Little dreams

Left to right, top to bottom: One of the classroom leaders helps her classmate read aloud in English; children practice their writing; children that attend government school in the afternoon peer into this one-room school.

It was the second morning of a four-day “field trip” outside Dhaka and into two rural districts: Bogra and Rangpur. I quickly, and clumsily, learned that my mastery of Bangladeshi culinary customs – eating with my right hand, and ensuring the spicy lentils, ever-present rice, fresh vegetables and fried fish do not trickle past my knuckles – did not extend to mastery of Bogra’s muddy village paths.

Farzana, a BRAC staffer who happens to exemplify this country’s innovative, resilient spirit, and I rose from our cross-legged positions on the front porch of a village resident. This woman’s porch serves as the meeting place for a group of about 15 adolescent girls, only one of which is married and all of whom participate in BRAC’s Employment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) program. They are slowly building up savings and taking out small loans to buy sewing machines, or maybe a cow, to contribute to their family income. One girl is using her profits from embroidery work to ensure her younger brother and sister can go to school.

Despite the incessant rain – Bangladesh is in the midst of its monsoon season, which means cooler temperatures and, in my case, two pairs of shoes ruined by mud – most of this village came out to see the American (!) woman here to visit their girls. After talking with the girls and many of their mothers, Farzana and I decided to make our exit during a respite from the downpour. The girls said ‘Thank you’ in English. Smiling, and wishing for the hundredth time that I knew more Bangla, I managed a wave and a “thank you.” And then, as I made my way down the single step: I slipped. Badly. A collective gasp consumed the village, followed by a sigh of relief and a few laughs as I grabbed hold of the nearest tree and laughed with them. I’m guessing the story of the American that nearly fell on her arse in their village was told over many cups of cha (tea) that afternoon.

While the villagers passed time mimicking the frantic swinging arms of an American Klutz, I spent midday in a hut in another Bogra village that serves as a BRAC Pre-Primary School in the mornings and an Adolescent Development Club in the afternoons. Farzana’s work at BRAC centers around integrating the ELA program we visited that morning with life skill-building and social centers for girls, called Kishori Kendros (Adolescent Clubs). After a day spent meeting with head teachers from secondary schools and local BRAC staff, I joined her at a Kendro, and she translated as I asked these girls for their thoughts on how to improve Bangladesh’s education system.

This summer, I’m learning from, bouncing ideas off of, and debating with teachers, students, parents, school management committees, BRAC headquarters staff (representing programmes ranging from Government Partnership Initiatives and Children with Special Needs to Targeting Ultra Poor and Research & Evaluation), local field staff, government officials and NGO leaders. These interviews, focus groups, meetings, and a workshop with BRAC Education leaders will inform my final product: recommendations for the BRAC Education Programme Director as he and his team develop a strategy to advocate for quality education in Bangladesh.

Inadequate schools are a major problem here. When I first arrived, I tried to explain that there is disparity in American schools, too. But I was patiently yet emphatically told that inequity in the States is nothing compared to the situation in Bangladesh. Here, I was told, it’s the difference between heaven and hell.

There’s broad consensus around why children aren’t learning as much as they should: a shortage of qualified teachers, insufficient teacher training, student/teacher ratios that average 70:1 despite the government’s stated goal of 45:1, a monitoring and evaluation system that’s never really been implemented.

And then there’s the country’s volatile political situation: When Awami League takes over, they replace everything the Bangladesh Nationalist Party started (and vice versa), from the benches to the curriculum to the monitoring system that never quite took off.

Of course, the real problem – if I can use this small word to describe a challenge that so completely boggles my mind and breaks my heart – is the tremendous poverty here, growing worse almost daily with rising fuel and food prices.

The scope of the “problem” is overwhelming, the contrasting vision of quality Education for All is grand…but the reality, and the hope, lies in conversations with children and youth held in huts and schools throughout this country. Resting my chin on my knees, as rain provided background music on the tin roof above us, I asked the five adolescent girls in front of me in that hut –the elected leaders of their club of 30 – to help me move beyond the problems. I asked them for solutions.

Taslima, the most passionate and the least apprehensive of the group (this 10th grader had just finished reciting a poem she wrote, and was a bit breathless after performing not one but two dances she choreographed), had a ready answer.

