Progress for some amid Abiding Poverty
ooking
around in these months it is fairly obvious that Bangladesh has made some
progress in the past seven years. Roads
and bridges have improved, as well as, the but service (air-conditioned even!)
making long distance travel by road a much more comfortable and less hazardous
adventure.
There are also many more factories, new modern office
buildings, shops and hotels. The
variety and quality of cars and other motorized transport has increased.
Computers and access to the internet and e-mail are available in all the
larger towns. In short, the
external signs of increased wealth and a certain modernization are very evident.
However,
it is also evident that the access to these benefits is limited.
Alongside these there are still dreadful slum dwellings, open drain
sewage system, the back-breaking toil of people loading or unloading sand and
stones by baskets carried on their heads, child labor in street workshops, old
people begging for their living and much more.
Life for the poor is still a very precarious business indeed.
Despite what is sometimes put forward by those who have eyes
but will not see or who have ears but will not hear, grinding, survival poverty
is not the fault of the poor themselves who love their hardships so much they
would be prepared to go to any lengths to hold on to malnutrition, illness,
illiteracy, poor clothing and slum housing.
The poor are poor because they lack access to the resources which would
enable them to buy food, to pay for the doctor and medicines, to have an
education to send their children to school and to put a decent roof over their
heads…
Dramatic Events
These months have been marked by more dramatic and even traumatic events. The international situation has affect us all, of course. Here it created some more tension because we are in a Muslim majority country, but apart from a few minor incidents and pro-Taliban demonstrations we have not really been in any danger. The national level politics created more upheavel. We had a general election in October 2001 with what turned out to be for many a very surprising landslide victory for the then opposition party, the Bangladesh Nat6ional Party, and their allies of a rigid Islamic political hue notably the Jamaat-e-Islami. They now form the government with the defeated Awami League now the main opposition party who have been refusing to take their seats.
The
law and order situation has been unsettled before and after the election.
There are reports of violence and armed robberies directed against the
Hindu minority in particular and against Catholic communities in the north west
of the country. The wider Christian
community was thrown into a state of alarm earlier last June when a bomb
exploded just a few minutes into Sunday morning mass in a parish where one of
our Xaverian Fathers is parish priest, Mimmo Pietanza.
It killed twelve young men and left many more of their relatives and
friends injured and traumatized. No
one has been brought to justice for this. It
seems to have been one of a series of bombings that took place at different
political, cultural, and religious venues throughout the country prior to the
general election with a view to creating a crisis of instability.
The last moment of shock was the untimely death of Fr. Rinaldo Nava, of a massive heart attack at 50, at the beginning of July 2001. He was a tireless and dedicated servant of the Church and the people of Bangladesh, and still had so much he wanted to do. We have lost too many too young over the past few years. I am not about to teach the Lord his business, but we could have used the contribution of Fr. Rinaldo and the others for a little while yet. This talk of lives lost brings me in a way to where I am right now.
(From Mission - The Xaverian Way)