Bangladesh: Preparing Communities To Keep The Work Alive

The internet connection has been kind to us and Mathew’s second blog post from his field visit to Bangladesh came through this morning with more wonderful stories of the things he is seeing and experiencing out there. If you haven’t already, do have a read of yesterday’s first post.

Over to Mathew:

Mathew Neville, Director of Public Engagement, World Vision UK
Nawabgonj: Day 2
Tuesday 13th November, 2012

The last time I got a letter from a woman telling me she loved me it was from my girlfriend (now my wife) nearly 20 years ago. We were teenagers, I was finishing my A-levels and she was taking a gap year in Ireland, working for a homeless charity – this was all in the days before email, of course.

Today I was handed several letters from women expressing their love for me; or did they mean their love for World Vision…? Either way, it was a great experience and one that only happens to me every two decades!

The women were members of a literacy group that World Vision has supported. Women ranging in age from their 30’s to their 70’s, women who had never previously been able to read or write but who are now able to teach their children and grandchildren.

I felt extremely proud to be part of an organisation that had helped something like this to happen. They wanted to express their thanks and their love for World Vision for everything that we had helped them achieve – one of them said ‘for restoring some dignity’.

Today was an incredible day learning about the ways in which World Vision prepares a community for when it is time for us to leave and work in a new place. As I said in yesterday’s post, we are in the final two years of our time here in Nawabgonj and are therefore putting all of our efforts into empowering the local community to keep going with the work once we have left.

The model that works very well here is the Community Based Organisation (CBO). I had heard about CBOs before but I was totally unprepared for what I experienced today and how it made me feel about World Vision and our supporters.

There are now 14 CBOs in Nawabgonj area and the first one that we visited today had over 1,000 members (only women allowed). The idea is that women pay in a monthly amount that can then be used to make low interest loans to the members. The interest made from the loans and from the capital amount is also used by the women to fund projects in their community such as the literacy group mentioned earlier or training women to run businesses, and even funding children to go to school.

They talked about the campaigns they run to address the problems of early child marriage and how they prevent this from happening when they learn about it in their communities. They talked about how children used to be involved in harmful labour but are now staying in school and finishing their education – it was a real joy to listen to them speak and see their happiness and hope for the future.

These women are poor – make no mistake about that – and yet they are not crushed by poverty because they have hope.

I was reminded so many times today of the last trip that I made with World Vision over a year ago – to the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (East DRC). This was a very different place and I came away with very different feelings.

Somehow I felt so elated at everything I was experiencing today and at the same time so sad for the challenges I know exist in DRC and elsewhere.

I wondered what it would have felt like to visit Nawabgonj 13 years ago, before we had got started here. World Vision came initially to help with disaster relief and apparently this was a very different place then – not the confident and hopeful place it is today.

This is the challenge and the privilege of World Vision and the mission that we have in this world: to find the places where children are living the toughest lives and walk the long journeys with them. The sadness and the joy of this mission is that once they get closer to our vision (to ‘experience life in all its fullness’,) we move on to the next place.

World Vision has played an amazing role here for well over a decade, especially in helping to establish these women’s groups – we see them as the legacy of our work in Nawabgonj.

Apart from all of the infrastructure we have built (the roads, bridges, schools, pumps, latrines and more), these women will actually be World Vision once we have moved on – I feel so strongly that in their hands, this community has a bright future.

Huge thanks again to Mathew for another amazing story of his time in Bangladesh; it’s wonderful to see the positive effects that your support is bringing about. What are you proudest of the community for achieving with your sponsorship and support? Leave a comment here or join the conversation on Facebook.

Read the next step on Mathew’s journey from Day 3 here. If you missed it, you can find Day 1 here.