Yesterday morning, between 9am and 10am, I was waiting for a gap in the traffic to be able to walk across the busy Road 27 in Banani. I was trying to focus my sight, left and right, to find a gap in the traffic.
For a lot of the time, an old woman was tugging at my sleeve demanding money for food. She is a newcomer in our area as far as begging is concerned. Those seeking alms hover around grocery and medicine shops, as well as restaurants. Lately, in the narrow residential no-through road where I live, a hospital has, against all the rules, been allowed to open and often, every morning, there are 20-30 people waiting in the road to have Covid tests, and so those seeking money for food come there.
And next to the hospital, a men and women’s beauty salon has just opened. In other parts of the more affluent areas of Dhaka, new restaurants are opening, which is difficult to understand. It seems, therefore, that some people have plenty of money to spend and also invest in new businesses! A lot of it is likely to be black money, I am sure.
What I have written above contrasts with the data released in September 2020 by the government’s Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, that 46.22% of households in urban areas of Dhaka and Chittagong had their savings wiped out, and 11.26% had either sold property or mortgaged them. In another study by the World Bank, it was reported that 68% of those who had to stop working in the same areas due to the pandemic lost their jobs.
There are also reports (Power and Participation Research Centre and Brac Institute for Governance and Development) that the financial assistance given by the government reached only 39% of the needy households, and what they received amounted to only 4% of their lost income. It seems that we are not able to reach those who need help most.
There have been many accounts of families, having had to leave their Dhaka homes and return to their villages. Not only have their livelihoods been turned upside down, the education of their children has been seriously disrupted. It is therefore difficult to understand how Bangladesh’s GDP for 2020 is +3.8 whereas India’s is minus 10.3 and Singapore minus 6.
Flashback to the 1970s
In the refugee camps of 1971, and when I came to Bangladesh in early 1972, I witnessed people dying of hunger or malnutrition. Now, I always say that nobody dies of starvation. Their communities will never allow this to happen. It reminds me of a very moving account, told to me by a friend -- a story from the mid-1970s.
The story involved a Bangladeshi boy named Mustafa, who grew up as an orphan in the eastern town of Comilla. Mustafa lived with a bitter and angry woman who beat Mustafa so regularly that his spine was permanently injured and he could not walk upright. When at the age of 12, he ran away to the capital city of Dhaka and became a beggar outside the stadium, he also had tuberculosis.
A year later, Mustafa, sickly and frail, walked into the hole-in-the-wall eating place owned by a man who had befriended him and sometimes gave him food. “I’m going to die,” Mustafa said to the restaurant owner. “Here is the money I’ve collected from my begging over the past year.” And he handed the man Tk115, at that time equivalent to roughly $7. “After I die,” Mustafa continued, “Would you distribute this money among the other beggar children outside the stadium?”
The restaurant owner was deeply touched and brought Mustafa to a clinic run by a British doctor working there under the auspices of Save the Children (UK). The doctor was also moved by the story and devoted himself totally to Mustafa attempting to cure his illness. An American Catholic Sister, who was a qualified nurse, spent countless hours with Mustafa at his bedside talking with him in Bengali.
Mustafa, almost mystically, knew he was not going to live, and, after two weeks, in spite of everything, he died quietly in his sleep. A few days later, the doctor and the Sister took his Tk115, multiplied it many times, and called together Mustafa’s friends, the other beggar children from the stadium, for a memorial meal atop his friend’s eating place.
And there, in the late afternoon, as the sun was beginning to set, they sat together on mats on the floor, and ate a meal that seemed ineffably holy. And the children spoke softly about their friend.
Thinking about the story of Mustafa, is it too much to ask the rich members of society to show more compassion, understanding, and generosity to those who have lost everything because of the Covid pandemic? Different religions teach us that “No one ever becomes poor by giving.”
Giving is one of the best investments you can make towards achieving genuine happiness. True giving comes from the heart, with no expectation of reciprocation. You’ll find that the more you give, the more you’ll receive.
Julian Francis has been associated with relief and development activities of Bangladesh since the War of Liberation. In 2012, the government of Bangladesh awarded him the ‘Friends of Liberation War Honour’ in recognition of his work among the refugees in India in 1971 and in 2018 honoured him with full Bangladesh citizenship.
