Burmese Refugees in Thailand

The team left Bangladesh and flew to Bangkok, Thailand, greeted by skyscrapers and luxury vehicles, well aware that this was not where most individuals in need resided.  It is the Burmese migrants living along the Western border of Thailand whose story must be told next. First, one must understand the difficult circumstances of people escaping Burma. This war torn country has long been a place of conflict between the many ethnic groups, forcing some to migrate to Thailand and live as refugees in border towns. The terrible conditions of persecution and torture at home cause many Burmese to flee, but they are met by discrimination and exploitation in Thailand.  Still some choose this life over their previous situation under the military junta, and do what they can to support themselves even if they are treated poorly.

Our team visited a Burmese family living near Mae Sot, working on a farm owned by someone else and getting paid half the amount the Thai workers earn. They are a family of 9 living in two small rooms with some pots and pans and each other. The father of the family is the sole provider who works in a corn field spraying weed killer every day. He takes a bus to work an hour each way to get to the farm, and then hikes up and down the fields spraying a mix of chemicals with little in the way of protective clothing. His work is hard, but it supports his family. However, if he was to miss a day due to illness or injury,  the family could be pulled so far behind financially, it may be impossible to catch up. We found out while we were there that he had malaria but was unable to seek proper care because it would mean missing several days of work. The wife takes care of their children, but also suffers from medical problems herself. Fortunately, there is a clinic in this area that serves this community (more on this later). This family creates a little extra income by farming a small plot of land at home to sell some of the food and also feed themselves, so they are just getting by. The kids attend a make-shift school which seems more like a babysitting group, but is better than no education or supervision at all.

This family is struggling through each day and if one little thing changes in their lives they risk losing all security. The lack of safety nets is a major problem for the poor around the world. They cannot afford to get sick or miss work, or they may not be able to pay their rent. Their precarious situation can go from bad to worse very quickly. Many have similar stories, and unfortunately, this is the situation for refugees the world over. They live not only with the hardship of their meager financial circumstance, but also with the constant feeling of being outcasts in a foreign country. These migrants receive no help from the government because they are not legal citizens, and they cannot return to their home country knowing the dangers that await there.

More than 140,000 refugees from Burma live within Thailand’s borders. Thailand’s government has been considering closing the camps along the borders and sending the refugees back, but this would be a certain humanitarian crisis for these people.  You can read more about this situation here  http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2065397,00.html

Coming Home…

Our journey to create “Living on a Dollar a Day” came to a finish out in the field on May 30, 2011, as our journalists returned home from their final trip abroad.  As we move to the next phase of the project, the writing of the text and the selection and editing of all the photos and video, we want to look back on the purpose behind all the travels, photographs, and incredible stories. It has been a full year of extensive journeys around the world including 10 countries, 4 continents, and innumerable lives encountered. The people we met were living in different circumstances from orphanages and hospitals, to outlying communities and farming villages, to the streets of major metropolitan cities, but all had a commonality–they make up some of the billion people that are desperately trying to survive on not much more than a dollar a day. These families struggle every day just to stay alive, and they are willing to work in jobs that most Westerners wouldn’t dream of doing in order to provide for themselves and their families. This is the core of why this project was created–to share the stories of the world’s poorest so we are aware of the poverty that exists and desperately needs changing. Poverty that we may never see day to day as we move through our lives, but that is a daily reality for many families just like our own. Our hope at The Forgotten International is that we, as a global community, not ignore the poverty and suffering that exists, but take the time to be a part of its change. We are excited about seeing the book come together chapter by chapter and to have a finished product of lives and stories to share with the rest of the world. If you are able to contribute to the finishing of the project in anyway, please visit  http://www.theforgottenintl.org/donate.html  to donate to the cause. Thank you for being a part of this journey and we look forward to continuing to share the stories we are fortunate enough to tell.

Indebted to a Dream

Bangladesh is known for a man who has created a system to help alleviate poverty based on the idea that the poor can work to make positive changes in their lives and that half the population should not be excluded from the economic marketplace. Professor Muhammad Yunus is the founder of Grameen Bank and “world’s banker to the poor” by pioneering micro-credit loans which gives small loans to the poorest of the poor without requiring collateral. What began in 1976 with a $27 loan among 42 families has grown to providing almost 8 million poor Bangladeshis, 97% of them women, with loans to start their own businesses. The bank has an estimated $25 billion at work around the world, lending to those who were shut out of traditional banking systems. Sounds like a dream solution for billions at the bottom of society to change their circumstances for the better, right? What happens when you take this Nobel Peace Prize winner’s idea and warp it into a capitalistic venture is the story that is in the news today. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2753

