I’ll start of with a quick “about me” I love collecting stamps – the travelling kind! Who wouldn’t be proud to show of a well travelled passport with all the wonderful stories that come with it?! I also adore children (not the bratty kind!) and god willing plan to have my own one day until then I have my adorable nephews and nieces to keep me occupied. Some day I’ll be a story teller and tell them of my travels but for now let me tell you my story.

Bangladesh is one of the smallest and poorest of countries, though in my opinion it has some hidden treasures in terms of some truly stunning places and the people are warm and welcoming – if you ever go travelling there take along ‘The Lonely Planet Guide to Bangladesh’ and it won’t be long before you stumble across some of these great places. I’m writing about my memories from my last trip to Bangladesh in January 2006, which marked the final leg of my tiring and exhaustive yet amazing solo tour of the Far East and South East Asia. Rest assured that will be my one and only solo trip, as I have got married since and now I have my permanent travel buddy!

One of the first things I noticed about Dhaka is the traffic and chaotic scenes outside in the airport vicinity - the poor trying to target the international passenger, vying for your hard earned pound or dollar. Some begging, some offering porter services, taxis etc. Ofcourse like any other city, there are some beautiful places and very well developed areas where the super rich and powerful live. But you don’t have to travel far before you get into the poorer districts where there is wide spread poverty and the substandard quality of living, likened with Hong Kong, where the rich and the poor live side by side in some places.

During my travels, I experienced a wide array of emotions, the highs and the lows. You would truly have to be heartless and without a conscience to be apathetic to the plight of the poor – it can be emotionally draining. My strong connection with children meant that I found it particularly distressing seeing children as young as 2 or 3 walking the streets with their siblings/families scavenging and begging for food, raiding dustbins (other people’s rubbish for crying out loud!) looking for whatever bits of food they can get their hands on, chances are that’s the only thing they’ll be eating on any given day. My affinity towards children is because many of them are helpless and vulnerable and can’t fend of for themselves and it’s seeing the children living like that which really gets to you especially if you have young children of similar age in your family whether they are your own children or your nephew/niece, that’s when it really hits home, makes you think it could have been one of our children, It could just as easily have been any one of us in an alternate reality.

When I heard of Restless Beings and what they stood for and the fact that the first project is working with the street children in Dhaka, I did not have to think twice to get involved especially having witnessed first hand the problems there. The thing is I know some people think “I want to give to my own people” the truth is the geopolitical borders do not exist in terms of poverty or to the needy, try explaining that to a young child! The children are the helpless innocent victims of circumstance, they are all our children and we have a duty to protect them by whatever means we can.

We are in the Muslim holy month of Ramadhan; it is a time for reflection and generosity and for encouraging empathy and compassion for others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves - the poor and the vulnerable around the world. Although the month of fasting comes by once a year, for many of the poor, they endure fasting almost every day of the year! Those who fast will no doubt know what it feels like to have an empty rumbling stomach and the hunger pangs that just do not seem to go away at times, yet we are not too concerned as we have the luxury of knowing that, as soon as the sun sets, we can break our fast and devour into a lavish meal. What about the luxury of the poor? They don’t know if and when they will be having their next meal! What about their lavish meal? They will be lucky if they have a plate of rice which they will share with the rest of the family!

It isn’t possible for all of us to go and work as aid workers – I wish I could, I would love to do that some day – but for now we can do the next best thing which is to provide financial help via organisations like Restless Beings who have the necessary resource in place. We should all give and encourage others to give whatever amount is within our means, no matter how big or small as every penny counts.

By Yousuf Goni – RestlessBeings Community Relations Officer

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.

Bangladesh: never the same.

Every time I have visited this complicated, intricate and richly diverse site of so much more than just colour and rickshaws, I notice more change. The country is taking small yet significant steps towards something which in the people’s eyes, is progression….

