During the very difficult Covid-19 years, we learnt of numerous groups of volunteers in Bangladesh seeking out and helping those in need.
Now, with the inflation of everything running at well over 10% and affecting the poorest in society, these voluntary groups are seen to be very active once more.
Most religions of the world tell us to help those who have less and when I was growing up in London, 60-70 years ago, it was a time after the Second World War when there was a shortage of and rationing of almost everything, food, clothing, petrol etc.
At home, we ate very simply and ate chocolate only at Christmas and birthdays. We were told by our parents that, at that time, there was not enough food to feed everyone, especially the poorest.
My mother had uncles and other relatives who had worked in Asia and Africa and had strongly influenced her thinking about poverty and the need to assist “those who have less.”
With her guidance, when I was as young as nine or 10, I helped her in raising funds for Oxfam, now one of the biggest overseas development charities of the UK and for the last 50 years an important development partner in Bangladesh.
In 1966, when my mother was terminally ill with cancer, she encouraged me to volunteer abroad. In India, Bihar was having a severe famine and, having qualified in agriculture and animal husbandry, I volunteered to assist in village relief and rehabilitation programs.
And that is how I first came in 1968 to the Indian sub-continent which has been my home -- with over 30 years in Bangladesh -- for most of the last 55 years.
To be a good volunteer, you need to be a good observer of who it is that you are trying to assist and you have to be a good listener too. You need to have infinite patience to understand how the person in need is feeling and how you can help without taking their personal dignity away.
In countries like Bangladesh, there is always a huge amount of spontaneous volunteerism in every village, in every slum. People always rally round to ensure that nobody goes completely hungry.
From 1998 to 2000, I worked with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society that has thousands of volunteers spread all over the country. Currently, more than 70,000 (50% are female) are volunteers of the outstanding Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP) who, during successive cyclones, have saved thousands of lives by getting people to cyclone shelters in time.
In 1971, alongside hundreds of Indian volunteers, we worked closely with the Bangladeshi volunteers who worked tirelessly among nearly 10 million refugees in all the estimated 1,100 refugee camps in India.
These Bangladeshi “volunteers” were refugees themselves, but they had stood up to organize the cleanliness and safety of the camps, the feeding times, the “school” times and the cultural activities of song and drama.
They have not been recognized as freedom fighters as they did not carry rifles, but these volunteers in the camps were and are some of the finest unsung heroes and heroines involved with the formation of Bangladesh.
Julian Francis has been associated with relief and development activities of Bangladesh since the War of Liberation. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh awarded him the ‘Friends of Liberation War Honour' in recognition of his work among the refugees in India in 1971 and in 2018 honoured him with full Bangladesh citizenship.
