DHAKA // On the first floor of a freshly painted building on a potholed street in suburban Dhaka, the cheesy tones of the white American rapper Vanilla Ice compete with squeals of laughter from 20 girls. Jasmine stops playing with her friends in the nursery run by The Dhaka Project (TDP) in the Bangladeshi capital. As she gives a quick, sharp shake of the hips, nursery staff look bemused. But the five-year-old girl in the red polka-dot dress has ears only for Mr Ice.
"She just loves to dance," says the head of the nursery, Tamanna Tasnova, 18, as the stereo blasts Jasmine's favourite song. "She dances all day long. When she's older she says she wants to be a dancer professionally. She's good enough." Jasmine has been at TDP for eight months. She was spotted by a staff member who found her barefoot, malnourished and begging near Dhaka's Zia International Airport. Now she and three siblings are among 560 children cared for under the project, run by Maria Conceicao, a Dubai resident and Emirates airline hostess, and a small army of helpers.
An estimated five million poverty-stricken Bangladeshis live in Dhaka's slums, in makeshift huts built of sticks and scraps of material beside open sewers and filthy, disease-ridden rivers. In July 2005, venturing from a five-star hotel used by cabin crew during stop-overs to see "the real Dhaka", Ms Conceicao was so appalled by the plight of the slum children that she vowed to help them. Later that month she returned to meet three local students eager to support her and to investigate people's needs. It was not enough, she decided, merely to make a donation; she wanted to make a difference.
With money from garage sales in Dubai, she rented a small house in the poor Dhaka suburb of Gawair and turned one of the two cramped rooms into a classroom for 39 children. In the other room, a small sewing school was set up with a couple of old machines to train the children's mothers and older sisters. From those modest beginnings, the school has grown rapidly. Three years later, in addition to the 560 already enrolled in the Dhaka Project, 300 slum children are on an ever-growing waiting list. The original small classroom has been replaced by a number of rented buildings scattered around the village that house two nurseries, a kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, a medical centre, sewing school, a guesthouse for volunteers and a girls' hostel.
It is not a bad portfolio for an independent project managed by a young woman with no experience in education, business or charity - and who continues to juggle stewardship of the project with her job. TDP assists families as well as children. The classroom where Ms Conceicao taught her first batch of pupils is now home to 10-year-old Mubarak, his brother Musharraf, 15, their father Abdul Salam, 47, their mother Ambia and the couple's three other young children.
While it is only a small room - some of the children must sleep on the floor - Mr Salam is one of many parents grateful to TDP. "It has given all of my children a chance at life," he says. "I have a small tea stall nearby and sometimes the boys help me to write down things I need for the shop." Asked about his hopes for his children, he smiles: "If my son simply continues this kind of education, I would feel very proud. I would like to see my children become engineers or doctors perhaps. Parents always want to see their children grow up and have a profession."
TDP's achievements do not stop with education. For the first time in their lives, hundreds of Dhaka's poorest families now have access to doctors and medicine. Maternal mortality rates are high in Bangladesh; the country lies in 140th place out of 175 in the Human Development Index. The principle problem is that most deliveries take place at home, away from emergency obstetric care and without skilled attendants.
The 39 per cent of the population with access to adequate sanitation are not to be found in Dhaka's slums. In an attempt to ensure all the children at least receive vaccinations and check-ups, Ms Conceicao brought in a local doctor to work full time at one of the schools and has since established a two-room medical centre, with a doctor, dentist and nurse available to serve the wider community. "My wife often got sick while she was pregnant because where we were living was dirty," says Mr Salam. "We used to get diarrhoea. We don't any more."
But while Mr Salam and his family jumped at the opportunity to leave the slums, not all parents do. In the Korail slums, Amir, 42, a father of four whose two elder daughters live at the hostel and attend TDP school, sits on a bed without a mattress that he made from strips of wood found near by. Despite being offered a home in Gawair, away from the polluted river and with access to clean drinking water, he and his wife chose to stay in the slums because he has an agricultural plot that earns him about 3,000 taka (Dh160) a month.
Even this is not enough to support his family, he says, and his aim is to find work in Dubai as a driver. But his is the best-equipped of the tin-roofed shacks that line the banks of the swelling river. A small television has been wired to cable nearby and works sporadically. Neighbours and cousins gather to watch. It is just before 9am but most of the women are already at work in the city, cleaning or begging with the children, leaving the young men at home with the babies.