The middle class is slowly making themselves a space in which they can flourish. However the gaps between the rich and poor are, as always greater than ever and still widening.

 

My trip was part play, part work, part research and part…well… a desire to see more of what I saw but to see its changes.

 

Buildings were more frequently piercing the sky this year than my last visit, however, the familiar rice fields, expanses of green in every shade and bamboo houses by the water were as still and present as I had left them. Life for some was moving faster, and for others, it lay still and rippled ever so slightly when the monsoon approached. That was the magic of the country which brought me back time and time again.

 

Since our launch, RestlessBeings has spent so much time on marketing, events and tightening the skeleton for Project one. This was all executed in the UK, where, amongst the streets of London we leafleted, protested about the injustice in gigs of poetic explosions and networked our passions away… so I felt privileged to actually have the opportunity to go to the heart of project one and actually spend some more time with and amongst the people who the project was dedicated to.

 

Accompanied by my eyes, ears and orientation, Dr Zaki, our Bangladesh Project One Co-Coordinator, Shoheb and Shipa, RestlessBeings Bangladesh Field workers and the Non-Executive Director Saleh and our on-field camera guy Shakir, I visited three main locations for three different purposes.

 

Our first visit of the trip was to Kamalpur station, Dhaka. My co-director, Mabrur Ahmed had made the same visit earlier this year in May and also in December 2007. I wanted to see whether there were any changes in the facilities available in the station and also to meet the new, and old children who occupied and some cases, ruled the station.

 

We were swamped with children, ranging from the 3 years to 16. Many were boys, their clothes torn, their skin dry and dehydrated and their frames smaller than their years but as always, there were all smiles and leaps of energy at our presence. As the field workers worked their way through the crowd by selecting some of the youngest children and talking to them about their day to day duties, and the ways, in which they protect themselves in the harsh streets, I took a little walk around the site these children call home. A looming concrete roof housed many, some passengers taking the train to distant corners of the country, some old and fragile and lying in the stations corners waiting until the night can come so they can sleep and disappear into a better world, and some, were these young bodies of hope, either carrying heavy loads and earning a few taka’s as coolies (ten TK was the max some would get – which is less than 10pence), whilst some sold their bodies for enough money to clothe and feed them, and some, just waited and watched until someone threw away any left-over food or bottles with a few drops of soda or water left inside. For these children, the concrete walls, street and excruciating heat was too much and the pains were visible; a permanent frown on their face, ribs falling out of their bodies, dehydrated skin, swollen lower stomach signalling malnutrition and most importantly a look of stress and sadness in their eyes that was just unnatural for children so young. Kamalpur station was the same, but the numbers of children had increased and my visit confirmed, that despite the presence of some wonderfully pro-active NGO’s in the neighbourhood which offered a place of escape for a few hours a day, these children still had nothing but the baking concrete floor and station corners to rest their bodies at night. Exposed to more than just mosquitoes and angry wardens, some children fell into the arms of abusive adults, paedophiles and local mastans who imposed their money making, sex selling ideas, on young children who, in moments of desperate hunger and danger, would not think twice about selling their body. For some, the choice was not there, they had to enter such realms of self destruction.

 

My visit to Kamalpur was expectedly saddening and yet strengthening to see that a certain level of hope had not yet disappeared from some of these young children’s faces. They were still waiting to be taken away to a better place. For some it was too late, but for the positive majority, our presence was welcomed. One girl in particular, whose case I hold closely to my heart, was a young girl named Fatima. She left her abusive family to roam the streets of Dhaka hoping to find a job or some means of consistent sustenance. She found neither of those things and ended up in Kamalpur station where she resides with the other children in similar situation. The striking thing about this young girl was that at first glance, you would be forgiven for assuming she was a boy. Wearing a baggy green jumper torn by the neck, hair cut close to her scalp and shorts, she walked, ran and spoke the way a boy did. It was obvious after a while that she was putting it on. I asked her why and despite the fact that I have become desensitised to such morbidity, her response shocked me. Fatima had once again reminded me of the many other stories we had yet to encounter. She dressed and behaved like a boy so she would not be taken and used by the mastans or raped or abused by older boys who were also on the streets and heavily drug induced. Fatima, like the others, had had enough and needed to get out. In which ever way she could…