She had experience with just this kind of work. This past year Taslima single-handedly improved the quality of her school. See, her Bengali teacher spent more time talking about the weather, the news, or whatever interested him on any given day than he did teaching them their mother tongue. One day Taslima decided she wasn’t going to take it anymore. Starting tomorrow, she warned him, she was not coming to his class. And she wouldn’t return until he became a better teacher.

True to her word, the next day when her peers filed into his class, Taslima sat outside the room in silent protest. Soon the headmaster came across this defiant young woman as he strolled the halls with his ruler (although the Bangladeshi government has officially banned corporal punishment, it is unofficially present in many schools). Taslima explained that her Bengali teacher was not teaching effectively and as a result she refused to attend his course. To her surprise…the headmaster listened. That very day, he met with the teacher, who subsequently began teaching Bengali to his 10th graders. And he made sure that this young woman in particular was satisfied with his class: He stopped by Taslima’s home periodically to check in on her studies.

Inspired by this young woman whose grade point average of 4.55 on a 5.0 scale did not surprise me in the least, I was eager to know what she wanted out of life. So, I did it. I asked her and her friends the age-old question: What do you want to be when you grow up? But none of them were eager to offer their hopes and aspirations. The energy and laughter that had filled the hut over the last hour vanished. After a long pause, Taslima responded. Farzana’s crestfallen expression as she contemplated how to translate this young woman’s answer told me this visit would not end on the uplifting note I selfishly craved.

She’s a practical one, Farzana prefaced her translation to English. Taslima’s response? “I can afford little, so I dream little.”

When pressed, she said she might be interested in development work, “like you”, but the spark was gone. The cold reality of the possibilities, and the impossibilities, within her rural village had hit her. Almost on cue, the rain let up. Farzana and I, both unable to find the right words, bid farewell to these young women, thanked them for sharing with us, and said yes, we hoped to return to their club one day soon.

Travelling from one village to another over these four days, my emotions mirrored those I witnessed when Parveen called her family in her village: nervous, excited, sad, happy, even angry. I would add to this list invigorated…and helpless.

Upon visiting a government secondary school with bare walls but legions of eager students on Day 3, my translator – this time, a Dhaka University graduate named Shakina – asked the students if they had any questions for me. Their curiosity was palpable. Minutes earlier, while I met with nine members of their school’s management committee, at least 50 children set free for the midday break fought for space in the four surrounding windows to catch a glimpse of me and figure out what in the world I was talking with their teachers and elders about.

In the 9th Grade classroom, a girl in the front row, center, stood up cautiously. She looked me in the eye, and asked: “How can you help me go to university?” Tears in her eyes, she didn’t look away. She wanted a response, something real, something she could hold on to. The Bangladeshi adults in the room wanted an inspiring, hopeful promise. One of them asked me to say that I would see what I could do upon my return to the states. To this I responded anxiously, not wanting to make a promise I couldn’t keep: “I’m a student myself...” my excuse trailed off.

The most I could tell this girl, in this moment, was that her question was “the best and most difficult” I’d been asked since my arrival in her country. I encouraged her to keep asking these important questions of the adults – Bangladeshi and foreign – she meets. And I asked if she knew of a scholarship program recently started by BRAC; Medha Bikash (Promoting Talent) provides scholarship funds for a small number of extraordinary but poor students to attend university. But conversations with BRAC staff after our visit to this school confirmed what I already knew: for most children in rural Bangladesh, college is a dream too big for their family’s budget.

One of her classmates asked me if American schools are like those in Bangladesh. I explained that we also have teachers in the front of our classrooms, American children carry backpacks just like theirs to school, and we too have a lot of adults (like those in that classroom) that care deeply about students like him. Differences? Well…there are usually fewer students in a classroom, and there are often about the same number of girls and boys (at least two-thirds of the students in this room were boys). But I also explained that America’s public education system has been around for more than 100 years, whereas their country is only 37 years old. Bangladesh is doing tremendous work, I told him. I came here to learn from the important work that’s happening in your schools, I said. He beamed.

Another child asked me, in perfect English, if I have any brothers and sisters. Two younger sisters, I replied: Laura and Michelle. “No brothers?” he asked. No, three girls were enough to keep my parents busy, I said with a smile.

