Travels in India, part 2

Visiting the Bangladeshi Refugee Community in Varanasi

Later that day we visited a slum community (which are called jhuggis) of Bangladeshi refugees (The Bangladesh government  mowed down some poor communities and many fled to India. Bangladesh is only hours from Varanasi by train, sharing a border with India.  India has, to some small degree, absorbed these hapless nomads (at least temporarily)  several miles away in Varanasi, 19 of whose children are now  students at BSS. Their housing was primitive. I saw only one one water spigot for the entire community. Women were bathing, fully clothed, washing through and under their saris as discreetly as a person could with dozens of people all around. 

(Jumping ahead while I am writing about how women bathe and launder: In Kolkata the women have to get up in the middle of the night to bathe at the spigots. There the cultural norms is that no one is supposed to view the women bathing even though they do wear  their saris while bathing. The men, on the other hand, strip down to their shorts and bath on the dirty sidewalks, which the women are pounding the family's  laundry on the same dirty betel nut stained, cigarette butt-strewn,  urine encrusted sidewalks. They have to do the laundry where the water spigots are located. From time to time I'd see a hand pump for water. It is clear that almost no one in India we saw has running water in their homes. 

Electricity, when anyone has it, is sent through a dangerous snaky mess of illegal wires. We saw the results of dangerous community electrification later that day at Buddhas' Smile School. 

BSS student, Amit Kumar, 12, was one of five children standing under electrical lines when the lines collapsed onto them. Three children were electrocuted to death, Amit and another child survived the electrocution. Amit was badly burned on his leg, arm and neck.  His left leg is in need of a scar release surgery and hopefully  Rajan can find a surgeon to do this surgery  with Amistad's help.  Amit's biggest sorrow is that he can't stand for prayers with the other boys. 

A problem arose we were leaving the Bahgladeshi refugee community. A local Indian community politician came over to the van and lit into Rajan for encouraging the Bangladeshi children to come to her free  Buddha's Smile school. 

The local Indians, who let the (illegal immigrant) Bangladeshi squat in their neighborhood do so because the Bangladeshi  families are doing the worst of the worst jobs, the ones that even poor Indians don't want to do. And they do NOT want the Bangladeshis to learn to read and write. 

Most of Rajan's students must work before or after school, or both. Some of Rajan's  little Bangladeshi students scour their area of Varanasi picking up garbage before dawn in the morning and again after school, selling the recyclable materials (plastic, cardboard, cans) for 9 cents American per pound, (5 rupees per kilo). Rajan's Bangladeshi students also make pies from cow dung,  baking them in the sun and then carefully store them in round piles for sale as cooking fire fuel.