A boy wades through a fes­ter­ing trash pile in Bangladesh, look­ing for food. Human­i­tar­ian orga­ni­za­tion World Con­cern is work­ing nearby, improv­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in the neigh­bor­hood with small busi­ness funding.

I knew we were on our way to a Dhaka slum, but on the way, the slum wafted into the car. The sour, stomach-turning odor matched what I began see­ing: fly-covered piles of trash lin­ing the sides of this Bangladeshi road. Crows and cows picked through the fes­ter­ing debris, hunt­ing for food. Plas­tic bags and chicken bones emerged from the piles, all cook­ing in the sticky 100 degree heat. And on top of the mess: a cou­ple of bare­foot, shirt­less kids.

The boys wan­dered through the piles, look­ing for some­thing to eat. My van stopped nearby, and I popped open the door, hold­ing my breath, which only works for so long. I watched one boy, maybe five years old, as he held a piece of scrap metal and poked at the garbage. He would head in one direc­tion, then change routes, scan­ning the ground.

At one point, the tan, black-haired boy picked up what looked like half of a rot­ten melon. He brought it to his face, took a whiff, dropped it, then silently kept on mov­ing. He even­tu­ally dis­ap­peared from view behind a shack, near where a woman (his mother?) was prod­ding at another pile of trash. It was almost as if they were think­ing, “surely, this is not all there is for me.”

Across the street I saw row after row of ram­shackle homes. Water­front shanties, with front lawns of blow­ing trash. The nearby lake was red with pol­lu­tion. Who knows what chem­i­cals had been dumped in there to make that unnat­ural color. Later in my trip across Bangladesh, I saw a river that was black with grime, and saw a barge pump some­thing grey directly into a lake. I am not sure if the fish­er­men nearby even noticed.

With­out a doubt, this expe­ri­ence is depress­ing. Still, I know that World Con­cern is doing some­thing to change this sit­u­a­tion. A few min­utes after we drove away from the slum, we vis­ited a woman now able to pro­vide for her fam­ily because of a small busi­ness loan. After that, I met another woman who has a grow­ing screen-printing busi­ness because of World Concern.

We can’t take care of all of the prob­lems in this slum, but we are doing what we can to change the pic­ture of poverty here, one per­son at a time.

A woman picks through rot­ting trash in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Near a Bangladesh slum, heavy pol­lu­tion turned this lake red.

A fly-covered melon is one of the treats to be found in a Bangladesh dump fre­quented by hun­gry children.

Like

Unlike