Nanci is the tall one

As you can imagine, the trip itself was both breathtaking and heartbreaking. Bangladesh, in particular, is a beautiful land with  colourful, happy folk who live in a geographic area and climate not condusive to sustained development. The yearly floods and increasingly frequent, crippling storms and their consequent tidal surges keep millions of people in a perpetual state of rebuilding and “starting over.”

To view Faye Hall's painting of this photo see link at page bottom.

One of my favourite photos is this one.  These mud-caked kids gleefully followed us as we visited a massive excavation site where around a thousand people were working to restore a 5 km water canal that had been silted-in by a single and devastating storm – Cyclone Sidr  (click HERE for details of this storm that claimed the lives of between 5-10 thousand people in late 2007.)

The Bangladeshis have developed an ingenious way of coping with some of the environmental traumas they face annually. For a good part of the year, the land is totally covered with flood waters  isolating communities to random highlands, disrupting inter-community life and restricting access to health services and schooling.  For the other part of the year, as  the waters recede  there are irrigation issues to deal with and transportation problems as so many roads get washed out in the floods.  The response is to dig canals for the dry seasons, which are used for transportation, irrigation and stocked with fish for food.  The dirt excavated from the canal is piled immediately beside to form a highland walk-way above the floodwater level so that communities can remain connected.  The high roadways are then planted with grasses  and renewable, fast growing fruit and lumber trees that stabilize the ground but also can be harvested for food and building materials.

What is remarkable is that all this work is done by hand without the aid of machinery of any sort:

6 feet of silt excavated from 5 kms of canal by 1000 people in 15 days!

We visited an excavation site where a thousand workers (paid in food from a program supported by CFGB) were digging out the silt from a massive canal/irrigation/fishery/water diversion ditch. The canal itself is 32 feet across at the top, 8 feet across at the bottom and fifteen feet deep. The flooding from Cyclone Sidr silted-in many of the water ways which requires gargantuan efforts to remedy. These folks, using only mud cutting tools and baskets, had removed about 6 feet of silt from the bottom of 5 kms of irrigation ditch in only 15 days. The silt itself is left beside the ditch in a ten foot high mound that the women pound into a road after it has dried out some. The irrigation ditches here help divert water when there is too much and bring it in when there is not enough.  Everything here is about managing the good and harmful potential of water.

Women pound clods of mud excavated from the canal into a smooth high-road.

It’s very hard to get a picture that captures the enormity of this work. Below is a completed canal/ high-road ready for planting and below that, a mature canal/highroad.

Ready for trees and grasses.

Beauty!

Mud Buddies / Painting by Faye Hall

It’s all very inspiring! To view Faye Hall’s painting and read her notes click  HERE

To become better familiarized with the tremendous work of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank click Here

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In closing… a moment of Zen:

Boats in repose.

Tim Plett's photo of his daughter Tayah

(The following is Part 4 of a series of paintings by Signpost staff, Faye Hall. The inspiration for the paintings came from photographs Steve Bell brought back from Bangladesh in 2008.  To view earlier paintings, see the links at the bottom of the page.)

Back to the beginning…I hadn’t painted seriously in years. It wasn’t until I saw some of Tim Plett’s photography that my hand started itching for the brush. I chose a portrait of his daughter Tayah, playing  Tim’s mandolin. When it was done, I called it Daddy’s Mandolin. (Tim is an awesome free-lance photographer, calling his company Dawntreader Photography. He does all of Steve’s tour and publicity photos.) At the time I thought…if I can paint a mandolin, maybe I was brave enough to tackle a few of Steve Bell’s India and Ethiopia photos.

Originally, I picked five of the best photos from Steve’s collection to paint. I didn’t tell him that I was painting them at the time, but confessed later on after two were finished. (I didn’t know if I would do a good enough job).  It was amazing that the first five I had chosen were his top favourites.

Mud Buddies - Oil Painting of Steve's Photo from India

I thought I had found enough of the inspiring photos, but perhaps I looked through them too quickly. One afternoon I was driving Steve home after work, and he opened his laptop computer to show me another of his favourite photos…how could I have missed it! The sheer joy and delight on the mud splattered faces of these boys was enchanting! They had nothing, but enjoyed playing in the mud as they worked. I had to paint this one next. I called the painting Mud Buddies. The most fun part of painting this one was the very last session – smearing the “mud” on the boys!

- Faye Hall, Signpost Music Director of Orders and Fulfillment

To read Steve’s story behind this picture click HERE.

To view other paintings in this series click below:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

Musahar Child Painting by Faye Hall

(The following is Part 2 of a series of paintings by Signpost staff, Faye Hall. The inspiration for the paintings came from photographs Steve Bell brought back from Bangladesh in 2008.  To view other paintings in the series, see the links at the bottom of the page.)

