Dear SCAW Donors,As Bangladesh is essentially one huge delta, its rivers, fingers of water which are the entry to the sea of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers (Padma and Jamuna in Bangladesh) of India, are the real highways of the nation. When travelling on the crowded highways, you are made aware of this by the frequent river crossings, some of them causeways and bridges more than 10 km long. In the rainy season, you must be even more aware of this when half of the country may be flooded. However, the ultimate way to appreciate the roles of rivers in Bangladesh is to travel on them.
We had been to some of the river ports for bedkit distributions and seen the teeming life in them: ships and boats of all sizes loading and unloading, sometimes with cranes and pumps but most often by means of human labour; men carrying impossible loads of iron bars and huge sacks; endless human chains with baskets of sand, filling an entire ship. At these locations, we also caught a glimpse of the people who live by and on the rivers. They depend on the rivers for everything.
One of our major bedkit distributions was at the ancient port of Barisal, the port where, years ago, the British set up their government, arriving by river from Calcutta. To reach and return from this site, we travelled overnight, around ten hours by steamer. We arrived in the port of Dhaka as the sun was going down on the 6th. We found organized chaos as tens of thousands, like ourselves, were there to board ships for different parts of the country. Some of the ships were huge – three decks like football fields, upon which people sat or lay. Families arrived early to stake out a sleeping and eating area. Where it was really crowded, people sat to sleep. Where there was more room, they lay down. The larger boats must have had many thousands of passengers.
As far as we could tell, our vessel had under a thousand passengers on one and a half decks. You could not walk between people. There were whole families — grandparents, parents, and children — all excited and happy and glad to be going home to their villages from Dhaka.
We set off exactly on time and pulled out into the bustling, dark, river. Around us there were taxi-like rowboats, more large ferries like ours, freighters large and small, with the lights of the city all around. We were able to sit near the bow of the ship watching all of this with the aid of a scanning, probing, spotlight which kept us away from other vessels. The small freighters going by us very low in the water often had families on board sitting on top of the cabin or cargo enjoying the cool evening air. The vessel wended it way through rafts of water hyacinth. Even though still a long way inland, the tides of the Bay of Bengal affected our progress throughout the voyage.
We were fortunate to have tiny cabins, each with two campbed-like beds. There was a shared washroom. We ate in a central wardroom, good Bangladeshi food that we had already come to appreciate. We were also very fortunate in that two of our host Rotarians were traveling with us. They were a fount of information about the ship, the river, and the regions through which we passed.
At dawn on the 7th, we arrived in the port of Barisal: nowadays the centre of one of the most rural parts of Bangladesh. Outside of the port the people live in tiny villages. They depend on agriculture and inland and sea fishing. The family of our host Rotarian had lived in the area for generations. We distributed 700 bedkits during a very busy and exciting day, from the courtyard of his home – but that’s another story.
That evening, just before dark, we returned to Barisal to board our steamer home to Dhaka.
Barisal is not Dhaka: there were several large ferries and many boats, but nowhere near the overwhelming sights and sounds of a great city. As we waited for our ship to arrive we watched others boarding theirs, buying provisions for the trip: bananas, cooked nuts and beans, Bangladeshi pancakes, and the like. We also watched people who lived on and around the dock settling in for the night. One lady with two young children was staking a section of a walkway (which would be deserted once the steamers had left) for the night. There were groups of very young children – four whose leader was a girl of no more than eight years who lived on the streets around there. The girl had an open ulcer on her foot. We were a great source of entertainment for them.
When our ship arrived, it was a paddle wheel diesel, built in the 1920s. Its first passenger, we were told, was a Governor General of India. Queen Elizabeth (perhaps the Queen’s mother?) had travelled on it. It was smaller than our previous ship but equally crowded, this time with people travelling on the roof, as people do on trains and buses here.
We had smaller cabins than before, leading off a smaller “state room” which exuded ancient splendour. There was a key for the washroom – that is to say one key between us – which was some distance from where we slept with the intervening space often occupied by sleeping people. We were served traditional British food on the tiny foredeck – excellent fish and chips.
We came up to Dhaka at sunrise and saw the great river and its banks through the mist. Hundreds of craft, large and small. Banks lined with factories, brickyards and ship building and repair facilities. At one location, we saw around 12 ships in drydock (at the upper flood level) each at a different stage of construction. Although it was barely light. Everyone was hard at work: the welders, the gangs loading ships, and the boat taxis.
At the harbour — among tens of passenger ships, most larger than ours — we again saw the extraordinary bustle of life of this great port city. Amidst all the bustle there were people, children, adults, families, still fast asleep in corners or on passageways where people walked round them or stepped over them. One young girl was fast asleep lying face down of a huge sack of something – total unaware that thousands of people were passing by. We saw one person who had died in the night, picked up by men with a freight rickshaw.
We were home in Dhaka, ready for the downtown distribution of 226 bedkits. One of the recipients was a blind boy, another was a little girl who was sick to vomiting but did not want to leave the line, yet another was a tot who was very upset because she had lost sight of her mother who was too shy to come forward. This is why we are here. This day we reached 4,000 bedkits for Bangladesh, 4,000 families touched with hope, but yet so few in the great scheme of things.
But, as Murray Dryden said, "You help those you can, one at a time."
Peter Adams
SCAW Travelling Volunteer
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