Anwara

The story of one of Bangladesh's children

1995
Anwara is 4 or 5 years old, and like most people in Bangladesh neither she nor her mother knows her
actual age, although the year can sometimes be judged when special events or disasters occur.
Anwara's father, where is he? Nobody seems to know; he went off somewhere one day and didn't come
back.
The culture in Bangladesh is that if you are a divorced woman, a widow or have been deserted, you are
thrown out of your husband's village, because you are told that you are to blame. Your own family (your
parents) cannot take you or your children into the old family home, as there is too much shame associated
with your name.
Anwara's mother is sick a lot of the time. Too sick to work, when it is available and women like Anwara's
mother can only get half of the daily wage when work is available, despite the fact that there is a minimum
daily agricultural wage rate set by the government. Any work available is given on a take it or leave it rate
set by the landowners.
Because most of the time she is unable to work, Anwara's mother gets no money to buy food, medicines or
clothes and because her mother is considered too old, no man is interested in her for remarriage or for the
oldest occupation for women. Anwara's mother has two tatty saris and a couple of threadbare blouses.
Anwara and her mother live in a straw and bamboo `house' that consists of one room, which they share
with a small chicken and the few pots and pans that they have. The thin blanket that they have does little to
keep out the severe cold of the winter months. Anwara, now has two frocks and two pairs of bloomers. Last
week, she only had one frock, which is made from nylon and is very ragged and a matching pair of
bloomers that are so tattered, they keep falling down.
Anwara doesn't complain, she doesn't beg and although someone gave her a new frock made from thick
cotton to try to keep her warmer during the winter, she carries on unknowing that her life is one of day to
day survival. Anwara is so happy she wears her new clothes all of the time and will probably wear them out
before the weather really starts to get cold.
Cold for Anwara and her mother means torment. The temperature at night will fall to 5 or 6 degrees
Centigrade and the thin mud and straw walls of their house will keep no heat inside. If they have food, they
will cook in the house, creating a fire hazard for themselves and their neighbours. Anwara's neighbours are
generally in the same condition as Anwara. One family consists of three women and four children. A
mother, her two widowed daughters and their four children (three girls and one boy).
Because all of these women have `lost' their husbands, they are treated with great suspicion by everyone
and have no chance of remarriage, even though both daughters are only in their twenties, although they
both look to be in their forties. Their mother is a scrounger and a known thief; she is also a miser and will
not share food with her daughters or her grandchildren, although the boy child sometimes gets some
scraps of food that may be left. The survival mentality of the grandmother excludes even her grandchildren.
One daughter, given the chance, will work harder than most men. She is lean and strong and always
looking for work to be able to provide for her children. She is, in comparison to Anwara's mother, quite rich,
as she owns three saris, four hens and two goats. She doesn't get too much work though, because she is
known as a ‘naughty’ woman and has a bad reputation. Because, when times are very hard and she has no
money to buy food or clothing, she turns to prostitution to enable herself and her children to survive.
Her two young daughters, Jeli and Narkis, run free, scrounging and pinching what they can from the local
markets, foraging in the local area for firewood and herbs to cook for curry. They can be seen in the market
sometimes, sweeping the dusty ground in the hope of collecting a few grains of rice after the traders have
finished for the day. They can sometimes be seen selling bundles of herbs for other poor people to buy for
cooking. During the market days, the rice traders `employ’ young girls and boys to constantly sweep the
area around their stall to collect the fallen grains of rice. This way, these children can `earn' half a Kilogram
of rice.
Like Anwara, neither Jeli nor Narkis go to school and probably never will. Jeli did start to go to school, but
her mother could not afford the teachers `fees' or the price of pens and schoolbooks. School is supposed to
be free, but teachers supplement their salaries by charging for examinations and other normal activities.
Some schools require that all the girl children wear white tunics with a coloured sash for modesty. There
are not too many children's parents who can afford these luxuries.
Anwara, by developing countries standards, is not sustainable as she is one of the many thousands of
children who will survive or die according to fate. They are too poor even to come under the wing of an
NGO. They cannot form a group, as they cannot even save the two Taka (3 pence) a week demanded for
one year, before they can get a loan. Many NGOs will provide subsidised medicines and vitamins, but
Anwara’s and Jeli's mothers cannot even afford these. If they get sick, they just have to hope that they can
recover or try the cheap local medicines that are sold by the village `doctors’.
Anwara is sometimes lucky; a local benefactor will give her a little food in exchange for some light work.
Even at 4 or 5 years old, she knows that she must work to help her mother get food. She works very hard
at watering plants, running errands to the local shops, sweeping the yard or winnowing grains. Even at her
age, Anwara already knows that if she does a little work she might get something to eat and she expects to
eat rice only once in two or three days, otherwise, it might be only homemade chapattis and wild herb curry.
She doesn't beg food and often refuses favours. She believes that "little people should not drink milk" or
that "sweet biscuits are for rich people only".