In the last classroom, Grade 10, a boy wanted to know how many children sit on school benches in America. He was crammed with four other boys on a bench built for three. His brown eyes opened wide as I shared that, in my country, children typically each have a desk. His teacher helped me explain what this would look like. I tried to soften the blow. In some schools, I told him, children sit around a table.

As I express these stories using only words, I regret not taking more photos. Those of the Primary School students posted with this blog are the only ones I’ve got from the four days. In the moments, asking these children and adolescents if I could take their pictures just didn’t seem right. I couldn’t bring myself to say, after they so openly shared their ideas, problems, questions, artwork and lives with me: I am here to learn from you, your ideas will be joined with others to shape BRAC’s work to improve your schools, only to follow that with a meager “And, before I leave, can you smile for my digital camera?” But today, as I write, I wish you – my friends, my family – could see their faces. More than that. I wish you could see their potential.

“We didn’t even have bridges…”

Photos (top to bottom): BRAC Village Organization Meeting, for microfinance participants (all women); BRAC Primary School Children sit in a semi-circle in their one-room schoolhouse; BRAC students perform; me, BRAC USA staff Rachael, and BRAC intern coordinator Shana in front of what is arguably Dhaka's swankiest bridge.

During tonight’s blackout – these happen nearly every day – I think I’ve successfully persuaded myself that it’s romantic rather than trying to write my blog by the light of a battery-operated lamp, in my small, er, cozy room now without A/C or a fan. It’s not primitive, I tell myself. Quite the contrary: I have this laptop, this bed, this lamp.

Moments earlier, we – myself and the two young maids that work in my home here – were poring over my Bengali-English phrasebook. This little book is our tenuous bridge to understanding, and we’ve already spent several hours practicing a variety of questions and answers, in Bengali, English and sometimes Hindi (turns out ‘namaste’ is not only a word chanted at the end of a yoga session). It occurred to me tonight that my difficulty learning Bengali won’t stymie much except my ability to direct a rickshaw driver here. But without English, well, there are real consequences for these two women.

Anyhow, I digress…sort of. Yesterday, I spent a day “in the field” with BRAC for a baptism-by-fire orientation of sorts. I went to Savar, a suburb made up of a number of villages about an hour from Dhaka. After tea, biscuits and bananas at a BRAC training center, BRAC whisked about 15 interns away in two spotless white mini-vans through narrow streets crowded with people, rickshaws, animals, bicycles, and a car here and there. We walked the last short leg of this journey – shooing away mosquitoes and avoiding muddy puddles from yesterday’s rainfall along the way – and suddenly we were upon a group of about 20 women. And men, and children…it seemed the whole village came to this week’s Village Organization meeting, curious about the arrival of sweaty, wide-eyed Americans.

These women – all married, all wearing bright, colorful saris or salwar kameez (tunics worn over loose-fitting pants – my new favourite clothing ensemble), all eager to be heard – receive loans from BRAC. They participate in the first tier of BRAC’s microfinance program, which means they are very poor but eligible for a small loan to buy a cow, a sewing machine or some other means to earn income. And they’re held accountable as a group – which is in part responsible for BRAC’s 95% repayment rates despite their poverty.

At VO meetings, borrowers report to their Programme Organizer on progress and they make loan repayments. They also help one another out when cash –Taka – is short. Why do they work with BRAC? The interest rates are low, they say. It allows them to make money for their family. We ask: Do their husbands ultimately control the funds they earn? Suddenly all of the women are talking at once, while the men and children observe – their husbands are aware they receive loans, the women say, but they all insist they are the ones who decide how to use the profits.

Bangladesh is a tough place to live. It is unbearably hot (although you wouldn’t guess it by the lack of sweat on Bangladeshi brows), the poverty is deep and widespread, and decades of corruption have led to today’s state of emergency, instituted by the military government over a year ago.

But these women are also tough – I can see it in their tired eyes, their sun-scarred complexion, their strong and sure voices. So I am surprised to see that their Programme Organizer – in essence, their leader – is not another woman, but a young man dressed in a pressed, button-down shirt. Later in the day, I am again surprised to see legions of women working at an Aarong production facility (Aarong is an upscale shop started by BRAC that makes and sells handicrafts, while providing fair employment for Bangladeshis) under the supervision of… men. I asked the BRAC staffer with us about this power imbalance, which was especially striking given BRAC’s mission to empower women and girls. She assured me that women also take on leadership roles, and what we were seeing today was a small sample.

