Bangaldesh: Mission (8,000 Bedkits) Accomplished

From Bangladesh 2008 Photo Album

Day 16: Tongibari

We are finished — making it 8,000 bedkits, with today's six hundred at the village of Tongibari.

This village is now home for two hundred displaced families that lost everything during monsoon season when the river washed their homes away. After the distribution we visited some of the homes in the village that had received bedkits the previous year. It is hard to describe the sense of sadness that enveloped us as we tried to comprehend how little these people have and what joy and comfort such a simple gift as a bedkit brings.

We saw cow dung drying on sticks that is the source of fire, simple huts with one or two small spaces to live in, and men working at an ad hoc cement block manufacturing site hauling gravel to the cement mixer and carrying the mixed wet cement by hand to the block forms. These men work incredibly long and hard for about $1 per day.

From Bangladesh 2008 Photo Album

Two pictures stick out from the ones added to the Bangladesh 2008 Photo Album today: sandals lined up outside a simple hut (take your shoes off before entering my home no matter how humble); kids wearing their new shorts from the bedkit already swimming in the local water hole and showing off their muscles for the camera. Kids are kids.

From Bangladesh 2008 Photo Album

Joan is happy because we stopped in this little village at the fabric store and she bought 11m of cloth. The store owners hardly knew what to think as a van pulled up, six foreigners jumped out and filled this little hut, talking and taking pictures, while the rest of the village gathered for the spectacle.

Tomorrow we get organized to head home: tired, fulfilled and numb from the sensory and emotional overload.

Good night and we will talk tomorrow.

Doug MacDougald
for Team Bangladesh

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