Chintito

The marriage of ideas

Chintito

Ishrat Nawreen Shamma is a reader of this column. She wrote to me the following: "I visited Rupganj recently. There they make Jamdani sari. They have handloom to weave the sari. There are a few patterns that they follow. Each takes about a month to make. Little kids learn to make and they are quite the experts! I found it really interesting!

There are saris and dupattas and cloth to make kameez of various colours and patterns. Many well known shops buy from them.

The price ranges from 3000 Taka onwards to 10000; there are 50000 Taka saris also. They are ordered by big outlets, but there are few customers for the expensive ones.

There are a few handlooms in Mirpur too.
What if we spread this craft throughout the country?

I want to train little kids to weave and earn in this way; children who are basically street urchins and live in the slums and beg for money, or do other work.

While they come and earn we can teach them little by little. While they learn this craft they'll learn other things also. I want to train them and keep a supervisor too to maintain quality.

What are the pros n cons? I have many other dreams too. This I want to do to make their life better as a voluntary service. I really feel bad for the street urchins.

Shamma wrote to me for advice. I want to give her encouragement by narrating the grit of another lady in another country under a very different type of adversity.

Nicholas D Kristof writes in the New York Times:

Dr. Hawa, a 63-year-old (Somalian) ob-gyn who earned a law degree on the side, is visiting the United States to raise money for her health work back home. A member of Somalia's elite, she founded a one-room clinic in 1983, but then the Somalian government collapsed, famine struck, and aid groups fled. So today Dr Hawa is running a 400-bed hospital.

Over the years, the hospital became the core of something even grander. Thousands and thousands of people displaced by civil war came to shelter on Dr Hawa's 1,300 acres of farmland around the hospital. Today her home and hospital have been overtaken by a vast camp that she says numbers about 90,000 displaced people.

Dr Hawa supplies these 90,000 people with drinking water and struggles to find ways to feed them. She worries that handouts breed dependency (and in any case, United Nations agencies can't safely reach her now to distribute food), so she is training formerly nomadic herding families to farm and even to fish in the sea.

She's also pushing education. An American freelance journalist, Eliza Griswold, visited Dr Hawa's encampment in 2007 and 2008 and was stunned that an unarmed woman had managed to create a secure, functioning oasis surrounded by a chaotic land of hunger and warlords. Ms. Griswold helped Dr Hawa start a school for 850 children, mostly girls. It's only a tiny fraction of the children in the camp, but it's a start. (Ms Griswold also wrote movingly about Dr Hawa in her book “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.”)

In addition, Dr Hawa runs literacy and health classes for women, as well as programmes to discourage female genital mutilation. And she operates a tiny jail for men who beat their wives.

“We are trying an experiment,” she told me. “We women in Somalia are trying to be leaders in our community.”

So Dr Hawa had her hands full already and then in May a hard-line militia, Hizb al-Islam, or Party of Islam, decided that a woman shouldn't run anything substantial. The militia ordered her to hand over operations, and she refused and pointedly added: “I may be a woman, but I'm a doctor. What have you done for society?”

The Party of Islam then attacked with 750 soldiers and seized the hospital. The world's Somalis reacted with outrage, and the militia backed down and ordered Dr Hawa to run the hospital, but under its direction.

She refused. For a week there were daily negotiations, but Dr Hawa refused to budge. She demanded that the militia not only withdraw entirely but also submit a written apology.

“I was begging her, 'Just give in,' ” recalled Deqo Mohamed, her daughter, a doctor in Atlanta who spoke regularly to her mother by telephone. “She was saying, 'No! I will die with dignity.' ”

It didn't come to that. The Party of Islam tired of being denounced by Somalis at home and around the world, so it slinked off and handed over an apology but also left behind a wrecked hospital. The operating theatre still isn't functional, and that's why Dr Hawa is here, appealing for money (especially from ethnic Somalis). She has worked out an arrangement with Vital Voices, a group that helps to empower female leaders, to channel tax-deductible contributions to her hospital.

Ours is not to wonder what and how. Ours is to support all the great ideas that the youth have. There is a Dr Hawa, a Mother Teresa, a Rokeya Begum in each of them.

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