Our team wanted to finish up our work in Bangladesh with a positive story on the affects of micro-finance within the slums and how the families benefit from local NGO’s that provide this service. The situation they discovered instead was a portrait of the corrupted model. Our team was guided by a local into a ghetto that played host to different lending institutions. The guide warned them that the success stories would be on display, but if we wanted the real story we must look beyond the initial circumstances. It was not long before they came across a troubling scenario. A large pile of broken crates and furniture was being chopped up by a young boy around seven years old. He was swinging an axe nearly as big as him, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The wood he chopped was held steady by his bare foot, and seated behind him was a well-dressed woman watching him while he worked. This was her firewood shop, which she started with a micro-loan and now was able to hire on employees to do the work. Work that very much resembled child labor—dangerous labor at that. The boy supposedly was filling in for his sick father, but his skill with the axe would suggest otherwise.
“Yunus believes that in developing countries, people should stop looking for jobs and start creating them. A poor person should take a small loan and start her own business — and that will make her big enough to employ others. That has been Grameen Bank’s philosophy since its inception.”
It’s hard to believe that this was the image that Yunus had in mind when he said the loans would start businesses amongst the poor which would grow to employ others. Those “others” were not meant to be young children denied an education. Grameen Bank created requirements for each loan at the beginning of its conception, one being that all children of borrowers must attend school so they can work towards creating a better life for themselves. This model is trying to eradicate the cycle of poverty starting with providing the women with the means to care for their families and ending with the children receiving the education that will equip them to move beyond their circumstances.

There are now over 3,000 institutions providing micro-loans worldwide. Some have followed the Grameen Bank’s model, but it seems some have lost site of the ultimate goal. There is recent criticism that certain lending organizations are charging exorbitant interest rates on loans which leaves borrowers who started with nothing, now worse off, in debt. Second loans are taken out to pay the first, and those who were struggling before are now left with further stressful conditions as some are allegedly being hounded by aggressive debt collectors.

It seems some in the industry of micro-finance have capitalized on the poor and exploited their needs rather than trying to meet their needs. The industry itself has grown so quickly and without much regulation of how the money that comes in is being distributed and handled. The founding concepts of Grameen Bank must be reestablished if the poor are to have any hope of improving their circumstances. At a time when the system needs Yunus the most, he faces removal from his position due to the country’s statutory retirement age of 60 years. Yunus is already age 70, but he and many others feel his removal is due to politics and the desire for the government to gain more control of his organization, of which they already own 25%.

In a time when there is such great need, yet so much corruption, it is important to remain informed and take an active role to help those without a voice. At The Forgotten International we will continue to support and aid organizations that are effectively changing the lives of the poor for the better. We also want to shed light on issues at hand so we can be part of making a difference, and we encourage you to join in this effort. By supporting our book project “Living on a Dollar a Day,” or our other programs, you will help make positive change for those in need around the world. Donate today at: http://theforgottenintl.org/donate.html 

All photos by George Rosenfeld 

A Note about the Buriganga River…

The city of Dhaka has a river that runs through it. A river that is so dark that it is safe to say that what goes in it should not come back out. A river that must leave you feeling dirtier after washing in it then when you entered it, yet children call this river their playground and families call this river their washing machine. It is a source of life for the people, yet it is filled with dead, decaying, rotting contents. It bubbles from the chemicals that leak into its waters. This river is surrounded by many industries that recycle plastics as well as tanneries. Both industries that have been mostly outsourced from “1st world” countries for environmental reasons.

Other work that can be found in and around this river is often done by women and children who sort through the garbage carried downstream. In doing so they pick through piles of garbage looking for plastics. The plastic that is found is put into bags where it is transported out to be sorted even more thoroughly by its color and type. Then itcan be taken to plastic processors depending on what kind of plastic. The plastic then goes through a refining process, chopping, melting, grinding, and coming out in pellets. These PVC (poly-vinyl chloride) pellets find their way into the hands of plastic manufacturers and become one of the millions of plastic products that we use every day.
The industries that produce these plastics are known for their extremely hazardous working conditions. The ventilation is terrible, the machines are unsafe, there is no safety or protective equipment, and the workers make barely a $1 a day.

It is stories like these that we are trying to capture for our upcoming book. Before leaving Bangladesh, however, we also captured a story about a women who spends all day untangling plastic wires and feeding them into a chopping machine which proceeds to chop them into pellets for shipping and recycling. If you make a mistake and slip too far, the machine takes your fingers along with the plastic mesh. So far she has lost two fingers and when that occurs she of course loses her job until her hands heal. No fingers, no work, no money to feed her family. Of course when she returns to work, everything has remained the same. No safety measures, and the harsh conditions by her machine continue.

The work that seems to be created from the filth of the river goes from one bad extreme to the next. It is hard to calculate how many people are affected by the chemicals and contaminated water, how many diseases and infections the river is responsible for, but it contributes to the suffering of those who look to it for survival. They must continue to destroy their environment and risk the health of their own bodies in order to survive and feed their families. it is because they are not provided another option, another way. These are the lives we do not want to forget, the lives we want to provide with a better option.

All Photos by George Rosenfeld 

Luxury of a Dream

Our team reached Bangladesh and stayed in the highly populated capital city, Dhaka. Dhaka is the 9th largest city in the world and one of the most densely populated. It was here we began to document the next story for the book. In doing so we followed a lead that an NGO provided us to a local sweatshop to take an inside look into the lives of the workers.