 

Our second visit was to the property which RestlessBeings hopes to convert into the Rehab Centre & Shelter for these children. The property is in the heart of Mohammedpur. It is the perfect location as we do not want to isolate the children entirely and give them any form of culture or lifestyle shock, we also feel, by remaining close to some of the slum communities, we can gradually nurture them via food, medication, clothing, education, creativity and a clean, warm and safe place to stay at night. The property has two floors, with plans for a clinic with free medical care for the children residing at the RestlessBeings Rehab Centre. The rooms will be divided into bedrooms, play rooms, classrooms, offices and a roof top room were they can carry out creative projects and just relax and eat out. The property is quite run down, and requires some work, but the skeleton is perfect, and I knew immediately, it had something which we could nurture. It is raw and ready for us and our young residents.

 

And finally, the last visit was one to the outskirts of Dhaka were some of the largest slum colonies can be found. This trip was both emotionally and physically challenging for me. Some of the houses were made of old cardboard, bamboo, thin pieces of wood and other materials from rubbish dumps. They were perched on thin bamboo slats about a foot, in some cases only a few inches, above raw sewage. The smell was overwhelming and on some of our stops, it was difficult for our team to continue with our interviews of locals. Walking on top of bamboo paths was quite difficult, it was unfamiliar territory for me and there was a constant fear of falling through. I thought I was being silly and paranoid at first, but these fears were re-instilled after one of slum dwellers talked of how her two year old daughter had drowned after falling through rotting bamboo. The slum dwellers had been forced to move to a number of locations when the government required the land on which they dwelled to build more offices or to sell to rich investors. Despite the struggles and awful living conditions, the government refused to change or help in anyway and so the slum dwellers rebelled and built their homes elsewhere. Without any other option, what else can a family or individual do in such circumstances?

 

Despite the raw sewage, the water they drink by boiling this sewage, the food they eat very rarely and the unstable roof built on bamboo, the children of the slums were in better conditions than the children I had met in Kamalpur station. Some of these children had immediate family whilst others lived with aunties, uncles or grandparents and in some cases older siblings, after losing their parents to the consequences of poverty (starvation, illness, accidents in their labour work which paid peanuts, prostitution etc). Organisations such as BRAC had successfully managed to get their aid workers into these slums and opened up small schools which not only encouraged the dire need for education amongst these socially rejected communities, but also re-instilled a sense of hope in a colony which had given up on greater Dhaka and its governance. But it was all, well…just not enough. My opinion may be utopian, but surely, living on top of raw sewage and drinking and bathing in water from this and living in constant fear of disease, falling through your floor and flooding is not the way any human being should spend their years on this planet. A child in these circumstances is ridiculous!

 

These visits were beneficial in many ways for me. As one of the director’s of RestlessBeings, it reminded me of why we exist and what we want to be, but it also enabled me to meet and greet and communicate with some of the worst affected children who define our project. These children were the children who were either living alone on the streets of slum districts, who were either orphans or had no idea where their parents were, who were abused or in the danger of being abused due to their living standards and who had lost hope. These children were the forgotten, most marginalised and silent children. Those, whose glimmers of hope were gone after years of pain and psychological bruising. Unfortunately, my visits exposed many of these children. They stood away from the crowds of excited children who ran towards the camera or foreign unfamiliar faces. They shy-ed away when communicated to or walked off in anger as they had given up on these ‘invading’, ‘alien’ hands of hope who they had lost trust in. For RestlessBeings, these children were the ones with the greatest call for help. And my visit to Bangladesh was resonating so many of these calls. I have returned with a stronger need to push project one further into development and I cannot do this by myself. It can only be done collaboratively…. For this, I need you because they need us and if we don’t do something now, they may grow up and harm themselves and others or never grow up at all because all their fears caught up with them.

