Five Days In Bangladesh

Tuesday, February 07, 2006







Five Days In Bangladesh






I watched clips from a documentary that aired in New Zealand recently yesterday. The show was narrated by Lucy Lawless who is from NZ but is also known here for having her own show "Xena" and for those unfamiliar with that vehicle perhaps for her recurring role of Maddie Reardon in two CBS movies: Locusts, and Vampire Bats. I was able to view the clips which showed the entire documentary through a website which gives updates on what Lucy is doing.






In it she spends five days in different parts of Bangladesh to show how the poverty over there affects the people and in particular the lives of the children. Young kids working harder in one day than any of us will ever work to help put just one meal on the table for themselves and their family while also attending school for a few hours a day. That's all many of them have if they are lucky. One meal a day usually rice, and very small portion at that.






Perhaps this is nothing new but watching the people and how they try to survive and the pride they have...one family made a small feast for Lucy which cost them a weeks wages, which she of course didn't want them to spend on her but she didn't refuse because she didn't want to offend them. At this same home she held a small child in her lap who is very sick and probably has little time left in his life, and she after giving him back to his mother moved away from them as she began to cry while her translator stayed with them. I've never seen anyone in this type of documentary break down on camera but she did. It was heartbreaking scene to watch as she talked to the camerman as she cried about how little he weighed compared to her own 5 year old son and how because he sucks on his hand it's rotting.






She herself has sponsored a child there since 1996 who is now 15 and very healthy and happy and has she feels a bright future, so she's now sponsoring a little girl and she visited both of them at the end of the documentary which was nice as it gives hope that any of us can make a difference in a child's life there if we chose to do so by giving up just one thing...one luxury that we don't need...not even anything big like a car but small things. One person I know who saw this gave up her NetFlix account and getting coffee each day before work so she could put the money toward sponsoring a child herself.






It just opened my eyes alot about how much we here take for granted as it opened her eyes even further than they were as being a sponsor for ten years she did have an idea what things were like, but hearing about it and seeing it up close and personal are two different things.






For anyone who's interested here's the address of the site where you can see the clips: http://www.lucylawless.info/documentaries/world-vision/index.php






One last note. After seeing this and thinking about the live chat the class had last night about ads during the Super Bowl I couldn't help but think of how much good it would do if they had even just one spot during an event like this for what's going on over there. 90 million people would be made aware. Sure I know that it may dampen the mood, but isn't there room for awareness even if it's just for 30 seconds instead of having spots like this air in the middle of the night when only a fraction of people are awake.