Steve Bell took a photograph of this young girl in the rural countryside Bihar region of India in a hamlet of the Musahar people. Musahar means “the rat eaters”. They don’t actually eat rats, but often survive by hunting for rat dens and robbing them of the grain the rats have stored there.
When we were viewing the photos, I was struck by the gorgeous, liquid eyes of this little girl, and I had to paint her. I wasn’t sure I could recreate how incredibly beautiful she was – her eyes spoke volumes of misery and pain – yet hope. When Steve saw her he was also mesmerized by her, and she appears briefly in the promotional video of the trip made by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.

Original Photo by Steve Bell

Steve said, “Most aid experts agree that the education of a female child is probably the best investment in the fight against poverty – not only for the child but for the community. Through a local “Right-to-Food” program supported by Canadian Foodgrains Bank, members of the Musahar tribe are learning about their human rights and learning how to access social programs that will benefit them.”

- Faye Hall

Director of Order and Fulfillment, Signpost Music

To view other paintings in the series click below:

• Part One
• Part Three
• Part Four

Mother and Son painting by Faye Hall

(The following is Part 1 of a series of paintings by Signpost staff, Faye Hall. The inspiration for the paintings came from photographs Steve Bell brought back from Bangladesh in 2008.  To view other paintings in the series, see the links at the bottom of the page.)

When I started my new job working for Steve Bell at Signpost Music, I had no idea what was in store for me. The story of getting the job in the first place is a miracle in itself, and I have complete confidence that I am in the place where God intended me to be.

Steve had just come back from one of his trips with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, and as a staff, we looked at all of his photos and listened to his stories about the amazing, resilient and beautiful people he met on his travels. As an artist, I was particularly inspired looking at the gorgeous faces, and my desire to paint started percolating. I have always loved painting people, and Steve’s talent for photography was a perfect resource for unique, original material.

I hadn’t painted seriously for years. I had worked as an advertising artist, raised my children, lost my first husband, started a new career as an administrative assistant and finally remarried the same year I started this job. I didn’t even think I was particularly good at oil painting.

The first two paintings I did are from Steve’s trip to Bangladesh and India in 2007 with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. He met this elderly mother and her son about an hour south of Calcutta in a rural village in the region of West Bengal. Steve said, “The village is a notorious junction for the slave trade that still infects our humanity. Here we visited a project that rescues young women from this tragic reality; housing them and helping them heal and re-integrate with the community while providing food and education. Canadian Foodgrains Bank supports food-for-work and flood response projects in the region.

Smiling Woman painting by Faye Hall

The woman in the paintings was the oldest person in the village: 83 years and a body that bares the evidence of a life lived in chronic malnourishment. She had a lovely spirit and hugged me enthusiastically after I showed her the portrait that I had taken of her. She was very smiley until she was posing for the camera. I couldn’t convince her that the uninhibited toothless grin was what had charmed me most.” (The fact that she smiled all the time except when he took a picture, is the reason I called the painting “Smiling Woman” – FH.)

-  Faye Hall, Director of Order & Fulfillment for Signpost Music

More about Steve Bell’s Humanitarian efforts…

To view other paintings in this series click below:

• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four

The storm itself was named Sidr which means “red eye.” After the storm the trees showed significant signs of heat damage – almost as if they’d been burned. We could still see the evidence of this. No one could explain to us the phenomena but there was something in the storm that generated an unusual heat enough to dry out, curl and even burn the leaves. Very odd. Whatever it was that caused this, it has given the storm a mythologically malevolent personality.

One thing we did notice on our drive though southern Bangladesh was the lack of livestock. We saw few cattle or goats – but apparently the storm killed millions. In Canada we suffer so few, and comparably mild, climatic shocks it’s almost impossible to imagine an event that would rob us of our babies, fields and homes, but also leave millions of rotting carcasses on the ground to foul the air and poison the water. My brain simply cannot wrap around the misery and shock that would follow.

We left Loban Ghola (the name of the village we visited) and traveled north east about six hours drive to Khulna. The countryside is wonderful. Again, the population density here is mind boggling. During the whole week, over 40 hours of driving through rural Bangladesh, there was never a view or vista that didn’t include hundreds if not thousands of people. So when I say country, you mustn’t imagine miles of unpopulated space as we are accustomed. Someone trying to help us grasp the reality of the population density here said “imagine placing 140 million people in Manitoba and confining them to the area south of the Trans-Canada highway, and you can begin to imagine….”

Because the plains here flood every year, the roads, pathways, villages etc. are all raised. The major roadways are raised a good 10 – 15 feet above ground level, and most pathways and hamlets at least 3-5 feet. One tends to think of road level as ground level, so the effect is to remember the whole region as endless checkered plains of sunken fields and fish ponds decorated brilliantly by tropical groves and grasses . The roadways and paths are also planted with trees (fruit and other) on their slopes (to prevent erosion) giving a verdant canopy effect which is very picturesque. The colourful dress of the Bengalis, the cheerful ease in which they relate to each other seems a perfect compliment to the steamy, sunlit, tropical landscape. What ever might be said about the suffering of folks here, they seem to be a genuinely happy people.

