Today I'm going with two people from Marie Stopes International, and the finalist who is travelling with then, to see the work MSI is doing in several slums inside the city.
First, it's off to the old-established Sadea Khan slum, down the side of an embankment next to, and indeed on top of, the river. Gaudily decorated lorries roar past, and about a dozen rickshaws – the employment of many Sadea Khan husbands – are parked up nearby.
Walking through the mud, and past the pipe with clean water where women are doing the washing up, we step on to the bamboo walkway. This is all that separates us from the filthy river, and underneath you can see water, plastic bags of various shapes, sizes and colours squashed up together, and all kinds of mess you wouldn't want to look at too closely. All the houses are supported on stilts, just slightly higher than the walkway. Let's hope there's no flooding here…
We go into Shahida's house. She is 26, and has three children – the oldest 12. She was married at 12, and is determined her children will not marry until they are 18. Nor does she intend to have any more; she has had a contraceptive injection. There is a double bed in her house, on which her two youngest children sleep. She, her husband, and the eldest child all sleep on the floor – and you can see straight through the gappy, rotting floorboards to the river. No wonder they are all constantly ill and that she and her husband are unhappily married. "There is no privacy, no humanity, no morality here," she says.
But Shahida has, as we would say in the UK, a real "eye". The floorboards are painted with flowers, and the family's few clothes are folded on rails and colour-coded so they look like a display in a shop. Fairy lights are draped everywhere – Shahida has done everything with that one room that she could. What a waste.
We move down to a bigger house to meet more of the women. Apparently they give birth on those beds, just inches from the dirty water, the river which is making me feel more and more queasy with its sickly, stale smell. They don't go to the hospital – unless there is an emergency, such as one woman who had a caesarean section – and are seen through their labour by traditional birth attendants who don't have medical training. They do, however, have sterile delivery kits and infant mortality has gone down.
A couple of hours drive through often static traffic, we reach Shampur slum. This is just outside central Dhaka, and is in an area of factories and workshops, all crowded together. While the last slum was constructed from bamboo, these houses are right against the factory where many of them are employed, and all seem to be made of corrugated iron.
The heat is extraordinary. There are small open fires cooking the meals with which they will break their Ramadan fast; environmental pollution and smells of burning from the factory, plus the paths are very narrow and muddy – although presumably just from the rain. And the houses are all jammed up close to each other, getting hotter and hotter. With clinics on hand, the textile workers and their families – in this area anyway - have generally reduced their families to two children although, again, this is a tough way to bring up children. Beyond tough really.
The humidity leads sweat to drip down the faces of many of us, and I particularly feel for our translator, Dr Farzana. Not only does she talk for hours on end in this heat, but it is Ramadan and she is fasting during daylight hours. This means eating and drinking nothing – not even a sip of water. We Brits, on the other hand, gratefully gulp down cola when it comes – and none of us likes the stuff!
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