creative-i 7: The Bangladesh Issue
Words, voices and images: Connecting to cultures around the world
"You stand there in the sodden earth. The very few possessions you once owned, a tin cup, a plate and a jar for carrying water, all swept away once more in the river flood. You are not alone, you stand in this place with tens of thousands of others".
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This is the seventh in the series of our now very international magazine creative-i. In this issue we travel to Bangladesh, to India and Tibet. It is 2014.
In our journeys series we take you on two Indian journeys, one in the south of India, as we talk to some of the crafts people who conduct business along the roadsides and in the north of India we travel from New Delhi to the startlingly beautiful Taj Mahal.
In the last journey in this issue Indonesia’s Arahmaiani takes us to the north of the subcontinent and to the Tibetan Plateau and to Lab.
And so to the main subject of this issue and to Bangladesh, we visit the chars and meet our friends, old and new. We think about the birth of a nation and visit the contemporary art scene in Bangladesh as we learn about the Dhaka Art Summit.
Chars Livelihoods Programme
In Bangladesh we visit the Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP phase 2) which began in 2010 and adds the districts of Lalmonirhat, Nilphamari, Rangpur, Pabna and Tangail. The programme was designed to lift at least a further 78,000 households from extreme poverty.
Progress in meeting these targets was good. When complete the two phases of the Chars Livelihoods programme will have assisted some 500,000 core participants and benefited a total of around two million chars residents, assisting them to participate in the ongoing economic and social development of the chars. These programs are now complete.
These Chars stories are a case study that allow practitioners to understand the pathway to success, in what is a highly complex and difficult development task. They are still relevant today.
“CLP is widely recognised as having been a very successful programme. CLP2 directly (and in many cases dramatically) transformed the lives of over 78,000 core participant households, and improved the livelihoods of one million poor and vulnerable people. More over, it achieved this while operating in one of the most challenging environments in the world: the riverine island chars in the Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Teesta, and Padma rivers of north-western Bangladesh”. UK Government
And so to our first story
In our world there has always been food, a house and a car, education and a job. I want you to imagine something.
We want you to imagine that you stand in this world with nothing, no possessions, no money, no house, no toilet, no food, and despite the water that surrounds you for as far as the eye can see, no water for you to drink.
You stand there in the sodden earth. The very few possessions you once owned, a tin cup, a plate and a jar for carrying water, all swept away once more in the river flood. You are not alone, you stand in this place with tens of thousands of others.
Each of you with nothing
What you have just imagined is the world of extreme poverty. Before the flood came, eroding the banks and sweeping away your shelter, your household was earning less than one dollar a day. Now there is no way forward and no way back.
You stand in this place and imagine another world. A world in which you too can live and care for your children. You are standing on the banks of the Jamuna River, on a char in Bangladesh. The year is 2005.
So what now?
We wish to acknowledge Abdul Momin who accompanied us on our visit to Afzalpur Village on that bright sunny day, Momin died on 11 September 2014.
We remember him with affection.