Since this is a land of rivers, you cannot travel far without having to cross a river on a barge or ferry. This is quite the ordeal. And the presence of white folks is a source of rather intense interest. The boat/barges themselves are rather dilapidated and cause some alarm to those of us that are used to newer modes of transportation and some semblance or at least nod to safety concerns. But they seem to work and the rivers themselves languid and swimable if need be. Often there are large lineups to get on but we have a government representative traveling with us who delights in wielding his powers to bring us to the front of the queue. His name is Rajwan and he surprised us at the airport when we arrived saying “I have been assigned to accompany and assist you throughout your journey here.” And indeed he did. We’ve been suspicious about why the government would assign an official to travel with us, but he was very nice and quite helpful throughout. He was with us every moment until we passed through the scanners to board our plane out of the country. Hmmm

We traveled on to Gopalganj where we stayed two nights in some sort of some abandoned government compound. I never did really come to understand the purpose of the place – it was built by a previous government and then abandoned for its original purposes. Now it’s some sort of guest housing. At one end of the compound there was a military barracks with a few hundred soldiers. Across the square from the guest house were several housing complexes but I don’t know who lives there or why. This was not a pleasant place. No screens on windows, no AC, no electricity for much of the day and evening which means no ceiling fans. Mosquitoes were as relentless as the moist heat and bed bugs, making the stay even more memorable. The beds were rock hard, ancient smelly mattresses with a topography to rival the foothills of Alberta, with no sheets nor blanket, just a bedspread which we chose not to disturb. Bathrooms were filthy – no hot water, decaying, dank concrete and cheerless. We didn’t sleep much at all. We haven’t slept much during the whole trip actually. Nights are a waiting game for the most part with occasional naps to break the monotony. As much as I sometimes rant ineloquently about the excessive toys and gadgets North Americans gorge on, we in jet-lag land give thanks to God nightly for our Ipods.

During our stay there we ventured out to more remote rural regions through the maze of narrow unmaintained roads and pathways. We visited a village of Hindus belonging to the lowest class of society. Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim with about 10 percent Hindu, two percent Christian and two percent tribal religions. There doesn’t appear to be much animosity between religious groups here. I certainly did not feel any of the hostility we sometimes felt in Ethiopia or that I overtly felt in West Bank.

These Hindus however were of the Muchi caste which is the lowest Hindu class in Bangladesh. The village itself was very poor, mostly mud huts with thatched roofs and no modern facilities. But it was well kept – even beautiful as were the people themselves. They greeted us with carnation garlands, a shower of flower petals and several dances from the children and even an educational skit written to educate the people on the dangers of diarrhea as a result of unsafe drinking water. Dysentery is a major killer here.

Canadian Foodgrains Bank supports a feeding program here so that the children get at least one nutritional meal a day. Education, especially for girls and women, is probably the most important piece of any development program. So a feeding program at the school is so incredibly important not only for the health of the children, but as a way of keeping them returning to school. It takes pressure off of the mothers, who often give up their own rations of food for their husbands and children. This leads to all sorts of health problems including low birth weight of newborns, and physical deformities in these children which add significant pressure to the family and social cost to the community.

The kids adore Nanci – everywhere we go, within a few minutes there is a crowd of laughing, giggling women and children surrounding her. Often the women want to show her their homes and touch her earrings and skin. They love to see pictures of our kids. The camera crew is thankful for Nanci’s diversion creating capacity, so they can get the shots they want uninterrupted by the crowds.

At one point a woman gestured for Nanci to follow her to see her home. I began to follow but was quickly shooed away. I have observed a bond between women that is profoundly moving and mysterious to me. It’s not the same as male bonding – it is more connected to soul and suffering I think, as opposed to the bravado and belching bond between men – which has it’s own charm to be sure.

The next day we visited an excavation site where a thousand workers (paid in food from a program supported by CFGB) were digging out the silt from a massive canal/irrigation/fishery/water diversion ditch. The canal itself is 32 feet across at the top, 8 feet across at the bottom and fifteen feet deep. The flooding from Sidr Cyclone silted in many of the water ways which requires gargantuan efforts to remedy. These folks, using only mud cutting tools and baskets, had removed about 6 feet of silt from the bottom of 5 kms of irrigation ditch in only 15 days. The silt itself is left beside the ditch in a ten foot high mound that the women pound into a road after it has dried out some. The irrigation ditches here help divert water when there is too much and bring it in when there is not enough. They are stocked with fish so folks can feed themselves between growing and harvesting seasons and during the rainy season. They also serve as important transportation avenues. The roadway that is built beside is planted with trees and grasses that stabilize the roadways during flooding seasons as well as providing fruit and lumber for harvesting. Everything here is about managing the good and harmful potential of excess water.

