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Slum children: Whither safety?

RlZANUZZAMAN LASKAR AND PANKAJ Karmakar
IN the blinding midday sunlight, the yard looked like a murky swampland overflowing with rubbish.
As the daze slowly dimmed, the children came into view over a dozen of them playing on the dingy surface covered with all manners of litters that sat uncollected.
Some boys played with marbles beside a huge pile of rubbish.
Several other children chased each other around leaving behind tiny footprints on raw sewage sitting stagnant on the ground.
A little boy sat in a corner trying to blow air into a filthy piece of condom. And a little girl darted around with a piece of burning polystyrene foam, the kind that produces an extremely toxic exhaust when burnt.
These are the children of Shobha Kutir a slum near the Rayer Bazar Shaheed Intellectual Monument in the suburb of Mohammadpur. Most of them malnourished facing poverty and suppressing this or that disease in absence of medical facility.
The slum is home to some 300 families who cannot afford to stay anywhere else.
Most of the residents work as labourers or in garments factories, and have little time to keep an eye on their children.
“Here, it's hard to keep track of the children... where they are... what are they doing," said a bedheaded and moony Mohammad
Selim, who had just come out of a wood-bamboo shack.
The thirty-three-year-old day labourer spent the entire night loading and unloading construction materials from lorries.
Mohammad Selim, his wife and four children live in a tiny wooden shanty in the Shobha Kutir slum.
It has high levels of unemployment and diseases such as malaria and typhoid are common. Toilets are scarce at the slum with one for every dozen of families. The toilets offer little sanitation and even less privacy.
“It's a shanty with just a small room, and we have to pay Tk 1,400 per month for that,” he said, “anything better than this would cost over Tk 2,800.”
However, in the brighter side, there cue municipal facilities like electricity and water.
“But there is no gas. So we use dry leaves and wood to cook,” he said.
Rashida Khatoon was seen preparing lunch for her family on a clay stove beside her tiny tenement.
“I share this stove with some other families,” she said, as she washed some three/four Koi fish in a small clay pot and ignited Are in the stove.
“Cooking is difficult when it rains as the clay gets all wet and muddy. But we have to make it do as there is no other option.”
Few paces from the stove lay a small toilet beside a bathing space.
The toilet had a half broken door, and a middle-aged man clearly visible inside. The sound of him
urinating was as evident as the gaginducing stench that came from there.
According to Selim, around a dozen families use the same toilet. It leads to a lot of inconvenience and squabble between the different families.
Most of the slum residents, including Selim, moved here from villages in hope for a better life and with dreams of better future.
Selim moved into the slum in 2007. His former house in the Netrokona district was sold to pay the medical bills for his ailing father.
“Money was hard to come by, but life was better [in village]. I used to work as a labourer in other people's lands,” said Selim.
“But the lands tend to remain submerged in the village for half of the year. So I came here for money.”
According to Selim, money is easier to come by in the city. And it makes up for the worse environment and living conditions com-pared to the villages.
Even better, his children have easier access to education here.
“My eldest son reads in class five," he said.
The ten-year-old used to go to a school in the slum, which was run by two “ladies”.
"They used to teach in a small room inside the slum,” Selim said. “But then they left and my son was without any school.”
His son now goes to a school, which is somewhere to the east from the slum. He could not remember the name or the location of the school.
Selim is aware that government has made education up to class eight completely free. He wants the three other children, two of them daughters and another son, to go to school as well.
However, not many children in the slum go to school.
Six-year-old Ruma, for one, spends most of her day playing with her friends.
She likes to play with clay and listen to the radio in a nearby makeshift hotel when she is not helping her mother with household chores.
“I live with my mother and father, little sister, aunty and two cousins.” Ruma pushed back her short black plaits, and smiled nervously showing off her teeth visibly excited with the sudden attention.
Ruma said the house she lives in is small. It cannot hold back the heavy monsoon rain, it is “really hot” inside and there are “too many mosquitoes”.
The slum has many problems, but illegal activities are not one of them, Selim claimed.
“Sometimes we get thugs, drunkards and druggies. But not always,”
he said.
As Selim spoke, heavy lorries and other vehicles whooshed past by the road next to the slum.
"Its pretty dangerous in there,” Selim said nodding towards the road.
A lot of people were killed in accidents on that road. Many of them were children, he said.
According to the slum dwellers, simple chores such as bringing water from a municipal tap on the other side of the road, travelling to and from home or simply playing outside the house become a matter of life and death for these people because it often involves crossing the road.
Funbanu Akhter has been staying in the slum for six months and her tiny tenement faces the road from the western corner of the slum. She used to work at a garments factory until her health forced her to stay at home.
Three years ago, she lost her teenage son when he was walking along the road.
"He had just finished saying his prayers at the nearby mosque and was coming back home when a fast bus knocked him down. He was just 14."
Now she is constantly worried about her other children and does not let them out of her sight for even a moment.
They are also children. They also rear aspirations like other children living elsewhere do. But they are deprived of even the basic rights because of being slum dwellers.