Many years ago, when Eid-ul-Fitr came quite close to Christmas, it was interesting to observe the joy of festivities with family and friends and the giving and receiving of gifts.
The giving is, of course, related to Zakat by which, as I understand, 2.5% of one's “disposable income” (eg, cash, savings, and jewellery) should be given away, once a year, to the extreme poor and orphans.
As a foreigner living and working for over 25 years in Bangladesh, I see similarities between Eid and Christmas, such as the family coming together at a special time of the year, special foods, the joy of giving, and remembering those who have very little.
My work in the early 2000s was connected with assisting the very poorest in a government project, Adarsha Gram, which was assisted by the European Union and provided houses, homesteads, and livelihoods to homeless and landless families, particularly those who had lost their homes through river erosion.
Despite the many administrative and bureaucratic difficulties in managing such a project, the experience was enriching as well as humbling. Later on from 2006 until 2012, I continued to work with the same category of extreme poor people with the DFID and AusAID in the north west of the country.
Over those years with Adarsha Gram, I commuted from my comfortable apartment in Banani to the project's office in Nilkhet. At the nearby roundabout, two young girls with disabilities would greet me on most days with bright eyes and smiling faces, offering bunches of flowers or tea towels.
In a way, they became part of my extended family and part of my daily routine. The joy of giving clothes to them for Eid is difficult to explain.
One of the two girls could see with only one eye and the other could not speak at all. Their fathers had abandoned the families, blaming the respective mothers for giving birth not only to daughters but to daughters with disabilities.
The two girls lived in very poor unhygienic slum dwellings, so their happy smiling faces were all the more remarkable.
As I have been associated with Bangladesh since 1971, my friends sometimes refer to me as a “Bangladeshi foreigner” and I hope that connecting all these feelings, observations, and senses of my heart makes some sense, and will encourage people to reach out and help those who have less, not just at particular times of the year such as Eid and Christmas, but always.
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.
