April 25, 2008
by Hana Shams Ahmed
Overcrowded wards inside a public hospital.
It is like entering a posh hotel. Outside the lawns are immaculately groomed. The visitor is greeted with a heartfelt smile and a bow by the well-dressed guard. Inside the fully air-conditioned large lobby there are comfortable couches, a large screen television and a breathtaking interior. Large signs written in English tell you exactly where you can get the particular information you need. Smartly dressed attendants working round the clock make sure that not a speck of dirt appears inside the four walls. For a moment a visitor can forget that she is actually inside a hospital in Bangladesh. For a patient, if a part of the treatment is to feel that he is in a place where he will be taken care of, then these designer hospitals are doing a great job. Read the rest of this entry »
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February 29, 2008
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, February 29, 2008]
A young girl writes a poem where she asks a simple question — one which no one can answer. She asks, “Who am I?” Her forefathers were born in India, they immigrated to Pakistan, she was born in Bangladesh. India has given up on them a long time back, Bangladesh will not accept them as the children of the land and Pakistan will not take them back. She says that she has many names ‘Bihari’, ‘Maura’, ‘Muhajir’, ‘Non-Bangalee’, ‘Marwari’, ‘Urdu-speaker’, ‘Refugee’, and ‘Stranded Pakistani’. But she only wants one: human. This is the state of being of the 1.6 lakh camp-based Urdu-speaking community in Bangladesh. Read the rest of this entry »
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January 25, 2008
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, January 25, 2008]
When Shafiqul Islam admitted his sick baby girl to one of the best cardiac hospitals in Bangladesh he was somewhat relieved. He thought that if his baby who had a congenital heart problem had any chance of survival it would be at this hospital. And he was right. Lt. Col. Dr. Nurunnahar Fatema, the clinical and interventional child cardiac specialist who did a septostomy at Labaid Cardiac Hospital on 45-day-old Afia spent four hours at the operation theatre and the operation was a success. But Afia’s operation was done at the very last moment. Another day longer would have taken her life. But her troubles had begun much earlier. Read the rest of this entry »
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October 12, 2007
A Nightmare on Foreign Soil
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, Oct 12, 2007]
Joynal Abedin, Al Amin and the others who refused to leave ZIA until they got back all the payments they made to the recruiting agents.
A group of young men boarded the Biman Bangladesh flight to Malaysia hoping for a better life for themselves and their loved ones. They were promised high-paying jobs and were happy to sell off the last piece of asset they owned to realise their dream job. Within a few months they boarded another flight back to Bangladesh. Cheated by their recruiting agency, traumatised by the maltreatment from outsourcing agents, empty-handed and humiliated now they do not know how they are going to go back to their villages and face their families.
Read the rest of this entry »
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September 20, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, September 20, 2007]
(L-R): Hasina Khatun, Saleha Khatun, Abdur Rahim and Jahanara Begum
Jahanara Begum is too ill to hold a pen steadily. But for 35 years, that steady hand helped shape many of the best doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers of today. This 67-year-old woman has been a primary school teacher since 1962, and retired from service in 1998. Her place of work: Bhajahuri Shaha Street Government Primary School in Dhaka’s Sutrapur area. After the disappearance of her husband, a freedom fighter who never returned home after March 25th, she single-handedly brought up her two sons and daughter. After toiling away for so many years for a meagre pay of about Taka 4000 a month, Jahanara looked forward to her retirement. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 6, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, July 6, 2007]
“I was in tremendous pain, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t walk, I needed four people to carry me.”
“At first they tied both of Choles’ hands and feet then they tortured the soles of his feet and all over his body. They unzipped his pants and attached pliers to his penis and to all of his fingers and toes. They put candle wax on the wounds and then they put hot water mixed with dried chili and salt and poured it all over his body and through his nose and ears.” Read the rest of this entry »
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May 25, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, May 25, 2007]
No one knows how Shaptorshi is spending her days without her mother’s care.
It was the eve of Eid-ul-Fitr in 2005. Nine-year-old Shaptorshi had just come back from Dhaka to celebrate the big festival at her dadi’s house in Barisal. After playing with her friends, Shaptorshi came home to eat iftari and was told that her mother Papia was not feeling well and was resting in a room upstairs. She decided to go to her uncle’s house next door to have iftari and then rushed to the rooftop with her friends. After catching a glimpse of the new moon she rushed home to share the excitement with her family. She never got to hug her mother though. Right after sighting the new moon Shaptorshi’s little world fell apart when she was told that her mother was no longer in this world. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 11, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, May 11, 2007]
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Shumi woke up one day to find herself in a train with another man.
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Seven-year-old Shumon can’t stop grinning and his eyes sparkle with curiosity as he greets us at his adopted home in BNWLA’s (Bangladesh National Women Lawyer’s Association) hostel in Agargaon. He’s one of the many children who has had to face the cruel reality, a child’s worst nightmare, of losing his parents and home and enter an unknown and unfamiliar world. According to BNWLA, in 2006 a total of 367 children went missing from their homes.
