Thursday, October 30, 2008

Last distribution



After almost 2 weeks of faithful service, my iPhone is failing to access the network today, so this is being posted from the hotel's computer, which is crawlingly slow, so there will only be a couple of pictures. [Update: Upon arrival back home in Canada, I discovered a message from Rogers Wireless, left on my home phone in Brampton, advising that they had arbitrarily suspended my cell service because they thought the roaming charges were higher than normal. Duh!]

We went to Tongibari today for our final distribution of 600 bedkits. This village on the Meghna river is shown in the above photo.

After the kids received their kits, we visited the home of one of the recipients, and strolled around the village. This was the first time we had actually seen how the poor in the countryside actually live. It is appalling. This particular group of families had lost their homes when the river flooded its banks, and had relocated to rented houses. Fuel for the cooking fire is dried cow dung. The cooking stove is hand moulded from clay by the wife and mother. She was making a new one as we visited.



As you can see here, the bedkit had been unpacked, and the mattress was drying in the sun. Other parts of the kit were seen inside the house. All of the items are highly prized by these people who have nothing but what they can make for themselves.

I am out of gas, as are my team mates. We are in sensory overload, and will need time to process all of the information we have taken in. We have no frame of reference for much of what we have seen. We know it will be impossible to accurately describe this to our friends and family back home. We can show them the pictures, tell them the stories, but they will not really understand if they have not experienced something like this first hand.

So our team shares a special bond that comes from going through this together, discussing it, trying to understand it, trying to assess whether we made much of a difference by being here.

We think we did make a difference. There are 8,000 kids who have a decent place to sleep, a new outfit, a mosquito net, a water bottle, a back pack, a sweater for the cold weather, pyjamas, some school supplies, and some other odds and ends. The proof is in the smiles.

I think my job was the best one on the team. I had the last station, where the kids received their bedkits. I could see that they didn't really believe 100% that they were going to get one until it was actually in their hands, and then every one of them broke out in a big smile that said, "Yeah, it IS real. I'm actually going home with this. Wow!"

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