Author depicts Dhaka slums
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If you didn’t know that where Dhaka is, or that it is the capital city of Bangladesh, you’re not alone.
According to an author who works with a grass roots Canadian charity working in Dhaka, few Canadians do.
“People don’t attend to Bangladesh. No one knows anything about Bangladesh,” said Gem Munro, who wrote a book called South Asian Adventures with the Active Poor. “[Dhaka] is the fastest growing city in the world. It grows by a Vancouver every year.”
He said there are projections that say the the capital city of Bangladesh will be the second largest in the world by 2012.
Its population is more than 12 million people.
Of that 12 million people, Munro, and others from a charity called Amarok Society, are trying to reach a very particular group — mothers living in slums.
“They’re generally recognized as being inaccessible, these women,” Munro said.
However, Amarok Society has made contact with these women and has taken on a project of teaching them how to be neighbourhood teachers in their slums.
Amarok was formed after Munro’s wife, Tanyss, was hired to go to Bangladesh and improve the school system. Both the Munros have a background in aboriginal education.
Munro said they saw the real and more serious concern was the millions of children too poor to even attend school.
Munro said 75 million children worldwide are too poor to go to school.
“It’s in our nature to try to answer this problem,” Munro said. “We became so fond of the people it really became a top priority for us. So by trial and error we developed a program that really works.”
The mothers learn how to read and write and learn English too.
The motto for the organization is “If you teach a mother, you teach a family. If you teach five mothers, you teach a neighbourhood.”
The book Munro wrote gives an account of how the program got started four years ago, and also tells the some of the women’s stories.
“The book is a fundraiser for us,” Munro noted.
He said the program improves the quality of the mother’s lives.
Munro is going to be showing videos and presenting information about Amarok and Bangladesh, as well as his book, at the Ladysmith library at 7 p.m. Nov. 10 (today). For more information see www.amaroksociety.org.
editor@ladysmithchronicle.com
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