This is a guest post from ActionAid volunteer Mahdia Rahman, who visited Bangladesh recently and saw the work of ActionAid in the country.
As a volunteer for ActionAid Australia, I have always wanted to see the results of ActionAid’s work first hand, so when I returned recently to my birthplace, Bangladesh, I decided to take the opportunity to visit ActionAid’s work in the country and see for myself what difference their projects have made in people’s lives.
When I arrived in Bangladesh, I felt myself drowning in pessimism upon seeing millions of people suffering on a daily basis: poor girls and women working as domestic servants, degraded, deprived of an education; young boys, desperation on their faces, struggling to sell something to the cars passing by; men riding rickshaws in the heat… I couldn’t believe that millions of Bangladeshi people had been born into a life devoid of opportunities. And yet, on the other end of the class system, there were people living in comfort.
However, my tour with ActionAid Bangladesh proved that even when people have little else, there is hope that they can change their condition. Accompanied by ActionAid Bangladesh and staff from the Population Services and Training Centre members, we drove from Dhaka to a village in Gazipur, where I happened to have grown up in as a young child. Now, 14 years later I was driving past that area trying to take in the surroundings, behaving and being treated almost as a foreigner.
Before even addressing some of the issues raised in the current debate it is important to note that Australia is not a major international donor to the poorest countries by international standards and this fact is consistently incorrectly misrepresented in the mainstream media.