 

Rahima – Co-Director and Founder, RestlessBeings - Trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh - July - August 2008

 

This past week, many interesting developments have been occurring internally with Restless Beings. Here’s a quick update:

 

Firstly, to your delight, no doubt, we have introduced a fresh new website and this has been the work of our fantastic web developer, Mooktakim Ahmed, who joined us over a month ago.  The directors have outlined to Mooktakim the ambitious plans for the website and over the forthcoming weeks and months, we will implement new, exciting features which make your charity contribution more interactive.  For now, make yourself feel at home, have a look around on the forum and open a discussion on any subject that you want to bring to people’s attention.  The blog arms you with an opportunity to challenge, debate and comment with the Restless Beings board who in turn will blog away of developments and issues on a weekly basis.  We are in the process of integrating many new features, with the next being a gallery.  Watch this space!

 

Secondly, this coming Friday, the 25^th of July sees the second School of Though nights, a conscious lyrical journey for conscious souls! Come along but be sure to pre-register as we are experiencing high demand for this particular event.  Faith FX the renowned UK champion beat boxer as well as hip hop spiritualists Poetic Pilgrimage will be performing.  Just go to www.restlessbeings.org and you can buy your ticket there.  Doors open from 7pm at Oxford House Theatre, Bethnal Green.  Tickets will also be sold at the door, but this is subject to availability.

 

Thirdly, Rahima, my co-director will be flying off to Bangladesh to film part 2 of our series of documentaries on Street Children in Dhaka, Bangladesh.  She will also spend time with Restless Beings Dhaka team and will visit children around the Khilgaon Thana area with Shoeb and Shipa, our excellent field staff.  Over the past month Shoeb and Shipa have been steadily building relationships with ‘floating’ children.  Rahima will also be finalising the finer details of the rehab centre.

 

 

 

And finally, and I apologise for ending on a sour note, following my regular weekly conference call, Dr Zaki, our Bangladesh coordinator informed me last week that the whole colony of street children living on the platforms of Kamlapur Rail Station have been displaced by the government.  They must now look for new accommodation now that their plastic sheets tents have been destroyed.  With monsoon season, and heavy rain almost daily in Dhaka, life for the forthcoming days and weeks will prove to be too much for some street children living in Dhaka.

 

Signing off for now,

 

Mabrur

Just at work feeling very restless and I wrote this piece which I wanted to share with you all.

I am an export,
I have been exported by a nation which is over spilling with beings wanting to reach out
An import into a nation which once needed me to recover its economic stance
But now rejects me for being aloof to its cultural demands.

In a world full of disparity because of a constant drive for capitalism,
We are merely numbers once again wanting to reach out.
The trend for individualism and the desire for fame
Pushes us to a plane of undying egotism.
The nation that once was a promised land, where we all had dreams
Has apparently become a reality, I find myself tortured at the thought of immovable poverty.
A poverty of the soul, where we care no longer for our brother, nor our mother,
But care solely for ME. Me is my world and me is my concern.
I will push and prod, exploit and denounce others for my sole purpose in life, me.

