Bangladesh: Children in Bangladesh

People who read the reports of SCAW volunteers or who regularly read items on the SCAW Web site, are used to descriptions of the children who attend the bedkit distributions in poor urban setting or remote villages. The recipients arrive early, by bus, boat, or on foot, often traveling many hours. They are excited and become more excited as they change into new clothes and sit patiently while the bedkits are being given out. Their brothers and sisters come with them and are equally excited and enthralled. These are emotional family occasions.

Also standing around the site, watching the proceedings are children whose families have not been selected for kits. This is a heart-wrenching experience for all SCAW travelling teams. On this trip, we are giving away 8,000 kits but this is a drop in the bucket in a country of over 150 million people in which children abound.


You see children everywhere.

• The five day old baby in the middle of a large communal bed, lying on a SCAW bed mat from last year. The bed occupies two thirds of a room which is home to eight people: the baby under a net frame like the ones we used to use to keep flies off food.


• The three or four year old child carrying a doll-like infant, scrambling in horrific traffic for pennies.


• Boys playing cricket*, with a real bat and a rubber ball, in the only open space in an inner city slum.


• A toddler playing, and occasionally appearing to plant a seed, in front of a line of family members, many not much older than she, systematically planting a field by a roadside.


• A child waking and stretching on its sidewalk sleeping mat an hour or so after dawn, watched over by a woman left by a family whose rolled sleeping mats are stored for the day on a wall beside the already incredibly busy street.


• Children playing cricket* on a sand bank (presumably with a ball which floats).
  Children among the crowd on top of a packed bus traveling at over 100km/hr on a packed highway. (We saw the wreck of a bus which had crashed the previous day, killing fifteen, and injuring fifty.)


• A little girl throwing rocks at those of her twenty or so cattle which ventured too close to the train track.


• Six boys under five years, carefully sorting a truck load of garbage.


• Children playing cricket* in a paddy field, sliding in the mud for the ball.


• A family, parents, and three very young children breaking up a truckload of bricks — presumably to make gravel — each with a small hammer. (There are essentially no rocks in Bangladesh, which is mainly underlain by the silt of the world’s largest delta.)


• Small boys being moved on from in front of a store where they were watching cricket on TV.


• Teenage girls in sari-like school uniforms, proudly going to school.


• A young teenager peddling a rickshaw piled high with produce, on a traffic-clogged street, with a toddler proudly sitting on top of the load.

This is a country of children. They abound – in the rural areas and the packed cities, by day and by night. In Canada, most of us have forgotten what it is like to live in a neighbourhood full of kids. Even when there are children in our home communities, they spend long hours indoors and in school. We forget them and tend to keep them quiet even when they are excited.

We forget that they are our life and our future, that they are us as we were.

Here in Bangladesh, they have not forgotten such things. While we should never glamorize the lives of children here, no one can deny that they are front and centre in the life of the nation.

Peter Adams
SCAW Travelling Volunteers