So, on we went – to a human rights and legal assistance meeting (today’s topic: constitutional law, specifically issues of divorce, inheritance, and polygamy), a BRAC nursery (where one of the interns fainted from the heat), a community library.

And then there was the BRAC Primary School. I’ve come to believe that you can tell immediately when a school, or a classroom, is good. This one-room schoolhouse was great. I could see the learning taking place – it was in the artwork that covered all four walls and hung from the ceiling, it was in the dances the children performed for us, it was in the way they answered our questions without hesitation but enthusiasm, and pride.

I’ve read so much about BRAC schools: they serve children who either dropped out or never enrolled in largely sub-par government schools, they enroll 65% girls, they serve 25 to 33 students, the teacher is a married woman from the community, and they have a child-centered approach to learning. And: On average, BRAC children – at more than 37,000 schools in every district in Bangladesh – outperform children in government schools on national exams.

Dr. Abed, the founder of BRAC and hands down the most charismatic individual I have ever met, joked when I saw him tonight that BRAC Schools are like McDonald’s: every one is the same. As promised, at this schoolhouse there were 33 children, exactly two-thirds were girls, and the teacher had a wedding ring. But more than that…these children are confident, they are smart, and they have so much potential. I asked them what they were learning that day. One of the girls jumped up and read to us, in English, a passage on food from today’s coursework. We had to ask the standard question: What do you want to be when you grow up? Boys overwhelmingly wanted careers in the police force or the military (although one wants to be a singer, and he performed for us on the spot), and girls aspired to be pilots, flight attendants, teachers, doctors, and, yes, police.

Though invigorated by this classroom, at the end of the day I was nagged by a question: What happens on a girl’s journey from the classroom to the workplace? Many of these young girls are leaders, they are confident, they have big dreams. Boys and girls in this school jump (literally) to share their ideas and dreams in equal measure. But in the workplace, men are the supervisors, the organizers… women are maids, line workers, recipients.

I raised this question today, this time to the strong, empathetic, smart woman leading BRAC’s innovative new program to reach the “Ultra Poor” in Bangladesh. She assured me BRAC is making strides in achieving gender equity in the workplace. BRAC full-time staff (not including teachers and other part-time employees) are 20 percent women overall, and even 30 percent at headquarters. My expression must have been nonplussed. Twenty percent? Thirty percent? That’s equity?

She went on. You must keep in mind, she told me: Our country is only 37 years old. For the first 10 to 15 years after independence, she said, we were focused almost exclusively on reconstruction and rehabilitation (Bangladesh’s independence immediately followed a cyclone in 1970 that killed 500,000, a Liberation War in 1971 with disputed Bangladeshi casualty figures ranging from 200,000 to 3 million as well as 8 to 10 million refugees, and a famine in 1973-74 that many claim killed over one million people (the government figure is 26,000)).

“I remember, in the mid-80s,” she said. “We didn’t even have bridges.” In a country where rivers and lakes criss-cross land as highways do in the U.S., no bridges is no small challenge. I can’t imagine gender equity was on anyone’s radar.

I’m still parsing out what it all means. But now it’s certainly difficult for me to argue that Bangladesh’s progress on social issues is inadequate, or too slow. All of those women I met yesterday were in the workplace, and were gaining access to loans and income. The maids I practice Bengali with are certainly farther along in their mastery of English than I’ll ever be in their language, and they do have a safe, comfortable place to live and a regular income in a country that’s wracked by poverty. Maybe the women are not the supervisors, maybe the maids are not fluent in English, but maybe they need some time, and resources…

I searched for context. Thirty-seven years after America’s inception, women were still 144 years from the right to vote. Bangladesh certainly has us beat on that count. This developing country has already had two female prime ministers. Admittedly, they are both in prison now, but that’s a story for another day.

"The switch has already been made."

My first photos! The view from BRAC headquarters, from L to R: urban slum dwellers take canoes to the city; the largest mosque in Dhaka; a rickshaw "parking lot."