This is a culture which is now deep rooted within the membranes of a global society.
This is the society that taught us civility.
This is the very society that taught us to steal away hopes of another for our own accomplishments.
This is a society, borne out of pride and driven by stroking our personas.
This society that has given us the ability to unflinchingly keep a third world within its confinements of the third world.
A third world that exists solely because we regard their natural resources as our own, because we own the rights to the land, because we colonized them, because they matter not to us in our ultimate goal of sustainable wealth built on the undevelopment of the undeveloped world, where we prefer to help a community of starving people to starve themselves more by taking away from them the only opportunity they had to claw themselves out of the dire situation that we put them in. Is it any wonder that in a continent where resources such as pearls and natural gas are abundant, its people suffer more famines than anywhere else on the planet. Is it any wonder that the oil rich countries of the middle eastern peninsula seem to be our mouth wateringly tasty region next on our list of exploitation. Is it any wonder what while the country of Bangladesh harbors more natural gas, petroleum and potential for hydro energy, its children are lying on the streets of its Capital begging and selling themselves? I say that the people who make the decisions to sell their nation in exchange to line their own pockets are the ultimate whores. They deserve Capital punishment, not a place on Capitol Hill. This is my society, that taught me to speak and now I cannot hold my tongue.

I do not have an Immortal Technique nor do I have a Platform to scream from, what I have is an unnerving frustration
That whilst we are aware of the plight of another, we can sit and relax and be ignorant of an issue that we are all accountable for.
We are all expatriates, we are all foreigners, to what extent do we ever think that have a hold of a land that we live on?
We are in a state of an ignorant bliss as we admire one anothers talents whilst the reason that we are even here is unknown.
A simple request to think of the mess that we have created on this planet which we have no permanent home is rejected and is the loudest method of saying that ‘I don’t care’
I care for noone but myself, and noone cares for me but myself. This is the positive moral ground that we stand on today, where we once had a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We had a dream that one day our children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Instead I find myself ashamed to know that the content of our character today is one which is obsessed with cultivating success out of anothers failure. The content of our character accepts poverty, it accepts the robbery of an imperialised thirld world, it accepts the persecution of a community which has been forced into thinking it is beneath me, an export, an expatriate, an import and a martyr in the name of equality.

Copyright belongs to Mabrur Ahmed

Hey Hey Hey

 

Its been a while and we are less than a week away from our humble little daisy pop launch J

 

A lot has happened, the weather is menopausal, Ken and Borris are in the heat of lovers tiffs and scientists must still be spending another billion on a ‘new’ brand spanking way to immortality. I on the other hand have returned from a stress loaded time zone of preparing for the launching, attending a gazzilion events to network for restlessbeings (as any self proclaimed eager, overwhelmingly overwhelming tree hugging humanitarian would), trying to be a dutiful daughter to my mum who is fed of rarely seeing me and also squeezing in the odd bit of gardening (a trajectory of therapy for me). It’s been a busy few months and London is still the same so unfortunately the public transport, weather and immense volumes of people in one train carriage haven’t made it any easier.

I’ve realised, I moan a lot. Moan, moan moan, moan, moan…. It’s a cycle of psychological implosions. The young people we are trying to raise awareness for: children of the streets in Bangladesh, also have their fair share of moaning. Usually about not being able to sit closest to the voluntary teacher who works for the NGO that may help them, or get the most attention from the odd tourist and so on so forth. The difference is, my moaning is usually based on the material dissatisfactions of the tangible details of the city and life I live and lead. For children like Shati, Fatema and Ibrahim (check gallery), their moans are always internal desires for love. Its funny, how in world of abundance, technological advancements, the bigger, better, sexier, more appealing product to make you happy, the most stress free holiday package etc etc, we have not been able to find a way to shed love and attention to those who have never had it before and probably never will.

For the children who are being heard or taken under the wings of an NGO, there is a long journey ahead of physical and emotional repair. Through education, food, nursing and a somewhere safe to stay, orphanages have also provided a haven of hope. Unfortunately, this is a rarity and with over 350,000 street children still lost in the concrete jungle of Dhaka and in the many thousands of cities and towns world wide, there is a burdening sense of weariness and depression. These children are no longer waiting for help; they have given up and inevitably forced themselves to face their brutal truth. For these children, a difference would take a lot longer to digest. Their months go by without moaning. There is no tangible detail to choke them or prevent them from leading a tranquil day. There isn’t an NGO to take them away for a few hours and feed them and educate them. These children, wake up to a real nightmare on a daily basis, were being raped by a local mastan (gangs), abused and spat on by a corrupt police officer and trampled on by passer by’s is their normal, quiet, unheard rolling of life. These children, when not searching for food in heaps of rubbish, spend hours walking through patches of greenery or sit in corners of an empty spot of the city where they can reflect and just stare at what moves forward in front of them.

