29-07-2010
"What about the children?" is a question many people ask themselves when considering serving with BMS World Mission. But, as Fiona Priestnall discovered, the experience of working overseas can have a profoundly positive effect on young minds.
I think the impact of what we were experiencing hit me when my six year-old daughter recently announced: “Mummy, when I’m older I’m going to come back to Bangladesh and open a café for poor people. When they ask me how much the food is I’ll just say ‘zero taka.’”
Coming to the end of our three-month volunteer project in Dhaka I am able to reflect on what we have experienced during our time here. In terms of our children, I know they have each learnt first-hand how blessed we are in the West to have food, medical supplies and homes. They have seen the grinding poverty here, the children begging and the people rummaging in rubbish dumps for food. We have had discussions about conditions in the garment factories, why children work in homes as domestic staff and why the rickshaw wallahs often cannot read or write. These are things they will not easily forget.
But there is more to our time here than the negative side of life in Bangladesh. We have also made good friends from all over the world; both Christians and non-Christians.
Our two older children have been to a local school and enjoyed making friends there, discovering that children the world over generally love the same things – sweets, drawing, playing games and watching DVDs. We have had fun visiting local families and sharing in their food and seeing a little of their lives.
We have also seen monkeys in the jungle areas, tasted tea grown in a local tea plantation and watched the Bangladeshi countryside gently rolling by from a train window. These, too, are experiences none of us will readily forget.
Whilst I have been focusing on developing the children’s work in the local church, Al has been working as a management consultant with a BMS-supported business. He has been able to work alongside local Bangladeshi staff in the office and develop good working relationships with them all. Despite the frustrations of working in a country like Bangladesh (regular power cuts, difficulty obtaining certain items and bridging the cultural gap) he has been able to develop new working procedures for the company as well as train some of the local staff to carry on the consulting work when he has gone home. He has also been able to work alongside factory management teams to improve working conditions in some garment factories.
Volunteering with BMS has been such a valuable life experience for all of us. We have been so well supported throughout our time with BMS and cannot praise the staff highly enough. We are all so glad we took the opportunity to spend three months in Bangladesh and would recommend it to anyone.
Al and Fiona Priestnall served for three months with BMS in Bangladesh as short-term volunteers. They were accompanied by their children: Ellen, Naomi and Iona.