Whatever horror Shumon has had to go through in the past few years does not reflect on his face though. He looks genuinely excited about the arrival of people from outside the hostel. He enthusiastically shows us his jigsaw puzzle of the Bangladeshi flag. When I ask him if he has solved it all by himself, he takes apart the whole thing and redoes it to prove that he did indeed solve the puzzle himself. Shumon doesn’t know his last name or the name of his village home; he only knows that somewhere in Netrokona a mother who goes by the name of Saleha is crying out for her lost son. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 4, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star Cover Story, May 4, 2007]
A typical middle-class family employs a single homeworker (varying from age anywhere from 10 to 40, mostly women and girls) who is responsible for all the work in the house. She has to wake up earliest in the morning and prepare breakfast for everyone in the house and also the Tiffin for the school-going children of the house. She has to get the children ready for school. Then she has to clean the furnsiture and sweep the whole house and wash the clothes. After which she has to cut and clean the raw food for preparing lunch. Sometimes she has to clean the toilets. After everyone in the house has had lunch and she has completed eating whatever leftover that has been handed down to her she has to clean the dishes. Read the rest of this entry »
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March 30, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, March 30, 2007]
Family members of Choles Ritchil break down after receiving his dead body
He was a brave man. He stood up for the rights of his people whenever the need came. When the Bangladesh government decided to go ahead with its proposed Eco Park project in 2000, putting the lives of thousands of indigenous people at risk and threatening the ecological balance of the area, he took a stand against it and protested. When greedy, materialistic forest officials, who had anything but the interest of the forest at heart, started felling trees in the darkness of the night and selling them off for personal profit, he jumped on them and refused to let them get away with it. He loved the Modhupur Forest, his ancestral home and he loved his people, the small minority of Garos and dedicated his life for the establishment of their rights. Read the rest of this entry »
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March 16, 2007
The Price of Staying in School
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[March 16, 2007]
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One of the reasons for the high rate of drop out is that there is little interaction between teachers and students.
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Thirteen-year-old Tuma has been working at a home in Dhaka for the last three years. When she was eight years old, her parents had enrolled her in a primary school in their home district of Brahmanbaria. She studied there for two years but had to drop out when her sister who worked in Dhaka said that her employer’s relatives were looking for a maid. Her education came to a premature end and that too not for the best of reasons.
It is unfortunate, shocking even, that Tuma is among 48% of primary school students who drop out from the many government and non-government rural schools all across the country. Like Tuma, many come from very poor families, for whom education is not a priority. Families with very low income place more importance on food and shelter, rather than education or healthcare, and thus the alarming rate of untimely dropouts every year.
Read the rest of this entry »
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January 12, 2007
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, January 12, 2007]
No one has ever been convicted of murdering a home worker.
Five mysterious deaths took place in different parts of the capital city last month. All of the deaths took place in middle and upper-middle class homes of the so-called well-to-do families. And all of the victims were the poor, helpless modern day slaves of our society the silent, overworked and underpaid home workers. The news of their deaths went amazingly unnoticed, taking up little columns of our cold, morning newspapers.
Read the rest of this entry »
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December 1, 2006
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star Cover Story, December 1, 2006]
Habiba Akter, founder of Ashar Alo Society
35-year-old Mahbub (not his real name) was diagnosed HIV positive while he was working in the Middle East and 17 years on he looks just as healthy as the next person. Many people might find that hard to comprehend, as the overriding notion is that a person diagnosed HIV positive is virtually sitting on his/her deathbed. Mahbub is perhaps the perfect example of the contrary. Read the rest of this entry »
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November 10, 2006
FOLLOW UP
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, November 10, 2006]
Madhabi Mala now has something to look forward to. (Photo: Andrew Morris)
About seven weeks ago Madhabi Majhi’s life almost came to an end at the house where she worked as a maid. Her employer, Kalpana Majumder allegedly pushed her and her co-worker Moni Mala from the top of a six-storey building. Fifteen-year-old Moni Mala never lived to tell the series of events that led up to that fateful day. 10-year-old Madhabi was rushed to the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation (NITOR). Read the rest of this entry »
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October 20, 2006
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star, October 20, 2006]
The only thing they can look forward to on Eid day is more work.
For most of us, Eid is a fun event. Not only do we get a few days off from work with an extra load in our pocket, we also get to spend some quality time with family and friends who otherwise remain at the other end of numerous missed calls and sms’. Food, shopping, hanging out with family and friends without much to worry about for a few days a year might not seem like such a luxury in the true sense. But for many, even considering something like that is an extravagant thought. They work silently among our midst with no demands and most of them will be spending this Eid without family and friends, working their usual unlimited hours. Read the rest of this entry »
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October 6, 2006
by Hana Shams Ahmed
[Daily Star Cover Story, October 6, 2006]
Madhabi Majhi changed her statement about being pushed from the roof of a six-storied building after her torturer’s sister threatened to kill her.
September 17 began like any other day. The quiet neighbourhood of the residential area in Dhanmondi was still deep in slumber in the early hours of the morning. The numerous schools in every nook and corner were still closed and only a few people were seen walking around groggy-eyed thinking of the day ahead. Suddenly all hell broke loose. Shrieks and screams broke through the early morning air. It was barely six in the morning. The body of a young girl came flying from the rooftop of a house and landed on top of the steel railings of the garage of a neighbouring house. To the horror of bystanders, within moments the body of yet another young girl started falling from the rooftop of the same house, got only momentarily tangled up between the branches of a tree and fell to the ground. Fifteen-year-old Moni Mala died on the spot and 10-year-old Madhabi Majhi was rushed to the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation (NITOR) in a critical condition. Read the rest of this entry »
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Hana Shams Ahmed 
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