 

For them, time stands still…always did… and in their stagnant pond of no hope, they allow themselves to crumble.

 

 

Post by

Mushroom

Hey all!

Just a quick note to update you all of our work:

We held a board meeting a week ago to decide upon how we plan to launch officially and how we plan to go about raising awareness and funds for project 1.

Firstly, we decided that we would have a charity dinner as our official launch event.  This would provide an opportunity for our guests to enjoy dinner, entertainment throughtout the evening and finally the first showing of our documentary film.  We have decided to do this in April and hope that we will have all you eager readers there!  Secondly we are currently working on editing our docu film as well as implementing our marketing strategy to reach out to all types of media and spread the word of restlesseings, who we are and what we are planning on doing for project 1.

Please guys dont forget to invite your friends to join the restlessbeings facebook group, to join onto our mailing list and finally to comment on our forum.  Restless Beings is about activism, for standing up for marginalised communities across the world, for giving hope to those who have none and to direct our daily restlessness to a positive worthy cause of helping our fellow human. 

Hey All!

I haven’t blogged on here for a while now, so firstly i would like to extend my apologies I know all of you must have missed me so much, lol.

Ok so where to start…. so much has happened over the past 8 weeks or so.  We had our first meeting which was open to all at the Idea Store in Whitechapel and it went really well. We discussed the ideas of the first event and also of project 1, Dhaka street children.

From there onwards, we formalized a board.  The make up of the board is alarmingly diverse which is fantastic.  we have appointed two non executive directors, Saleh Ahmed and Mohammed Abdul Alim who are in advisory positions for Restless Beings.  We also have a co-coordinator in Bangladesh who is leading our efforts there.  In the UK we have a bunch of board members who are full of energy, raring to get on with our first project.

I visited Bangladesh over the Xmas period…what an experience; I met some of the street children that are in Shishu Tori care.  Shishu Tori are really doing a fantastic job there and we hope to form a long lasting partnership with them.  Also while I was there, I visited some slum areas and I honestly cannot describe in words the conditions which they are living in.  Thankfully, I have filmed everything and so the good news is that we shall soon have a short docu that everyone can watch to truly understand the scale of problems that these hapless children are facing.

On my return, we have held another board meeting where our strategy for project one has been discussed.  We will be meeting again in the next week or so to finalize these plans, so watch this space.  Unfortunately, one of the directors has also gone through a very distressing time, having lost one of her parents.  I hope we will all sincerely pray for the deceased and also for the family.

We shall be back very shortly, and more than ever before, we will have an action plan which includes all of us, including you the reader.  we may not be able to eradicate child abuse and poverty, but we most definitely will have positive impact on some lives.  The success depends upon how active we chose to be!

posted by Mabrur

Good afternoon

 

Apologies, I have been very busy with work and have not had the chance to blog away.

I was wondering if everyone has noticed the sudden (once again) emergence of food and health related programmes on terrestrial television? Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver alongside a handful of other chefs seem to have gone on this passionate journey of the great organic and free range (Food Fight, Channel 4) and others are discovering ways in which we can lose weight or change our life by starting at the gut… its all quite timely considering the creeping obesity epidemic in the UK.

 

I watched a programme last night called ‘Fast food Junkies’ which was both light entertainment as well as quite worthy in its message.

It gathered a group of four very overweight and unfit members of the British public who were either loyal fans of their nearest curry house or lived on microwave food and didn’t know what parts of the body to use when and if they had to actually run for the bus. Basically, they were very unfit.