Anwara is polite still, good mannered and usually smiles, although she has a withering frown when
annoyed. She is still soft, not yet fully hardened to the laws of survival, where the fastest and the fittest will
survive and the others, like her mother, may get sick and die with no one to help them.
Anwara is a Muslim, but the Muslim edict of giving 2½ percent of their income to the poor doesn't really
apply to Anwara, as most of the people in the area are too poor themselves to be able to give anything.
Even the local mosque is still only four walls that have been that way for the last five years or more and
there is no money to do any further work.
Recently, in a way, Anwara had a little piece of luck. A flash flood mostly destroyed their house when the
water in the nearby river rose by 14 feet in 24 hours and overflowed its banks. Anwara and her mother
were found shivering in their wet clothes standing in two feet of water, trying to rescue and cling onto the
few meagre possessions that they had. They were taken to shelter, given some dry wrappings and fed
twice a day for three days whilst the waters receded. Anwara had not eaten so much food for a year or
more, she got rice, vegetables, eggs and fish and on one day, she was given toasted biscuits for breakfast.
She was also bathed, de-scabied and given vitamin tablets. This same flood badly damaged 26% of the
local houses and forced many people to sleep rough.
They slept on mats on the concrete floor with 31 other people who had been rescued, with real brick walls
and a concrete roof. Anwara wanted to stay, but after four days, her mother wanted to get back to what was
left of their home and make whatever repairs she could.
Like many people, after the flood went down, Anwara's mother had to try and find materials to make repairs
to the house. There was no money to buy bamboo and straw, so they had to make do with palm leaves and
the old straw that was left after the flood. Anwara and her friends went to gather bits of trees for firewood or
leaves to dry and help with the cooking. Being small, Anwara is usually pushed around by the bigger
children, who are also at the same task.
Anwara's mother needs to buy straw to repair the walls and thatch of their home. There is little straw left
from the last harvest, but what straw there is, is being purchased by the merchants from town and the
richer landowners, for livestock feed and for house repairs. The price of rice straw has nearly doubled in
value, but as Anwara's mother has no money to buy it anyway and nobody will give her mother credit, as
they are concerned that she may not live long enough to repay any loans. Even the price of salt and rice
has gone up after the flood, not too much as yet, but as the winter approaches and the weather gets
harsher, it will rise as it did last year from 12 pence a kilogram to 24 pence or more.
Thankfully, Anwara is rarely sick and apart from the normal coughs, colds, lack of food and skin parasites,
she remains well. She doesn't know that they lack food or medicines, for this is the normal situation,
although not 500 yards from her `home' is an NGO with a mother and child health clinic, But they are even
too poor to be able to afford the subsidised medicines that the NGO has in store.
The nearest fresh drinking water is 1000 yards from their home, so at least that is available. However, after
the flood nobody remembered to flush out the hand pumped tube well water pipe and many people became
sick from contamination. Anwara bathes in the river everyday and like most Bangladeshi's she is very fussy
about cleanliness and no matter what the weather all people bathe. The fact that bathing in the river water
may give villagers many diseases makes no matter, as long as the complete body is washed. Teeth are
cleaned using a twig from a special tree and the mouth rinsed out in the river water.
The water from the tube well is considered only for drinking or cooking. Anwara bathes in the same river
that three weeks ago, was a raging torrent of 14 feet of water that now has gone down to its pre winter level
of just two feet. Within the next two months, the river will dry up completely. Villagers will then bathe in the
nearest pond that has water and only when they are also dry, will villagers bathe using tube well water. To
bathe by the tube well is thought to be immodest for women and girls, so they carry the considerable
amounts of water needed back to their homes.
The water in the rivers and ponds is filthy and full of diseases, but thankfully most people have some
natural resistance to many of the local diseases or there would be many more sick people, especially after
the flood, when dead animals and rubbish could be seen floating in the water. The river is also many
people’s open latrine, as the need to wash the private parts after urination or defecating is part of the strict
code of behaviour. Anwara doesn't know that bathing in the rivers or ponds can make her sick, many
children love to play and splash around in the water, not knowing that many latrines empty into the water
causing diarrhoea, hook worms and skin diseases. Nobody in the small compound that Anwara lives in has
a latrine, nor do 90% of the community. When and wherever you need to go, you go.
None of the adults in Anwara's small collection of dwellings owns any land; they cannot grow their own food
and have to depend on getting labouring jobs in the paddy fields during the planting or harvesting seasons.
Sometimes they get a little work at other times, but everybody in the rural areas has to rely on crops for
their main income. If there are good rains, which are unusual in the north, farmers can plant the rice
seedlings and get a good harvest. At other times, the farmers have to rely on diesel pumped irrigation to
have any chance of a crop. The present crop of Amman rice will be harvested in December and until then
the villagers go short of money and subsequently short of food.