The workers were all women and undeniably hard working women at that. They spent most of their lives on sewing machines in this large factory, and seemed happy to be doing so. Although the work was hard, they considered themselves blessed to have a steady job that kept them from the streets and allowed them the company of other females, but to most Westerners this job would likely feel more like punishment. The women there work 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, with only 2 Sundays off a month. Two of the women that our team spoke with walked an hour each way to get to the factory, and then worked on an assembly line all day where they stitched and cut fabric which was then passed to the next sewing station.

After the women had finished their work day, our team went with some of them back to their homes to see where they lived. Each woman resided with their families in small tin shacks on a narrow, dirt street in one of the oldest sections of town. In the monsoon season these roads make getting to and from work each day a challenge.

One of the young women who worked at this facility was actually only a 14 year old girl. She worked in order to help support her family. Her father had abandoned them when she was very young. After her long day working, she returned home only to become the caretaker for her two younger siblings until her mother returned from work late at night. She rarely saw her mother, she left the house by 6 am every day in order to make it to work on time. In the evenings, she had hardly an hour to eat a little something before bedtime. Bedtime consisted of one bed for all four family members. Finally school for her was not an option since she was the eldest child and had to work to help support the family. When our team asked her more about what she dreamed of doing someday, she simply replied that she wanted to be someone who made enough money to take care of her mother. This is a phrase that unfortunately we are very used to hearing, “I do not have time to dream, or think about the future. I’m just trying to get by today.” Dreams, it seems, are a luxury that not everyone has.

All Photos by George Rosenfeld 

Living On A Dollar A Day

Living on a Dollar a Day is a book and documentary project which will, in words and images, tell the stories of the women, children and families around the world who work long hours, sometimes under dangerous conditions, to earn not much more than a dollar each day.

Through this project, The Forgotten International’s (TFI) hope is to bring awareness of the struggles of the poor and of how more than one billion people at the bottom of the economic ladder work so hard just to stay alive. TFI also wishes to discredit the myth that many who are poor are simply lazy or worthless. Hopefully, this project will help many to realize that poverty is often a condition that is symptomatic of forces outside the control of the poor, and that the chasm that exists between the daily living conditions of the poor and those of the rich, is simply unacceptable.

A Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, Renée Byer, and a videographer, George Rosenfeld, are traveling on behalf of TFI to a minimum of 10 countries to capture these stories. They are currently finishing their travels in Asia which included visits to India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia. Their next destinations are going to be two countries in Africa, three countries in South America and some stories from Eastern Europe.

Our Work in India

Shortly after our team’s arrival in India, we moved to our first story which involved the sewer workers in Delhi. We decided to do this story because, of course, one of the objectives of this project is to focus on some of the terrible jobs that many people around the world are forced to do largely as a result of their economic status. In India, and somewhat unique to that country, employers still use human beings as tools to clean the sewers of large cities or to clean out open latrines in the countryside or to sweep human feces from cement slabs that people use to relieve themselves in areas of the country where toilets don’t exist. These jobs are given only to the lowest caste in India who have been called “untouchables.” The Dalits of India make up about 16% of the country’s population or about 180 million people. It is dehumanizing work. Work they have been forced to do largely because many in India feel that because of their caste they are the only ones who would be fit for such work.

Sewer workers, of course, get paid very little and sometimes die from the gases they are exposed to in the sewer pipes of Delhi and other large cities. Not only do these sewers contain human waste, but often are filled with cockroaches, rats and chemicals that are both harmful to their skin and body. These workers go into these sewers with no protective clothing and remove the waste with their hands, a shovel and a small bucket.  The photograph to the right is of one such worker who’s being hosed off after diving into and cleaning out a sewer.

Below is the photograph of the sewer he just entered to clean. It is filled with sludge and human waste. This type of work is actually illegal in many areas in India. Nevertheless, the law has not caught up to the practice and local governments are still trying to figure out how to deal with sewage in cities with decaying infrastructures and populations that are out of control.  No one should be forced to do this kind of work simply because they are poor and thought to be of less value than other human beings. TFI’s team managed to interview a person who works in one of these sewers. His story will be highlighted in our upcoming book.

TFI also visited Northern India where, as you can see in the photograph below, our president, Tom Nazario, stopped to visit a small slum on the hillsides of the Himalayas. This slum community is situated alongside a river, the homes are made from not much more than sticks, stones, and plastic tarps. Here, families live by begging and you will often find beggars anywhere tourists congregate. The point of interest for tourists in this part of India is, of course, trekking, spiritual retreats and the home of the Dalai Lama. How beggars live, how much money they make and what impact their poverty has on their children and the opportunities those children may have in future is what we focus on in our book. Many millions around the world live on begging and often make far less than a dollar a day. It would be gross negligence on our part to create a book about the world’s poor and not mention this population. In this photograph, Tom Nazario waits on line with children at the slum who will get their hair combed after just being given a shower by one of the volunteers. Two hundred children live in this small slum and on a 110 degree day, a shower is one of the few pleasures these children have.

Other stories we’ve chronicled in India include the story of a young blind girl who begs on the street of New Delhi in order to support her mother and younger brother, women who build roads and structures by hand, slum dwellers who are being evicted from their homes as developers take over cities, and street vendors who sell trinkets or provide services to passersby in the hope to make enough money to buy food for their families.

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