter. She is now in her 40s. 40 is far too old to get married in Bangladesh. Shahanaz, a BRAC Education Programme manager overseeing primary schools in the local area, notes that of the 28 children who recently graduated from her schools, half dropped out from high school within the first three years. BRAC launched an investigation to identify the reasons. It discovered that of the 14 children, all under the age of 14, seven boys dropped out in order to work in Rangpur jute mills or Dhaka garment factories, and seven girls were pulled out of school to get married. Child brides are trapped in domesticity before they have the chance to consider other options. Early child marriage is also a considerable health risk for young girls. Girls who give birth before their bodies have fully developed are more at risk of birth complications. Moreover, away from the familiarity of their natal homes and thrust into a new environment, young brides are also vulnerable to exploitation, bullying or abuse by their husbands or in-laws. One tactic the development industry is pursuing to tackle early child marriage is to campaign for continued education for girls. Government initiatives such as cash incentives and food for education schemes have already had notable success in keeping girls in primary school. However, the older the girl is the higher dowry demands on her parents. The dowary system is normalized in Bangladesh and attempts to stamp it out have largely been successful. This makes girls from poor families disproportionately vulnerable to early marriage as poor parents struggle with dowry demands. One way of overcoming this would be to focus on making higher education universally attainable for women from poor families. As well as being a means of escaping poverty, higher education makes women more attractive brides and dowary demands are correspondingly lower. State higher education is free and highly respected in Bangladesh. However, it is also extremely competitive and tends to attract children from middle class families rather than the lower classes. Quotas or targeted recruitment schemes could help change this. It is a shame that highlighting the attractions of higher education may covertly play into a system where brides are treated as commodities; however it is unlikely that the dowary system will disappear overnight. In the meantime the pursuit of higher education could be an attractive enough goal to stave off child marriage. When I was living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a 4 year old child from the village died. He died in India during open heart surgery. The first I heard of it was when my host mother got a phone call and then hurried to the parents’ home bringing me with her. Many women from the village and a few older men had gathered there (despite the fact that the child’s parents were still in India and not at home). 5 days later a wake was held in the evening.
Mourners sat on mats outside the child’s house and were led my monks in the chanting of Buddhist sutras. On occasion monks stopped to speak directly with the parents of the dead child who were sitting directly in front of them. I didn't understand what was being said, but I imagine it was some form of counseling.The bereaved were very contained in their mourning (unlike in China where people mourn through cathartic outpourings of grief.) The next day there was more chanting followed by a lunch in a marquee set up in the field in front of the house. The lunch was hosted by the parents of the dead child, although villagers contributed dishes. The guests ate first and were served by their hosts. This is in accordance with South Asian cultural practices. That evening the parents of the dead child again hosted villagers, this time fewer people in a less formal fashion and in their home. The parents continued to remain composed in front of their guests. A month later I attended a “religious festival” which turned out to be the funeral of a monk. The atmosphere at this event was very different from that at the child’s funeral. I would describe it as festive. Local venders hawked tea, sweets and balloons. A brass band accompanied the transportation of the monk’s body to the funeral pyre. The monk had died several months ago and his body had been preserved prior to his cremation. His coffin was decorated in colorful paper and had a transparent window over his face. Mourners brought offerings of paper and kowtowed in front of the coffin before taking a curious peek at the window. Parents helped lift their children up to the coffin for a better look. Nobody seemed particularly petrubed by the site of the dead body. I followed the crowd and paid up an offering in order to also have a peek. I saw a sunken face, stained dark brown and shiny with preservative. The eye sockets were empty but for fluffy grey mold growing inside. It was a little disconcerting. The monk’s coffin was placed within a funeral pyre several stories high and decorated with colorful paper to look like a pagoda. Firecrackers were shot at the pyre to ignite it. The crowd accompanied this with appreciative cheers and pantomime style groans of disappointment when the firecrackers hit or missed the pyre. The pyre was refusing to light and we left after thirty minutes of unsuccessful attempts. I recently spent three months working and living with the indigenous Chakma community in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). I have tried to return, but within the past month access to CHT for foreigners has been restricted and I am still waiting for my request for entry to be processed.
At the end of 2014 ethnic tensions between Bengali settlers and the indigenous communities simmered discernibly. During my time there, the spark that triggered all out violence was an arson incident at a Bengali owned pineapple farm. It is still not clear who the arsonists were, but members of the Bengali community saw it as the final straw in a long list of grievances and retaliated by burning downing homes and there were reports of rape of indigenous women. The backdrop to these hostilities is years of unsuccessful negotiations between those campaigning for indigenous rights and the Bengali government. As negations once again stall, the situation continues to deteriorate and I am hearing more rumors of violence from my indigenous Chakma friends in CHT. The rumor mill is a dangerous beast. It is a potent driver of rising tensions which, when they break into violence, claim innocent bystanders. All parties nurse understandable grievances, but tit for tat retaliation too easily deteriorates into long running feuds, the original reasons for discord long in the resulting nastiness. Development work that seeks to build bridges between Bengali and indigenous communities are valuable. The act of working together as peers towards a common goal is not only poignant, but working together in the field forces both parties to see each other as individuals rather than ethnic typecasts. It is also a useful way of refuting negative stereotypes. On a number of occasions I heard Chakma friends describe Bengali men as rapists. However my Bengali team members, hosted by Chakma families, were a clear refutation of this stereotype. I was leading a team of mixed UK and Bengali volunteers in CHT and I made special effort to ensure that we work closely with Chakma youth club members in designing and delivering our development interventions. One host father voiced that volunteering can be a powerful tool against the caste system. Certainly, it was inspiring to see Bengali and indigenous Chakma youth socializing and working together as equals. The system of having communities members host volunteers in their homes was especially meaningful, for it was in this same village that a local girl had been ostracized for marrying a Bengali man and some families were reluctant to let Bengali men into their homes. Sadly, I have recently heard that VSO will be pulling this particular programme out of CHT. I imagine the increasing difficulty of getting foreigners entry access and the safety of national volunteers in the face of increasing ethnic violence are two likely reasons for their decision. I regret the decision but sympathize with VSO’s position. |
AuthorI am of Sino-Scottish descent and I have a professional interest in the development sector. ArchivesCategories |