Wonderful women of Bangladesh

One afternoon we took a rickshaw and head towards her house/house passing by a chaotic market with crazy traffic and continued on a narrow, quieter roads where the scene has dramatically changed. We were only three minutes away from the chaos but here there was no sign of noise or business only the bells of the rickshaws and laughter of the children. I was off to see a lady called Mita who was an embroidery entrepreneur working with disabled people. This simple description was enough to give me an urge to meet up with her to find out her story and see if we could work with her for part of our livelihoods project.

I totally lost my sense of orientation passing from one narrow bumpy road into another until we gradually slowed down. There I saw a petite woman wearing a beautiful red dress and a big smile that fills the whole street with happiness. She has long, black hair tied up neatly at the back, a beauty spot on her cheek and deep black eyes. She gives me a tight squeeze on my hand as a sign of closeness. I like her. The very moment I saw her, I knew I liked her. Together we entered a big metal door which opened up to a beautiful green compound with a narrow path next to a pond. Mita also had some friends over who were so keen to meet me. The communication among us was non verbal. I couldn’t speak Bangla, Mita couldn’t speak English and her students couldn’t speak at all as they were deaf & mute. There was such warmth in the air when we were sitting and trying to understand each other through body language, translation and smiles.

The sitting room was dimly lit, packed with furniture and embroidery tools. My favourite things in the room were the photos. A photo of Mita when she was young, a photo of Mita and her husband looking so fresh and loving, another one from a distance in a beautiful landscape. It is a bliss to get to know someone in such a way, try to read her by looking at her belongings, her looks and her interaction with her daughter and friends with whom she can communicate with sign language. There was "loud" silence in the room with small giggles.

Mita is Christian. Quite a minority in Bangladesh. She creates and teaches embroidery, working with up to 300 disabled people. When asked why especially the disabled, she discloses her own disability which is the source of her empathy. I was utterly surprised to find out one of her hands\arms didn’t function. This is incredible as she earns her living from handicraft! My first surprise was, however, to find out 16 years ago a young woman like her started a social enterprise in rural Bangladesh. How impressive is that! She started small, doing as much as she could by herself in an open field which was her first workplace but the demand for her quality work gradually increased which then required more labour. She decided to give a hand to one of the most marginalised groups of people in Bangladesh – the disabled. You can't see many disabled people in the streets of Bangladesh except for the beggars because the rest are hidden behind the closed doors out of everyone's sight but Mita and her husband who is a gentleman and also a multitasker (a security guard, runs a tea stall and a mobile phone repair trainer) gave them a hand. They made their tea stall reachable for the people on the wheelchair and run their meetings there as her workplace isn’t wheelchair accessible. I look at them in admiration. The bonding, the way they talk to each other and the things they’ve been doing together are an example to us all. 

Although initially it was far away, we managed to hire Mita to run a workshop as part of our livelihoods project. I was the happiest when we found a scope for this training. It meant we could also go ahead with [our] plan. The moment I heard her story, I wanted to share it with everyone. It would be the perfect topic for the documentary which we had planned to make in our previous placement. So we did.. a short documentary which tells her story and our journey with her.

Before the end of the previous cycle, I promised Mita I’d be in touch when I came back to Bangladesh. Yesterday I finally had the opportunity to knock her door. Both her daughter and Mita screamed when they saw me! The warmest welcome one could imagine. I’m simply lucky to get to know such extraordinary lives in the middlest of the ordinary.