In a couple of hours, the men will also leave for work. Most are rickshaw drivers and will spend the next 10 hours pedalling bicycle taxis over rust-coloured tracks where deep potholes have become muddy pools in the rain. While 82 per cent of boys and 86 per cent of girls enrol in primary-school education in Bangladesh, and 87 per cent reach grade five level, dropout rates past this point remain high. Parents, struggling to survive, need their children to work to help feed their families - and they cannot afford school fees.
And fewer than half the children who do complete primary school attain expected competency levels because of poor teaching methods, overcrowded classrooms and a lack of home support. But while Amir is grateful for the project's help in educating his children, not all of the parents share his enthusiasm and some refuse to allow their children to attend school. These children are among the estimated five million aged five to 14 years who are working, many in dangerous conditions.
One of TDP's founding members, Jewel, explains: "Some parents are scared we will take their children away or sell their kidneys. Others want and need them to work for them, begging usually." Occasionally tearful and exhausted, Ms Conceicao admits that she is struggling to keep the expanding project running smoothly. "My aim was always to see my kids graduate from university but I never expected it to be this big," she says.
"We do this not because we want to keep expanding but because of the need of the kids. The medical centre was built because there is a need for the children to have access to medical care. And the dental centre? How can the kids work without interruptions if they are sick or have toothache?" In July, Ms Conceicao rented several rooms in a three-storey building in Gawair which now houses 26 young girls aged from 10 to 14 who might otherwise be considered a burden by their parents and married off.
The girls live, four to a room, under the watchful eye of two "grandmothers" appointed by the project to cook and care for them. Around 35 of Maria's original 39 charges, glossy-haired and with pearly white smiles, are still studying hard and greet visitors in the French and German they picked up from a European volunteer who recently visited. But the risk of tragedy is never far away; two children died in separate incidents last month, a boy drowning during the monsoon while visiting family in a nearby village and a girl dying of fever before her family could get her to hospital.
Drowning is the most common cause of death among small children in Bangladesh, followed by pneumonia, malnutrition and diarrhoea. "You think that you are giving them everything and you think that you get them everything when you start here," Ms Conceicao says. "They are not supposed to die at the age of four or five. I feel guilty because I feel I have not done enough to protect them. Their mothers trust me to look after their children but you always think they are going to live forever."
Soaring costs, coupled with increasing demand for the project's services and budgetary limits, mean a more structured business approach is needed. "It's such hard work," says Ms Conceicao. "It's physically exhausting. We have reached our maximum building capacity - financially, socially, structurally, mentally." Fund-raising remains a struggle. "I'm still raising money from garage sales whenever I am in Dubai," she says. "Emirates Foundation donates Dh45,000 a month but the monthly expenses are Dh75,000 so I have to beg people for the other Dh30,000 every month."
Ms Conceicao says she has appealed for support to the large charitable organisations in the UAE, but fears her project will never quite fit their criteria. "I was told by one organisation that we were too sophisticated," she says. "They should come here and work with the constant power cuts, giving lessons in the stifling heat in the dark, working with no car and trying to get everything delivered using bicycles."
In time, Ms Conceicao hopes to hand the project over to the community. "I feel my job is just to sow the seed and let others, local people, nurture it so it becomes self-sustainable," she says. "But I am a perfectionist by nature and I feel I have to come here all the time to ensure things are being done properly." The constant visits to Dhaka have not been without personal cost. The work has destroyed all trace of a social life and she has not even seen her family in Portugal for three years.
All her time off is spent in Dhaka, constant requests for leave have ruined her promotion prospects and her salary has been cut by the need for frequent unpaid absence to resolve problems. "For three years I have not been me," she says. "As a person I have been in a coma for three years. "Every single day I want to quit. I feel guilty because this project depends on me but it is asking so much of me. But how can you say you have had enough? I just need to find someone to shoulder the responsibility."
She says that what she and the children of Dhaka need from the UAE is people's time and expertise. "We need volunteers to come here for longer periods of time to help train up our staff," she says. "I need project managers. People forget I don't have logistics experience, I don't have accountancy or business, I have no previous experience of running a school - I have no background in education or curriculum, only that I once went to school."
Would she give up her airline job to work on her project full-time? "I can't," she says. "My job is what stops me from going nuts. It recharges me." But then, in another way, so does TDP: "I look at the kids and they give me hope." @Email:loatway@thenational.ae For more information about The Dhaka Project, and on how to make a donation, contact Maria Conceicao at maria_conceicao@yahoo.com