We also visited a farmer who has recently completed a training session of farming techniques to help him increase the yield of his tiny plot of land. He was digging up his first crop of potatoes since the training which has already doubled his usual yield. The whole time we were talking and filming him, he seemed a bit anxious about me, several times trying to say something discreetly to me. It turns out my zipper was down and he was desperate about my potential humiliation. It ended up being a funny moment that brought a lot of laughter and warmth.

Later we visited a fish farmer who also had also recently attended a training program (similarly sponsored by CFGB) which has helped him to double the output of his wee pond. We were lucky to have come upon him right when he and several men were in the water wrestling with a mammoth net pulling in thousands of jumping fish. It was exhilarating, joyful and humorous to watch.

We returned to Dhaka for one more night before catching a flight to Calcutta. Actually, we still hadn’t gotten our visas to enter India while we were in Canada. So we reapplied at the Indian consulate in Dhaka when we arrived here and didn’t know if we would even be allowed access until a few days before we were to go.

We arrived in Kolkata Sunday morning on route to Patna, a city of about 2 million in the center of Bihar province which is the poorest province of India. 30 million people crammed onto this tiny plot of land. I don’t have the stats on the actual square kms of the province but it seems about as populated as Bangladesh.

When the customs officer in Calcutta saw where we were headed he shook his head and said, “Patna?! Not so nice.” I’ve been to Calcutta (now called Kolkata) before and know what that means. The possibility of experiencing worse frightened me.

So right now I’m writing from my hotel in Patna. The hotel is meager by our standards but just fine. It’s clean and even has wi-fi!!! But Patna is easily the most destitute and ugly place I’ve seen in my life. The crowded streets, the crumbling unkempt structures, the smell of feces and urine mixed with rotting food, garbage and diesel, the insufferable heat and the throngs of people, cattle, swine and black smog-vomiting vehicles seem to suck the memory of beauty away.

We arrived here three days ago and had most of that day to sleep and recoup from the rigors of Bangladesh before our week in India. Then we traveled deep into the rural country side to visit two hamlets of the Musahari people. (Musahar means – the rat eaters). They don’t actually eat rats, but often survive by hunting for rat dens and robbing them of the grains the rats have stored there. These are the untouchables – the lowest and poorest cast of Indian society – among the poorest of the world. Life is so miserable here, so dirty and ugly. I had forgotten. I was here back in ’94 but somehow had forgotten how devastating it is: elderly women living on a hundred dollars a year, whole families living on 70 cents a day. We sat in a circle out in the open sun with the whole village as they told us what life is like here. Those that have jobs work for absentee landowners for a few kilos of rice a day. Every year, during the rainy season (starting in a couple weeks) the plains flood, their whole village goes under water for two months and the villagers survive by huddling on top of an escarpment the government built for them back in the ’70s.

Only one in several hundred children of the first village was in school. They are badly malnourished; the babies dangerously underweight, the women are thin, worn and sad.

The government set up a food-for-work program to help them survive the rainy seasons, but the funding gets swallowed up by various levels of corrupt municipal officers who don’t care about them. The folks we’ve met here are trying to set up education programs to teach the Musahari about their rights and how to defend them. But it all seems pretty hopeless. I asked one of the workers what keeps him going – considering the magnitude of the problems and the unlikeliness anything will change. He just gently smiled and said he loved Christ, and that out of gratitude to God he would work 24/7 for the poor for the rest of his life even if nothing changes. That is something I remember about India, that it is full of Mother Theresas. It’s rather humbling.

Our accommodations in the country were dismal. I think we’re a bit over saturated from experience at this point which brings down one’s toleration level. More bed-bug bites. I hate the bed bugs.

As compared to Bangladesh, the people here don’t seem happy at all. They are friendly for sure and jump up to help at any sign of need. But life here is hot, hard and relatively devoid of the consolation of beauty. A depressed mood has settled over our traveling group and I think we’d all be relieved to be airlifted out of here. Tomorrow we fly to Kolkata and then on to a place by the sea where we’ll visit a few more sites before returning to Kolkata to catch our flight home.

I’m very glad to be here. I’ve learned a lot and met some wonderful folks but this is the definitely the hardest trip I’ve ever taken. Maybe I’m just getting older and less resilient. We’ll be glad to be on our way home.

The storm itself was named Sidr which means “red eye.” After the storm the trees showed significant signs of heat damage – almost as if they’d been burned. We could still see the evidence of this. No one could explain to us the phenomena but there was something in the storm that generated an unusual heat enough to dry out, curl and even burn the leaves. Very odd. Whatever it was that caused this, it has given the storm a mythologically malevolent personality.

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