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” should be given away, once a year to the extremely poor and orphans.
As a foreigner (now also a Bangladeshi!) living and working for over 30 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 the ultra poor with the DFID and AusAID-supported Chars Livelihoods Program 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 passing the five-star Sonargaon Hotel twice a day. 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 return for some money. In a way, they became part of my extended family and part of my daily routine. The joy of giving clothes to them at Eid is difficult to explain.
One of the two girls could see through 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.
It was a coincidence that all those years ago I was acting in four different roles in Dhaka Stage’s production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol which was originally published in the week before Christmas in 1843. The book was written by Dickens drawing on his own experiences of growing up in very poor family circumstances. His father had been imprisoned for being in debt and Charles was taken out of school by his mother and was sent to a shoe polish factory at the age of 12 years and earned six shillings a week.
The book was written at a time when there was much poverty in Victorian London, inordinate child mortality, and -- until a proper sewerage system was completed in 1875 -- frequent outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.Dickens' description of the Christmas holiday should be the very essence of Christmas today, not at the greedy commercialized level, but in people's hearts and homes.
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.
In addition, this year, more than ever before, we think of the Holy Land. How will Christmas be celebrated this year in Bethlehem? When will the leaders of the world have the moral courage to call for a ceasefire to end the carnage and murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza?
Tomorrow Bangladesh will be observing Martyred Intellectuals Day, and soon after we will be celebrating Victory Day. We remember that the blind support of the United States to Pakistan caused the death -- directly and indirectly -- of millions of Bangladeshis and now the United States is regarded as complicit in the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians including thousands of children.
Tell me, is this the way to celebrate the birth of Christ in the Holy Land which is sacred to not just one but three religions?
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.
