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This week has been as bumpy as the road we ride to the camps on. Great curtains of rain have swamped the town, leaving the path to our offices a snake-filled swamp. Lord bless the smart-thinking cleaner who hefted a few bricks into the mire so that we could hop, skip and jump our way to our desks. Ah, we areally are in 'the field'! But its not just the rain that's been making me despondent.
The week started with a smart well-educated young man giving me a note that read 'This camp is ruining my life, please help me'. Another came in only to be told that he'd been misinformed about his family being resettled to Canada. Whilst these encounters were pretty gutting, the encouraging thing about young bright men is that they have the chance to succeed in Bangladesh itself. Even without official access to higher education, it can be managed with determination and the right heads turned. Its the young women who worry me.
Its hard knowing that if things don’t substantially change then the girls with the bright sad eyes who come before us, lift up their burquas and calmly tell us their stories
will turn into the dull-eyed, leathery-skinned women with the painfully thin arms who at present are their mothers. It’s very depressing. It’s also depressing that these young women, in fact all the refugees, are not model examples of honesty but are, rather, model examples of survival. Understandable, but depressing.
There is nothing like the frustration of hearing the same story from 5 different sides, all equally convincing, and all likely to be equally full of fabrication. In a camp where 10,000 people have been living virtually on top of each other for the past 15 years, it is no great surprise that tensions rise and tempers often flair. A large part of our job appears to be guiding various warring parties towards solutions with the law or each other. This would be easier if people didn't resort to lying quite so often. Over the past 15 years, these people were used and abused by so many different factions that sometimes the truth was all that they had left for themselves. As a bargaining trump, a last hand, it is not often shown on first meeting. And who can blame them for that? But blame them we do, and still
House rounds
Community services team checking on single elderly people in their homes.strive to help. It's a balance I haven't quite got my head around yet. I am a social worker and a lie detector, a community services assistant learning the ropes.
Actually, this week being like the road was a good analogy. It appears smooth, there are interesting things to see, but its only when you're off it, and out of the car that the sore muscles and cricked necks appear. I think likewise, when you're in the camp listening to someone's tale of woe, which to them is the agony they live in, it is interesting and a problem to be solved and the tears in the old woman's eyes don't jab at you because you're concentrating on what can be done. So you busy about your day, and you visit shelters and you promise assistance, and deliver assistance, and sometimes you sit back and just commiserate because there's nothing else to do. But back at home, in the evenings, it sinks in gradually, and in the mornings its hard to wake up.
My remedy for this it to tell myself to pull myself together. I only have to think of these things, and then usually only in positive ways, in terms of their solution. Inshallah, that is the closest I will ever get. The people I meet are forced to live them, have to fight and suffer and cry and beg and put up with so much. So the least I can do is think about it constructively. But there is a gap between the analytical thinking and the emotional response that I haven't quite managed to fill. And I'm not even sure if it's filling that will solve it. But its something that needs to be bridged, or managed, or at least worked out so that its easier to live with. Let the learning continue!
ps I'm fine really - every day it's easier and there was one incredibly happy event this week - the marriage of Romeo and Juliet - which I'll write about soon!
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Dad
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Eyes opening
The learning is a curve and has plenty bumps too, but the bit we have to cope with is that we can only do a very little at a time - and to realise, as I know you do, that that little can be really big to someone else. Change starts small. Keep your chin up - at least you have only one to cope with! Keep the blogs coming, they're a delight to read, as are your photos to see. Thinking of you and knowing you've a positive outlook and smile as ever.