Unending fields of rice

Last night, after watching out the car windows for seemingly unending hours, we reached our destination in Rangpur; the BRAC Training & Resource Centre (BRAC-TARC). A huge facility for training BRAC staff [primarily field-based], the TARC is incredible. It has residential accommodation for 100 trainees [small children are allowed] along with additional guest rooms (for trainers and visitors like us) and training classrooms, dining hall etc. The trainings are free of cost as are the accommodations and related expenditures. At this time, 4-5 trainings are being conducted in the centre. What’s more incredible is that this is not the only facility of its kind—there are 22 TARC facilities across the country. It's the stuff of dreams for many NGOs and partially explains the high degree of loyalty that BRAC employees feel.

The morning was spent being briefed on the particulars of the TUP project. It began in 2002 in 3 districts [Rangpur is one of them] and has, so far, reached 100,000 beneficiaries (all women). They plan to reach 200,000 more beneficiaries in the next 4 years and have expanded the number of districts that they plan to cover to 42. It’s ambitious but do-able.

After lunch, we headed out to visit beneficiaries of this project in their homes. Bangladesh seems rather homogenous as a nation because of the profusion of paddy fields everywhere. Granted, they eat rice at every meal, its still amazing. Add to that they all speak the same language and are racially similar and it seems a fairly unchanging nation. The villages are interesting. In Pakistan, I am used to a village being a single cluster of houses with another village comprising of another cluster. In Bangladesh, each cluster is one part of a whole village. Therefore villages are larger, I couldn’t get an average figure but one of our hosts estimated that average size would be around 400 households, which is a large village by our standards. This function of clusters makes for interesting village design; clusters tend to be built within an area tall trees and bamboos with agricultural fields creating the separation between clusters.

The first village we went to was a mixed Hindu-Muslim community. Similar to parts of Sindh in Pakistan, the villagers were living in complete harmony and were very happy to interact with us. Pakistan is of course a pretty well known country in Bangladesh since it has only been 36 years since East Pakistan became Bangladesh. And Bengalis are pretty forgiving people—they quite like Pakistanis!

The visits were themselves very interesting. The women who have been given a start by this project have managed to be very successful in not only developing enterprises but also in uplifting themselves from such extreme poverty. Its also remarkable the degree of business acumen they display. One of the TUP members started out with 6 goats and ten hens. Through a combination of saving and selling assets (hens multiply rapidly and you can sell an asset as long as you have a replacement for it—i.e. after a goat has given birth, you retain the kid but sell an older goat), she bought first a rickshaw and then used her remaining savings as well as rent from the rickshaw to buy a cow. Her assets now include 5 goats [of which 3 are pregnant], a kid [she didn’t include the kid as a goat!], a cow, 25 hens and a rickshaw. The project allows them to save well and also to develop their enterprise appropriately so that they are benefiting from microfinance as the project intended. Some take loans for land cultivation, others buy land for a house or for new livestock, but the important thing is that they now have the capital and [perhaps, equally important] the confidence to take on such loans.

And so ended the day. I leave you with the advice of one of the senior members of our group: “Instead of getting up as if a scorpion has bitten you, ponder upon the dreams of the night before…”