Farmgate

Experimenting with bus travel as a way of getting around the city -- tricky when you can't read the destinations. Usually people hang out of the bus door shouting the route incomprehensibly quickly; tickets are sometimes bought on the bus, at other times from men sitting behind small desks on the pavement near the (unmarked) bus stop. Farmgate is one of the city's most manic hubs - these photos don't do it justice.

Bardihara slum visit

Met Julian (on the right in the photo) who is starting a small scale project, teaching only 5 children (all girls, aged 12-16) from a slum near Baridhara tailoring and general education with the aim that they will enter a government school within a year or two. Spent the afternoon walking around the slum and talking with Julian and her students. The tailoring class shown here is also the tailoring teacher's house.


On the way home with my flat mate - we get mobbed by increasing numbers of very excited children each day.

Bowniabadh school visits

At last doing something resembling primary research - last Thursday went with two colleagues to visit a school run by a local NGO, Surovi, with technical and financial support from Plan Bangladesh. The area, Bowniabadh Colony, has been around since 1971 so is relatively developed compared to most slums in terms of housing and the services available there. (Coincidentally it is near Mirpur, the location of the zoo in the last post).

The school has around 500 students aged about 6-14 (primary and lower secondary). According to the headmaster, drop-out and grade repetition were very low (less than 5 per cent) and attendance very high (over 90 per cent). Teaching is in two shifts - the lower grades are taught from 8 till 10.30 and higher grades from 11 till 2.30. Teachers' salaries start at around £300 a year. The headmaster said that one of the strengths of the school was child-centred and participatory learning, although we had our doubts about that.

from my notes...
Class visits: First we visited a grade 1 class. The children were taking turns to stand at the front and repeat a call-and-response rhyme about health. The room seemed fairly well decorated with teaching materials and equipped with blackboard; there was plenty of space for the number of students. Later we visited a grade 5 English class. The students were standing in an arc; one student would face his or her neighbour and say, “My friend is X, who is your friend?”, then the second student would turn to face the next student along and repeat the same formula. The teacher walked around the arc listening to whoever was currently saying the phrase.

The parents of children in this school are apparently mostly employed as day labourers (usually this means in the market or on construction sites), garment workers and rickshaw pullers. In retrospect it would have been good to have met some of the parents -- we met one parent from the School Management Committee, but as a relatively well-off businessman he was probably very atypical -- but it was getting close to lunch-time and we needed to get back to the office before the canteen closed. Making more similar visits this and next week.