At last! My eyes glazed over from travel, I boarded Etihad Airlines in Abu Dhabi on the third and final leg of my 26-hour journey from Boston to Dhaka. After finding my seat, I stowed away my carry-on and shot off to the back of the plane for a pre-flight bathroom break. But first I took note of my seatmate: An older Bangladeshi man with a bright white beard, in a full white robe and his head wrapped in white cloth. As my blue American eyes met several inquisitive brown Bangladeshi eyes on this walk through the plane, it struck me that I was on the verge of entering an entirely different world. I anticipated interactions with people whose clothing was merely an indicator of the vastly different worlds we occupied – culturally, economically, socially.

On my way back, I wondered if this seemingly wise elder spoke English. Probably a few words, I decided, and I could use my handy new Bengali-English dictionary when we hit an impasse. What advice could he pass on to me? Would he be able to tell me where to visit in the winding streets of Old Dhaka? What were his thoughts on BRAC, the NGO (non-governmental organization) I was about to spend the next two months with as an intern?

But by the time I returned to Seat 25A, he was no longer there. Instead, another man was helping a young mother with her infant daughter into the seat next to me. Confused, but thinking that maybe this game of musical chairs took place so that this young woman could sit near her husband, I offered up my sit to him so they could sit together. He assured me that “the switch has already been made” and I quickly realized the elderly man whom I had imagined would take me under his wing in these last hours before arriving in Bangladesh had requested the switch and found an appropriate individual – a woman – to sit next to me.

It had occurred to me in the waiting area that there were few women on this flight – which departed at nearly two in the morning – and now one of these women had been sought out to sit with me, a modern Western woman who may or may not be religious, respectful, married, or a number of other things. Maybe he felt uncomfortable, maybe he was concerned for my own comfort level, or maybe it was simply culturally inappropriate for us to sit next to one another. It was likely a combination of these factors, but I couldn’t be sure: His eyes wouldn’t meet mine, and her English was nearly as limited as my Bengali. All I was able to learn from her was her name (Mahmouda), and that she was married (I would come to learn that her nose ring gave that status away), she had two other children, her husband was working in Italy, and she preferred fish over chicken. With that, off we went to Dhaka.

Given that Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program and its Cultural Bridge Fellowship are supporting my internship this summer, it seems fitting that my transport into Dhaka would be laden with gender and cultural issues I had yet to explore. The Bridge Fellowship supports the summer internships of a number of Kennedy School students, all of whom are working on issues related to gender and most of whom are working internationally.

I’m working with BRAC, an NGO founded in 1971 to aid Bangladesh’s rehabilitation following a bloody war of independence from Pakistan. BRAC began as a fledgling nonprofit humbly called the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, and today it is the world’s largest NGO and new BRACs have successfully launched in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Tanzania and Sudan with affiliates in the U.S. and UK. Their headquarters remain in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka. BRAC works for poverty alleviation and the empowerment of the poor, and it focuses its education, health, microfinance, and other programs on women and girls.

As many of you know, I’m studying education policy at HKS. BRAC happens to have an incredibly innovative and largely effective education programme – running, for instance, more than 30,000 primary schools throughout the country, with BRAC schoolchildren outperforming government school students.

I caveat my appraisal of the BRAC Education Programme as “largely” effective because quality education is a major issue in Bangladesh. They have high enrollment and attendance rates, but completion rates are nothing to write home about and many children do not pass a test of government competencies. So the BEP is planning to start an advocacy unit, to influence government policies to improve education quality and equity (according to gender, ethnicity, and special needs) in this developing country. And their Education Programme Director, Dr. Safiqul Islam, seems to believe I’m just the person to help them move through this next phase of developing an advocacy strategy. This week I’ve begun working with Trishna, the manager of BEP’s Capacity Development Unit, to engage in this process with programme staff, and later with BRAC teachers, parents and students as well as other NGOs doing education advocacy work in BRAC.

I’ve been here for a total of five days, and already I’m fascinated by BRAC and by Bangladesh, which is the world’s most densely populated country, and one marked by poverty and progress, corruption and innovation, and, it must be said, intense heat and humidity. I look forward to sharing this experience with you via this blog!