ASIAN LIVES: The lost childhood of a 'Tokai' in Bangladesh

BY HELEN Rowe

IN the dim light of a monsoon-soaked Bangladesh dawn, seven-year-old Abdul Joynal bobs to the surface of a city swamp, a small brown bottle clasped in his hand.

Flashing a wide, gap-toothed grin, he tosses his find to three young friends on the bank and disappears again into the murky water; if he can find more, four hungry little boys will have full stomachs today.

"Catch! There's more here," he shouts, spurting filthy water from his mouth, as the other members of "Billal's gang" wait, watching warily for rival gangs of older boys.

Back at the vacant shop Joynal calls home, he sits cross-legged on the floor and explains his work in a soft, childish voice.

Six families whose only belongings are a few tatty pieces of bedding and some well-worn pots and pans share this bare concrete shell attached to a new sports stadium in the capital Dhaka.

"Hunger demanded this plan. Before I used to get one or two taka (less than one cent) clearing rubbish from buses," says Joynal, whose gang three months ago began collecting the glass bottles discarded by addicts of a cough syrup containing the painkiller drug codeine.

"We don't get much money now but we get more than before," he adds with pride.

Billal's gang, named after its ten-year-old leader, has about eleven members aged between seven and ten who collect the bottles from Dhaka's many lakes and swampy areas.

"But there are other gangs in this area," says Joynal, straining to make himself heard above the din of the rain hitting the ground outside the shop's open front.

"If I come along (on my own) they will snatch my bottles from me. That is why we always go together because then they don't dare to snatch."

Children like Joynal and his friends are affectionately known in Bangladesh as "Tokai" after a long-running popular cartoon about an impoverished little boy.

Tokai's creator, the cartoonist Rafiqun Nabi also known as Ranabi, used the character as a symbol of Bangladesh's millions of destitute. Nearly half the 140 million population lives on less than a dollar a day.

Although Tokai marked its 25th anniversary last year, Ranabi says the ever-widening gulf between the country's rich and poor makes it as relevant today as it was a quarter of a century ago.

'We used to have to eat leaves and wild plants'

With his shaved head, pot belly, long shorts and bare feet, Joynal bears a strong resemblance to his fictional counterpart.

No-one knows how many Tokai kids there are in Dhaka. The children - both boys and girls, half naked or dressed in rags, large sacks slung over their bony shoulders - are a familiar sight on city streets as they go about their work scavenging for any piece of rubbish that could help earn them a few taka.

Their families make up the many rural migrants who flock to the city each year to escape starvation in the countryside. They set up home in empty buildings or build shanties from straw and bamboo and try to find work.

Women take lowly-paid jobs as maids while men work as rickshaw pullers or labourers. Children sell tea, shine shoes or, like Joynal, act as ragpickers, collecting and selling rubbish.

Joynal's family, originally from the unemployment blackspot of Gaibandha in northwestern Bangladesh, is typical. His mother Jahura Begum, 35, came to the capital as a child with her parents during the country's 1974 famine, when according to some estimates up to a million people died.

"Staying there would have meant death," she says. "We used to have to eat leaves and wild plants. There was no work there. We used to eat one day in three but here every day we can eat something."

Despite having been in the capital for more than 20 years, the family can still not even afford a room in a slum.

Joynal giggles and playfully snuggles up to his wizened-looking grandmother as his mother describes how she relies on three of her four children to feed the family. Joynal's father left several years ago and both women look at least twenty years older than their actual age.

"The cost of living in a slum has gone up because there are so many poor people in Dhaka. For a small room in a slum we would have to pay between 600 and 800 taka (13 dollars) a month," says Jahura.

"When we first came to Dhaka we lived in a slum where we didn't have to pay because it was a totally abandoned area. But we got evicted when the government cleared it. Then we lived at the bus station by the entrance to the public toilets, but we were driven out of there.

For three years, this empty shop has been the family's home.

"The owner comes here sometimes and shouts 'go away you kangal (people with nothing)' at us," Jahura says. "When the shutters are put up we will have to leave."

'I don't like doing it but otherwise I always feel hungry"

Billal arrives to try to persuade Joynal and his nine-year-old brother Jahirul to go out searching for more bottles. He strides in, looking grown-up in a grubby open-neck shirt and beige trousers rolled just below the knees.

Although his family is also poor, his father has a small tea stall that brings in enough to pay the rent on some run-down lodgings nearby. The others want to go out but Joynal's mother has banned her two sons from diving in wet weather for fear that they will catch a chill.

"We start work at 5 am to avoid the other gangs," Joynal says.

"It is difficult because the water is not clear so I walk along and when I feel a bottle with my feet I dive down to get it. I don't like it, but I do it because otherwise I always feel hungry."

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates there are 4.9 million working children in Bangladesh aged between five and 14 years, more than 14 percent of the 35 million children in the age group.

The children, it says, are caught in a cycle of poverty, lack of education and low-paid labour.

Although basic primary education is free in Bangladesh, other hidden costs such as transport and uniforms condemn many children to the fate of their illiterate parents.

The ILO ranks ragpicking as one of the worst forms of child labour alongside other work such as begging or recharging and refilling batteries in auto workshops.

But Joynal's earnings are crucial to the family's precarious existence. Joynal's elder sister, who is 14, worked until recently as a housemaid earning 300 taka (4.7 dollars) a month. Now she has found work in a garment factory for 930 taka per month.

"This job will help us but sometimes my daughter cries and asks me why I couldn't have let her learn to read and write," says Jahura.

'These children are completely robbed of their childhood'

Collecting five bottles will earn Billal's gang one taka. On a good day Joynal can give his mother up to 20 taka (30 cents).

"We collect glass bottles because we get more by collecting them than other things. We sell them to the garbage dealers and they sell them on to someone else," he says.

Other ragpickers collect paper, plastic bags and bottles or small pieces of scrap metal. The work carries a high risk of injury, especially for those who search clinical waste from hospitals.

Joynal has never known any other life. "I eat once a day, sometimes twice in a day. It all depends on our findings," he says.

Most family meals consist of just rice, supplemented on days when there is a little extra money with vegetables and a small amount of fish. In theory Joynal should be at school, but in reality he will spend his childhood struggling to earn paltry sums of money.

A few of Dhaka's working children are helped by schools run by non-governmental organisations or individual philanthropists. But help is haphazard and only reaches a fraction of those who need it.

For each child who benefits, thousands are left to fend for themselves, says Mahbooba Mahmood Leena, who founded a school that helps some of Dhaka's most needy children.

"These children are completely robbed of their childhood. All the things other children from well-off families take for granted are absent," she says. - AFP