Surovi
That’s the name of the charity school that I’m covering for my reportage… The story is about Charity schools that are not a product of NGOs but that were started by Bangladeshis for Bangladeshis. Surovi is really name the NGO that is taking care of this group of schools… But the schools have no other name… And to make things simpler, I’m just featuring one school… The one that I take pictures at is the one at Dhanmondi Pach (five)… Very near Pathshala...
It’s a very cool school… Madam Syeda Iqbaln Mand Banu (or Mrs Khan) started it in 1979 in her own home. She found children from slums, on the streets, working as domestic help and personally taught them. There was no classroom in her home compound so the students were taught in the open lawn of her home. The school is now one of 19 schools throughout Bangladesh. Most of the new schools have proper classrooms and facilities, but in this school where it all started, the students still have lessons on the lawn.
This is how the school works… It starts from baby class to class 8… Baby class to class 5 have 3 sessions of lessons each day…2 hours 30 mins… (The kids only attend one session) From 8am to 10.30am, 11am to 1.30pm, 3pm to 5.30pm… They have 3 subjects each day… For class 6 to 8, their lessons stretch from 8 am to 1pm… Only one session… Every class has about 30 students…
I've been shooting them for the past few days with Topu as my temporary translator... He's got his own assignment to do too... So I'm on the look out for another translator...
It’s a very cool school… Madam Syeda Iqbaln Mand Banu (or Mrs Khan) started it in 1979 in her own home. She found children from slums, on the streets, working as domestic help and personally taught them. There was no classroom in her home compound so the students were taught in the open lawn of her home. The school is now one of 19 schools throughout Bangladesh. Most of the new schools have proper classrooms and facilities, but in this school where it all started, the students still have lessons on the lawn.
This is how the school works… It starts from baby class to class 8… Baby class to class 5 have 3 sessions of lessons each day…2 hours 30 mins… (The kids only attend one session) From 8am to 10.30am, 11am to 1.30pm, 3pm to 5.30pm… They have 3 subjects each day… For class 6 to 8, their lessons stretch from 8 am to 1pm… Only one session… Every class has about 30 students…
I've been shooting them for the past few days with Topu as my temporary translator... He's got his own assignment to do too... So I'm on the look out for another translator...
When I first started shooting these kids… I dunno what I was expecting… But I was definitely worried… I didn’t know how having a language barrier would affect my ability to work with the kids…
It did affect me… I was awkward and weird… Thank goodness for Topu at the beginning… He was great with the kids… He made friends with them right away… And that helped me to warm up to the kids and vice versa… cos I could only say a few words to the students and ask for their name and their age… some of the kids were so young that they didn’t even know their own age….
But it got better as I started to recognize some faces and names… I also picked up the pace of my bangla knowledge… Crash course you might say… So that I could start asking the kids if they liked something… (Useful… Since the kids were receiving uniforms and shoes on the first few days that I was there…)
And things are still looking up… The kids started plucking bougainvillea branches with flowers and giving them to me and Topu, as a symbol of our popularity… At one point, we were comparing to see who got more flowers… He won… Then one of the girls from class five came to me and drew henna on my left hand for me… In pen… It was a really pretty design but got washed off real quick too… Sad…
Perhaps the kids will get more familiar with me as time goes by… I dunno… I really hope to be able to do my assignment on my own eventually… without Topu’s help as translator… That would be exciting…
posted by thebemusedphotog @ 10:05 AM
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