The soil is sandy and soon dries out, so the farmers have to be extra quick to get another crop planted. In
the dry season, wheat is often grown as it tolerates the drought better. The soil is worked hard, with no time
to build up its natural fertility between crops.. The hard pressed soil is expected to produce three main
crops a year, with the relentless pressure to feed the people. Any livestock manure that is available is
turned into cooking fuel for the homestead, as it has greater short term value, rather than being `wasted' to
enrich the soil. The local people know nothing about preserving the environment; they only know the
constant need to produce food to be able to feed themselves. In a country that only seeks to survive from
one day to the next, environmentalism means nothing; they know not, that the inorganic fertilisers are
destroying the soil or that the chemical sprays are damaging the natural balance of predator insect that can
be so useful.
Once the Amman rice is harvested, the farmers need no help in the fields until the wheat is harvested. This
means that from January to May there is little labour required, and the poorer people start to suffer from
greater undernourishment during the coldest and driest time of the year. The concept of `winter' in the
tropical country is little understood by many people outside of the area. During the ‘hot’ season, the
temperature will rise to the mid forties Centigrade and only fall to the mid thirties during the night. The
winter time brings many dramatic changes that are very hard, for even the local people to become
accustomed to, with day time temperatures rising to a maximum of 20 degrees and falling at night to five or
six degrees.
The cold winds that sometimes occur, blow directly from the Himalayas and hail is sometimes heavy
enough to coat the ground for a short while, with hailstones the size of marbles.
Anwara's mother will get very little food, other than the meagre rations that the government sometimes
hands out during the worst of times. There will be no natural sources of water, which means that there will
be no supply of fish for the poor villagers to catch for themselves. Meat is too expensive for Anwara's
mother to even consider buying, they will have to rely on whatever vegetables that they can scrounge or
pick up herbs from the fields for their curry mix.
The despair of the hard dry winters, forces many of the poorest people to migrate to the towns, drawn by
the faint hope of food and shelter. There are now, so many migrants to the towns, living in hovels or rough
in the streets and parks, that the authorities are being forced into occasionally forcing the people out of the
towns, in order to stop the mass of women and children begging in the streets and markets and generally
causing a lot of problems to the town dwellers.
The children of all ages are clothed only in the barest tattered rags that have little hope of keeping them
warm, let alone modestly dressed that is expected of all people. Those that have not had their heads
shaved after being infested with head lice (and worse) have stringy and matted hair that is tinged with red,
showing up their undernourished state. Many have permanent coughs, snotty noses or festering open
sores that they cannot get treatment for. Skin diseases and Leprosy are still virulent here, despite kind
hearted local and foreign doctors trying to help rid these diseases from the area. If these poor bedraggled
people go to the clinics or hospitals, they are usually driven off by the guards on the gates and many
doctors are unaware or uncaring of the problems of these people. With the population on the move all the
time and the stigma that is still attached to leprosy, few people attend the free clinics that could help them.
Even if they do start the treatment courses, very few complete the long course of medicines that are
required to treat the disease as they can last for more than a year.
Anwara is still young and living in the country, whereas in the town some girls only seven or eight years
older than her are selling their young bodies into prostitution to get money to survive. Other than that, there
is a good trade in young girls and women who are sold into slavery in other nearby countries. Many of the
males regard females only as a commodity like clothes, which are discarded when worn out. There are
thirteen year old girls with babies to support. They may be married and if so, they are lucky. They may be
the second or third wife to a well off man, but are treated as maid servants and bullied by the senior wives
and too frightened to run away, even if they have somewhere that they can go. As soon as the young girls
show any sign of puberty, their elders start to look for a suitable boy to wed them off to. It makes no matter
that the law states that they cannot be married until they are 18 years of age, they only have to start
menstruation before they are considered fit to breeding. That can occur from the age of 12 years.
To get a `good' marriage means that the family of the girl have to give the boy's father land, a motorcycle,
possibly gold or a television set and in some cases, the whole lot is expected. This is seen as one way in
which a girl’s parents can be seen to step up on the social ladder, by marrying up.
Girls like Anwara have nothing to give and will probably end up with a dark skinned boy, a cripple or as is
likely, a boy in the same situation as herself. The tremendous pressure on parents here to get their
daughters married off before she becomes ‘spoiled’, means that marriages can be arranged within a few
days of any interest being shown. The legal age of 18 is disregarded, the loan sharks will `help' with the
dowry, although that is no longer legal and the excuse for the whole family to gorge themselves for a day or
two on credit is of no apparent matter.
Like Anwara, there are many cases of girls who are dark skinned being rejected for marriage because of
the possibility that they may have dark skinned babies, as the paler that you are improves your chances of
a good marriage. Their darkness is rejected by their social peers, simply because they are ‘black’. Even
girls from wealthy families who are ‘black’ have a hard enough time, so there will be little chance for
Anwara to marry up the social scale when her turn comes.
With no schooling, no assets and the wrong colouring, Anwara doesn't stand much chance, although I
doubt that Anwara realises that she will miss chances. Life is `controlled' by the fate of god.

This true story was written in August 1995 as part of a series of short biographies that depicted the lives of
women and girls in northern Bangladesh. Only the names have been changed; the rest is as it existed in 1995.
The author spent several years in this area working on a project funded by the British Government.

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