Where to now for Sufia's family?
Sufia Akter Josna lived a life of courage. In the course of supporting her family the mother-of-six proved ready to face any challenge. When in October 2014 Sufia's life was suddenly cut short that too involved heroic self-sacrifice. On that day she rescued four Emirati children drowning in the sea off Dubai, before tragically, she herself drowned.
For the whole family, her death came at a time of hope. Sufia's gambit in travelling across the world to work as a nanny was paying off. With the Tk 12,000 she was able to send home each month her family had achieved a degree of solvency; and Sufia was pursuing an even bigger dream. She was saving to build a brick home to replace the mud-walled, tin-roofed one the family lives in.
“Only two days before her death when she called, she said she had saved enough money to start building our new home,” says husband Khurshid Alam, 60. It was not to be. Instead, her family faces an uncertain future.
Sufia was born into hardship in Bhatapara village in Shelbarash union of Sunamganj's Dharmapasha upazila. It's one of the Bhati villages lying along the lower portions of the district's rivers in the haor-lands, where the local way of life has not changed much since times past, where life's conditions remain rudimentary. In that part of Bangladesh literacy rates are well below average and there are few to appreciate the ills of child marriage.
Sufia's father's name was Kachi Miah, while her elderly mother who does not remember the name she was given, simply calls herself Osiber Ma, meaning Osib's mother, in reference to Sufia's brother.
“She never knew how to bear the pain of poverty,” says Osiber Ma. “Though she grew up with it, Sufia always wanted a better life. It's the reason she decided to go abroad to earn a living for her family.”
Yet despite her ambitions, Sufia's own life could not unfold free of the influence of prevailing social conditions and the expectations around her. She was married off at an early age to Khurshid Alam, a paddy field worker. During the course of their twenty-year union she became the mother of four daughters and two sons.
Sufia's eldest daughter Lubha Akter, 19, studied only to class three before she also married. She is already mother to two children. The second daughter Subha Akter, 15, left school years ago and plans are afoot that she too will marry soon.
Sufia's third daughter Runa, meanwhile, is yet a student of class seven at a high school in Badshahganj. To reach her school she needs to walk about six miles every day. Her eldest son Mazhar Miah, 10, studies in class 4 at a nearby madrasa where he lodges in a private home. The younger son Shakerul Miah, 9, studies in class 3 and the youngest, Sufia's daughter Rozina, 8, studies in class 2, both at a primary school in Bhatapara.
Of her children it is the eldest, Lubha, who best understood her mother's struggle against poverty. “When my father fell extremely ill,” she says, “and could no longer work in the field, my mother talked a lot about working abroad to manage the family expenses. She finally found the opportunity to do so through a neighbour who used to work as a household helper in Dubai. My mother spent every penny of her savings to go there.”
“I used to work in the paddy fields and sometimes on a fisherman in the haors,” says Sufia's husband Khurshid. “Yet our family never knew solvency; so when I became sick and could not work, our family was close to collapse. Sufia's decided at that moment to go to Dubai.”
Following her death, the family has received Tk 50,000 from the ministry of labour and employment, and a further Tk 20,000 from a Dubai-based charity, Dubai Cares.
“The government has said they will claim compensation for my mother's death from the UAE government; but we have not yet received any help beyond the initial payment,” says Lubha.
Though welcome, the amounts so far received by the family do little to make up for Sufia's regular financial contribution. “I have my own family now,” says Lubha, “but my father still can't work. Along with my siblings, my father and grandmother are really struggling.”
“When she left,” says Osiber Ma, crying in memory of her daughter, “she gave me the responsibility of looking after her youngest, Rozina, who was then only 3-years-old. Sufia had taken the full financial burden of her family upon her shoulders. Now that she is gone, what shall we do?”
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