Category: News

Goducate has been teaching in a village about one and a half hour’s drive north of Yangon, Myanmar, where the need for such help is great because the children there are unable to go to school. Their parents wake up before sunrise, to work carrying rocks from boats to shore. Finishing at about 5pm, they stagger home to cook and have dinner before soon going to bed to wake early again for the next day’s work. The parents cannot afford the time and money to send their children to school. The children play during the day, casually looked after by a few old grandparents and mothers who are too exhausted to work that day. They eat food prepared early by their mothers or perhaps even leftovers from the previous evening’s dinner.

The children look forward to anything that breaks their daily routine. Thus a very ready audience of about 50 children and their mothers gather within 20 minutes around Goducate’s two workers from Yangon whenever they visit, often unannounced. For our workers, it is a tiring 7 hours round trip by public transport from their home for each visit. But, it is a worthwhile endeavor, for I could see when I was there a couple of weeks ago, how keen the children were to learn. It is not only the children but also the adults who look forward to these simple short visits. The classes are held in the front yard of a kind farmer, who also allows the use of his small bamboo house when weather is bad.

Our two workers intend to provide more regular teaching sessions for the children in the village.

Since Goducate aims to help needy Asians help themselves, Bangladesh is a country that has attracted its attention.

Recently, Bangladesh was in the news because of a horrific factory collapse that killed over 1100 garment workers. I was in the country when that accident took place.

Bangladesh is the most densely populated large country. It has about 160 million people (half of US population) squeezed into a land area the size of Florida. It is a land of natural tragedies (cyclones and floods). Most of its export earnings come from the garment industry— where the starting wage is less than US$40 per month. 3.5 million people work in terrible conditions in these garment factories.

I spent several days surveying the capital city of Dhaka with a friend, Peter, who is a Korean doing his doctoral thesis on Bangladeshi culture. Dhaka is one of the most crowded cities in the world with over 400,000 rickshaws on its streets every day. It is also called the City of Mosques—with mosques everywhere in this country where 90% are Muslims. Since Peter is fluent in Bangladeshi, we were able to move around freely and talk to people, from those in the poorest slums to those in the most expensive universities.

At the end of my survey, I decided that we first need to learn more about Bangladesh before we start any Goducate projects. I believe that the best place to learn about Bangladesh is in Dhaka University, the premier university of Bangladesh. Peter does his research in this university. It is the dream of almost every Bangladeshi to study in Dhaka University. Though it is the premier university, its facilities are overstretched. In the dormitories that I visited, 35 men sleep in a crowded room (the size of a typical small classroom) on mats.

One of our recent graduates from Goducate Training Center, Jaime, has volunteered to be the first Goducate worker in Bangladesh. Jaime, who grew up in a poor family in the Philippines, has extensive experience working among the poor in various development agencies. He has worked in Bangladesh previously when he was with another organization. He is presently trying to enrol in Dhaka University to study Bangladeshi.

We dream of the day when Goducate can help needy Bangladeshis help themselves.