A couple of years ago I went on a life changing journey to Bangladesh on a clinical placement in tropical paediatrics ( kids medicine) as part of my Masters of Public Health. I wrote an extensive blog detailing my experiences but unfortunately thanks to the demise of Mobilytrip app including a two year period of providing no technical support beforehand I lost everything. Lesson learned – don’t rely on other people’s apps to save your precious travel notes!

Anyway I’d still like to share a little with you of what I personally observed of the amazing work Symbiosis does over there. Symbiosis International were the hosts for our placement and are a fantastic charity that does seriously good charity work! They work with the poorest of the poor that others struggle to work with. They build up communities and families in a sustainable way that gives pride and meaning to people who had lost hope – giving them the means to support themselves. Truly inspiring!

In Bangladesh I saw a lot beauty.   Beautiful village scenes…

Misty mountains

Vibrant markets

Colourful scenery

And beautiful people

But sadly I also saw unbelievable filth and poverty.   In a main street in a major town close to the main hospital I see a man sifting through this pile of rubbish to find items to recycle for money.

This is the main government funded medical college hospital in a major town. The relatives have to wash the bed linen, they’re collecting the drinking water from a single well which unbelievably is right next to an open sewer running through the courtyard of a hospital – there was also an open sewer next to the kids ward – there is a long way to go in public health terms…

Life is hard for the poor children in Bangladesh. This beautiful smiling girl looks so gorgeous  and happy.  But she is at work, like the other street kids with her. They were probably aged from 6-12. They are sorting through bags of rubbish for recycling to earn an income. But it gets worse..

This is medical waste! Closer inspection revealed they were sorting through the hospital’s medical waste including needles and syringes with blood and other infective materials.

These gorgeous children were fortunate enough to have a place to go once a day for a meal thanks to ADRA. Clean clothes and some education before hitting the streets to collect rubbish or do other jobs for the equivalent of $1 a day. Our professor was a bit of a larrikin and he jokingly mentioned thru the interpreter that he was hungry and would like a bite and next thing these beautiful kids were all handing over their one meal for the day!! ( Of course he gave it all back!)

We also got to see some slums. This is desperate living. Land is such a scarce commodity and these people live in a river bed where a good wet season means having to move, there is no sanitation, no running water. They are seen as the lowest of the low and it seems that no one cares about them.

We’d walk around the slums and see children like this with all kinds of facial deformities and defects and illnesses that you would not see in Australia because they’d be fixed.  There were many more but of course it would have been insensitive to take all their photos.

I got stared at a lot in the slums but I’m not sure why..It’s not like I stand out or anything…

Malnutrition is also a serious problem in Bangladesh. We saw so many cases of this like this skinny child- you can see the wasted small arms and body compared to the head, the  baby with folds of skin where there should be chubby little arms, the severely wasted child: or this scrawny tiny baby -his mother was from a rural area and this baby suffered both from poverty and lack of education. No money for food and the mother had traditional beliefs about not breastfeeding at birth and her milk dried up and she couldn’t feed her anything but diluted rice water.  Many more like her don’t even make it to hospital because they can’t even afford the transport there, let alone the fees.

I will never forget this little one. I know millions of children around the world are starving but to hear this child cry in pain as she was dying from malnutrition was almost unbearable.  She was more malnoursiehd than she looks because her body is swollen in a severe form of malnutrition where the body’s tissues actually start breaking down.  We visited her several times.  Her mother had six children and told us through an interpreter that she made 150 taka a day which is like a couple of dollars.  She didn’t have enough money for food. I saw her child’s paper and a bill was attached and simply entering the hospital had cost her more than a day’s wages.  She was sacrificing so much for this child she clearly loved but had been unable to feed and it was likely to plunge her family deeper into poverty.  It was such a desperate situation.

This little boy had damage to his vision from vitamin A deficiency because his family could only afford rice.

And then there are the families who can’t afford to access vaccines or don’t know about them through lack of education. Immunisation rates are improving rapidly in Bangladesh but there are still many of the poorest people who still do not access vaccinations.  This little girl is dying of liver failure from hepatitis b- most at risk groups in Australia are vaccinated against this.

These children are suffering an agonising illness and may not survive –  tetanus – part of our routine vaccinations and virtually never seen in Australia. The baby was in another more rural hospital that had virtually no staff or even medicines and he was stuck in an empty ward with no staff. We were told he would probably die. No vaccination and he’d got tetanus through an infected ear from swimming in dirty water and poor hygiene.

Many babies in Bangladesh die in the first few days of life because so many poor babies are born in villages with traditional birth attendants who are not trained in basic hygiene and dirty umbilical cord ties like this can cause fatal infection. This mother is nursing her baby who has just died from such an infection.

Hospitals and medicines are not the only answer – this is the main children’s ward in a major government hospital and there are four patients to a bed and hardly any health staff and basic equipment was lacking.

Just when it was getting to a point where we didn’t know how much of this we could bear to see, Symbiosis took us to some of their project villages.

The first thing we noted was how clean and beautiful the villages were – virtually no rubbish and everything was spotless. The kids looked so healthy and happy – they actually looked healthier than where I worked in Australia. They proudly showed their clean water well that had been tested for arsenic and marked green – safe to drink. Arsenic contaminated groundwater is a big problem in Bangladesh. The village had been trained in farming fish and had fish to eat and hatchlings to sell. They were happy to show off all the healthy vegetables they were growing and had training in composting and other techniques.The villagers gathered to meet us and thru the interpreter told us how since symbiosis had been working with them there had been a dramatic improvement in their health, virtually no children got sick any more, the women could read, they had incomes, they understood hygiene, they understand the importance of education and vaccines for their kids, and you could really see their kids had a better chance at changing the future. The traditional birth attendants had been trained by symbiosis and now found that virtually none of the babies dies and they knew when to take them to the hospital.

Then we went to another village where the children were being served kedgeree. This is a program where they teach the villagers to cook the nutritious rice dish with a balanced mix of veges and protein. They have been taught about nutrition and cooking by Symbiosis. We were offered some and our group who had almost all had the’ bangla belly’  were a little scared – we really hoped the symbiosis hygiene training had worked!!  All of us had by now already had ‘Bangla Belly’ from the town food. We had to show our faith in it – it tasted great and none of us got sick from this. Again we got to see the beautiful veges they were growing introduced by Symbiosis.

We met a lady who had been part of a Symbiosis savings group and had been able to save the capital to start up a small shop business that was now supporting her family and her kids schooling.

This Symbiosis community library was amazing. These women came from rural areas where they are almost all illiterate. They had been taught to read by Symbiosis and were able to come here and read books on parenting, gardening, farming, politics, newspapers and so on. They talked about how empowering it was and how they now valued education for their kids. Some sand about how they had learnt to escape domestic violence This is how powerful social change starts from the grassroots.

Then in the desperate miserable slums we saw these rays of sunshine – Symbiosis supported preschools – simple dirt floor huts but these kids were getting an education. And reciting to us in English and Bengali!

One of the women’s savings group met with us in the slums and told us how they’d been able to buy the sewing machine and establish a business, another lady’s husband had been able to purchase his rickshaw business. They talked about how Symbiosis had changed their lives for the better.

Symbiosis showed us incredible hope in a what seemed like a hopeless place and hopeless situations.  They were doing the stuff that really mattered – the things that prevented the dreadful misery we’d seen in the hospitals, the things that brought hope to the poorest of the poor and the least of the least.

I was inspired to support them in this amazing work and have been ever since – if you’ve been inspired too then  you can make tax deductible donations to them through here.