Cox's Bazaar / St Martin's Island

Showing my commitment to keeping a close eye on my ongoing survey, decided to take a long weekend holiday to Cox's Bazaar - a popular and slightly overdeveloped beach resort - and St Martin's Island - a pretty and largely undeveloped island with no electricity or cars.


Cheeky mouse hiding behind my pillow in the beach hut on St Martin's Island. He kept popping out to try and eat our bananas.

Survey piloting

Went to visit the four slum areas where the survey is being conducted by a team of investigators. First was Begunbari Pataton Bosti, Tejgaon.


This building contains 120 one-room households on three shakily constructed floors. The people live here worry constantly about it collapsing. There is a dispute between the landlord and the government over who owns this land, which could result in eviction. They pay around Tk. 1300 per month rent (£10), which per square metre is around 5 times as much as middle class families pay in Dhaka.


This girl went to a kindergarten (private) school, where fees were Tk. 3000 (£23) to register plus Tk. 150 (£1) per month.


Some of the rooms were too dark to fill in the survey - there had been a power cut since the previous day.

Lalbag Bosti

This slum was originally set up as a "sweeper colony" - people were invited to migrate from India to work as street sweepers. The housing was a combination of tin shacks and a much better 5-storey concrete building.


Some of the people here had relatively high incomes - around Tk. 8-10,000 (£60-80) per month for a family with two earners. This woman's husband was working in Malaysia and sending home money. Most of the children were going to school.

Study Areas

... have been selected:

• Korail
• Cholontika Cluber Bastee, Mirpur
• Lalbag, Old Dhaka
• Begunbari Pataton Bastee, Tejgaon

The entire project will go to 400 households in each area. My own survey will be given to those with children aged 11-15, which will be about half of them. The survey is due to start on Saturday.

My survey

Here's my survey instrument. It will be administered to families with children aged 11-15 within a larger sample of 1600 families in 4 slums. Not expecting as many comments on this as on the rhino picture. Survey training is going on right now. The plan is to pilot the survey on Thursday morning and finalise it on Thursday afternoon... when things get going here they really move surprisingly quickly.

BRAC School, Mirpur

Visited a school run by BRAC, the country's largest NGO. Saw class 1 and class 3, children aged 8-10. Parents’ occupations include rickshaw wallahs, day labourers including construction. Children’s work: boys often work in handicrafts (outside of house); girls work in home. Class runs for 4 hours per day in 2 shifts. There are about 36 children in each class. Children study Bangla, maths, English, social studies and also spend time dancing and singing. There are no fees and everything (books, pencils etc) is provided for free. The classes were noticeably free of repetition and children's work was up on display on the walls.

As I was about to leave they said the children would like to talk to me. In an awkward exchange the children took turns to stand up and ask me questions. One asked 'Any advice for us?' - I said 'Well erm you should probably study hard,' feeling a bit hypocritical. I asked the children if they liked school and they all said yes loudly. I asked what they liked /least/ about school. This made them glance around nervously and no one replied until the teacher picked one student to stand up and say something. But her reply was 'Nothing - everything is very good'. I asked the children what they wanted to be when they were older. A couple of girls said 'teacher' so I asked, who-all wants to be a teacher? Nearly all of the girls and a couple of the boys stood up. The remaining children wanted to be doctors, engineers or policemen. Apparently none of them were interested in going in to business or making money.

Afterwards visited some of the houses of the children's parents. This was by far the worst slum I have seen, claustrophobic, hot and full of stove fumes, with flimsy shacks being built literally on top of each other and only very narrow, muddy corridors between them.

River trip

Went boating with some Dhaka-ite friends, five of us squeezing into a tiny CNG taxi to get down to the river. Waiting at the dock, we gathered a good audience as usual. The river is fascinating and it was fun at first, but we were unpleasantly close to the sewage-smelling water.

Bashbari

Visited this drop-in centre for working children in Bashbari, Mohammadpur. It offers non-formal education and facilities like washrooms, lockers, health information, counselling, medical check-ups, games, tv, savings accounts. They are also referred to other places for free health services and vocational training. One of the children here is already a celebrity having featured in a Sport Relief documentary. Most of their families have a total income between Tk. 2100-4000 (£16-30); but around a quarter were in the Tk. 1000-2000 range (£7-£15). The children themselves earn anything between Tk. 10 and Tk. 100 per day (between 8p and 80p) working as rubbish collectors, part-time domestic helpers, and porters. According to the centre's staff, everyone living in this community is part of the 'hardcore poor' and none of them use the two government schools that are nearby, mainly because they rely on the children's incomes, but also because of costs like uniforms and tuition fees. This project has a pragmatic stance of giving the children basic reading and writing skills, together with various other services, rather than trying to get them into government schools.

The game shown here is called carrom and involves using little discs to tap other little discs into holes on a board.