... a bumpy road to empowerment of the tribal people in Bangladesh
... there’s suddenly a burning tyre smell and black smoke. The tyre of our car is not only flat – it’s disintegrated! Amazing we didn’t come off the road and somersault off the raised road into the rice fields!
We reach Birisiri after a 5 hour drive from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. In these highlands live the Garo people who originally came from Western China, through Tibet to hold a kingdom here with the partition with India in 1948. Then they started to lose their land rights and felt the full brunt of economic and cultural discrimination.
People Tree started working with Folk Bangladesh nearly 10 years ago – a fair trade group dedicated to working with tribal and indigenous people to help support them and provide markets for their traditional textiles.
Photos of us arriving at Birisiri Folk project and being greeted by village leaders and members of the group.
The women greeted us. There were many formal speeches to celebrate the opening of a new building that is the proud home to 10 sewing machines and an embroidery section that the local NGO and Folk Bangladesh have worked tirelessly to build.
Women have incredible embroidery skills (mostly used on embroidered greeting cards) but want to improve their earnings by turning their embroideries into finished products. Tailoring helps them do that and improve their earnings. Tailors from their unit in Dhaka have been visiting to train the women and left over handwoven fabrics are being made into bags to help to improve their sewing skills, turning waste fabric into something useful and helping the women earn more.
Bottom right: Bora Aksu designed a top and tunic to help give work to this group
70 women work in embroidery and were extremely proud to see their work modelled in the People Tree catalogue. Many women are the sole bread winners, earn more than their husbands or finance their studies at university with their earnings. Folk Bangladesh has run health and eye camps to help arrange operations for cataracts. The aim is to help support this very rural community that finds it increasingly difficult to survive as erratic rain fall has reduced this harvest by 20-40% leaving them nothing to sell after feeding themselves and little cash income.
The team brainstormed and came up with some easy experimental styles to sew at this group. The group are so enthusiastic and they’ll be support given to help them graduate from making bags to simple skirts!
There’s nothing like a walk through the rice fields in rural Bangladesh before breakfast. Masako from People Tree Japan and I love the village so getting up early is easy. By a strange and mysterious fate my old friend Sir Mukla Rahouan was there too and joined us and the Folk Bangladesh team for a walk and yummy dahl and roti breakfast at their family home. Then back to Dhaka where a surprise was waiting for me, more about that soon.
Down time in Birisiri
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