This week’s blog comes from one of our new additions to ur team, Tariq, who has joined as part of the pr/marketing effort. He was recently in Bangladesh and visited our team. These were his thoughts:

For me the attraction of Bangladesh is based on something that I can’t totally identify: maybe its discovering the roots that for years I feel I have neglected or perhaps its just escapism from a London life that can often seem pointless, regardless of motive this was my third visit in the last 12 months to a land and its people with whom I am finding increasing affinity.

The street children of Bangladesh are something that I have always been aware of on my visits (very difficult not to be), but due to maybe an inability to do so (lame excuse) I have never really attempted to connect with and understand this community, for the first time I had a framework within which to do this, namely Restless Beings.

An objective of this visit was to film a couple of evenings with RB’s field workers as they interviewed the homeless community at Kamlapur – the busiest train station in Dhaka, when telling relatives I would be doing this no-one thought it was a particularly clever idea as the area has a rather seedy reputation and attracts its fair share of drug addicts, I was expecting to feel intimidated and even entertained selfish thoughts of canceling (ridiculous). As is often the case in life, reality and perception couldn’t have been further apart, On meeting the two field workers Shoeb and Shipa I felt quite at ease and on commencing filming I couldn’t believe how much attention we were receiving - really excitable (but never aggressive) kids.

I observed a range of cases, from those who were staying there fleetingly to others who were practically permanent residents, at times it was very sad, in fact distressing – the boys were visibly malnourished and the evening does bring out the ‘working girls’, what some have to do to sustain a basic living makes me sick.

Here is not the place to detail each individual case I observed, but to summarise my feelings: It is wrong to generalize the whole community as distressed, many of the kids seem happy with their own ‘habitat’ and are perhaps emotionally richer than many of us in the West. In fact, the kids were amazing, such characters, an idea would be to make a Bengali version of ‘City of God’.

Having said this, witnessing things ‘on the ground’ reminds oneself that there are many who through no fault of their own have been given hopeless starts in their lives and have a right to a support structure which will give them a chance to attaining respectful self-sufficiency.

As a side note, on the way back, the Dhaka-Dubai (home of the world’s only seven-star hotel) leg of my trip provides an opportunity to have some form of chat with the many Bangladeshi expats living out there. The boy next to me described his conditions: impossibly low pay (when he does get paid), squashed in a camp with thousands of others for some life is the cycle of exploitation.

Pre-departure, my concerns were for myself: dengue fever (a close friend had recently contracted this potentially fatal condition in Colombo), the obvious heat and humidity (my first visit at this time of year) and a lack of good reading material for the plane (took a really worthy gamble with Khaled Hosseini’s ‘A Thousand splendid suns’).

I have arrived home safely and well but my fears are now far more pressing and for those I have left behind.