Successful case studies
Jasmin was walking abnormally. She was bending her body forward while she was walking toward the gangway with a pile of plastic bottles. This is her job to wash those and fill them up with water from the nearby city corporation tap.
From her birth she has been suffering from this problem- one of her legs are shorter than the other. At the time of her childhood it was the cause of her depression as everybody around her used to tease. Her mother died at her early age. Her father got married to another woman. Even the step mother used to tease and scold and beat her almost all the time. She considered ‘disabled’ Jasmin as a family burden. ‘She can not even walk properly, who will marry her, how long she be fed by her poor father?’ – The step mother used to utter these all the times. Soon her father also started to think in that way. The other two sons became more important to them. This made Jasmin so sad that one day she left home and came to Dhaka.
It was twenty years back when Jasmin was twenty years old. As it was her first time in Dhaka at the beginning she was puzzled. She did not know where to go and what to do to buy food. Many people offered her to sell sex. But in her mind she knew she wanted to find a way where she can live with dignity. At the Sadarghat terminal she started to beg to live. Soon she met with Sharif, a young loader working there. She noticed that Sharif is bit different than the other loaders of the terminal. One day Sharif offered her to get married and she agreed. They started to live under one of the planks connecting the pontoon of the terminal. Happy days passed quickly. The fellow loaders started teasing at Jasmin and her husband. After some days Sharif also started to be changed. Ill behavior has been started and love vaporized. Meanwhile she met another man named Iqbal who used to sell water to the passengers. He offered her a job to wash used plastic bottles and fill with water from the nearby tap for 30 Taka (43 cents) a day. She started the job but failed to continue due to her pregnancy. The small income awakened hope which soon disappeared.
At this perplexed moment Jasmin met with the staffs of Amrao Manush (we are people too) project. This is the project of Concern Worldwide for the pavement dwellers of Dhaka city. Jasmin came to know that they have the day caring centre very near where she can send her 4 years old daughter Shorifa to read, play, and sleep and to feed. And most surprisingly she doesn’t need anything to pay in return. She became the participant of the project. One of the other participants who lives close to her was made authorized to send and bring back Shorifa along with her daughter of same age. She started the bottle washing job again. The income made her confidant. Her husband also started good behavior to her like the early age. She is availing the locker facility of the centre and keeping the valuables there. She also saved 200 taka (2.85 US$) with the savings team of the project within three months. She established communication again with her abandoned family in Bikrampur. She wants to start her own grocery shop business back in the village. That is why she is doing her savings seriously. She doesn’t want to sleep in the street anymore. She wants to give her daughter a dignified life. Jasmin’s courage and struggle is an example among the other inhabitants of the terminal. ‘Jasmins also can do many things’ has become a local phrase among the floating people of Sadarghat now a days.
Shahidul Haque Khan