On Monday morning, my group and I visite Maleker Bosti, a slum in Dhaka. Assisted by Kaniz, my translator who worked for PSTC (Population Services and Training Centre), one of the NGOs which WAB works with in Dhaka, I visited a group of women who lived in the slum. I was led to one section of slum whilst the rest of my group went to two different parts. The bit that I was in was about the size of half a tennis court, and it housed 77 people, each with 6-8 people in each family. That's over 460 people crammed into that space. The first lady that I met, Anowara, lived with her husband, Nizamuddin, her son Delwadr, his wife and their 1 year old daughter, and Anowara's youngest child, a 10 year old girl in their 6ft square home. Here previous 4 daughters have already married and moved out. Nizamuddin is too ill to work and Anowara is unable to find any work, so the only income to their household is what Delwadr earns as a rickshaw puller. This is around 100 Taka a day (about £1). I was so shocked when I heard this. The previous night in the hotel, some of the group had drunk a can of beer each, which had cost them 300 Taka per beer. I couldn't believe that I was now sitting talking to someone who lived on a third of that everyday. Anowara struggles to provide 3 meals a day for her family, and when they go to the market to buy food, she is forced to buy the food which is beginning to rot because it is all she can afford. She told me that eating isn't a pleasure - she eats because she has to in order to survive. I couldn't help but think of the Western culture of going out for dinner in comparison to this.
The water supply into the slum was illegal, and the inhabitants lived in constant fear of it being turned off, especially as there was no maintenance of the line. In summer, it often dried up, and leaks in the network caused mud and raw sewage to get mixed in with the water supply. Anowara said that the water sometimes smells bad, and often gives them diarrhoea - in fact the children almost constantly have it. What I realised was that water is not an issue in Bangladesh - it's an incredibly wet country. What is a problem is the quality of that water, and the impact that has. The families pay 2000 Taka rent which covers their water and electricity supplies. A legal water supply would cost around 200 Taka a month instead.
The sanitation block housed 5 latrines for 77 households. The latrines were connected to a pond where their waste goes, and in between the latrines and the pond was an enormous pile of rubbish. And next to this, was the water pump. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, except for the fact that I was seeing it with my own eyes.
PSTC has plans to implement projects in Maleker Bosti, and when I asked how long it they thought it would be before the situation improved, the answer I got was 2-3 years, because of the time it would take to introduce hygiene education and break the current habits people have. The only thought I had was how good this was compared to the slums where WaterAid and its partners aren't working yet.
In the afternoon, we travelled down to Khulna, in the south west of the country, where we going to spending the next 3 days of our trip. The 8 hour journey on country roads was hair-raising at times, but we arrived all in one piece, although with possibly a few more grey hairs than before!
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