Anyways, the producers shipped these lardy beings off to the northern parts of Pakistan and dumped them in the mountain villages where the Shin Shao people resided. This Pakistani community is known for having one of the healthiest diets in the world. One which was varied in its choices ranging from fresh grown veg, to yak meat and cheese, inevitable enhanced by cooking methods which were not ones that resembled the British fry up and a physical lifestyle that revolved around the gathering, cooking and working off of that food (aah the life, no London tubes or traffic wardens).

The fatty four inevitably benefited from their exposure to this community and left with a pink glow in their cheeks, a less saturated nature about them and a general sense of optimism about their life expectancy. Watching their ‘difficult trials’ (of which most of it was learning to walk for more than five minutes without falling to the floor in exasperation) was entertaining but what I gathered from it was the loss of basic common sense and respect of and for our bodies that many countries in both the east, south, west and north have accumulated.

I am guilty of many a time when I happily eat through a huge packet of crisps and a diet coke whilst watching TV and knowing that it will clog up something or convert into fatty globules in my body. Our appreciation of physical activity and good food has gone down the drain because of companies filling their pockets with ‘cheaper’, ‘easier’ and ‘quicker’ ways to eat and live. Oliver’s ranting and raving about better school meals etc has done a world of good but how effective is it for the greater picture… do we really need to fuss so much about where to buy our food and what brand is better and which percentage of what is healthier than what..?!!!

Surely if we all started to get rid of the junk, realise our bodies need movement and started to grow and cook our own food, things would start to change?!!

I agree that a free range egg and chicken would make more sense then one that has been cooped up in a warehouse where space is non existent. But, organic olive oil, non imported aubergines in favour of farmers markets… etc etc… that’s going too far, people still haven’t got round to the idea of eliminating fatty foods from their diet let alone reaching for the organic hemp seed cereal on the top shelf of their local health food store..  

I think we need to realise that ’living of the fat of the land’ isn’t such an archaic agency of survival as our modern, fast paced way of life likes to believe and assert.

 

Peace and Peas

 

Mushroom

Hey all and a happy new year

 

Hope everybody’s holidays and festivities went well and we are all ready to get back to the normality of taxes and tubes and way too many cups of coffee !!??

 

Firstly, I need a detox. I need to find myself a machine that will wake me up with a prune juice and remind me to drink lemon water before bedtime and drink three litres of water during the day and get rid of all chocolate, caffeine and cake from my diet…

I took the easy root and graced my nearest health store with my ‘in need of a new health plan’ self and bought it bottled – thanks to Solgar’s Detox complex and top ups on a good multivitamin and multi-mineral.. I see the silver lining… no new years  resolutions this year, just a desire to actually remember to not take my body for granted.

 

Right, before I indulge in a large bowl of green leafy stuff and more fruit fruit fruit tea, I thought I will give you all an update on restlessbeings. Mabrur, one of the directors is currently in Bangladesh and will return some time next week. Last week he made a trip to Shishu Tori offices in Dhaka and met the friendly staff and also went to do a spot of filming around the city. My last conversation with him consisted of - 

 

Mabrur: I can’t describe it, Rahima, we must all do something for these guys, honestly, you have to be here, and they are so young and so helpless. Some have given up and are just lost in their state of helplessness but others still have that spark to want to do something. We have to help them…. As I filmed them and talked to the class that sat in Kamalpur station in the Schools under the sky project (one shishutori runs).. I could see their abusers only a few metres away from them…standing and watching me and the children. They wait until the class is over before using the children for their own needs…sex, stealing, violence or sheer mental abuse….its disgusting…. I felt really useless that I spent such little time with them and had to return to the rest of my trip there without actually giving them, there and then, an escape route… “

 

And on that note… I shall wait for Mabrur to return and tell you all, the rest fo what he did, saw, heard and felt.

 

Until then,

 

Ciao Ciao

 

Mushroom