Amanda Ryan's Feedback

A Volunteer from Australia

I have been in Bangladesh and with the JAAGO Foundation for three months now and I’m not sure that I will ever leave.

I am continuously amazed at how remarkable my new children are. These children lead hard lives where food is never guaranteed, in 2m squared shacks with usually at least five other family members and share one small toilet with the other 100 people in their area of the slums. Yet they come to our school everyday with a smile on their face that I rarely got to see back home, they bare a true smile, a smile that makes me appreciate being alive. These children really are the most amazing creatures on this planet and I think it is us who needs to learn from them.

My experience with the JAAGO foundation has allowed me to grow so much in my short time here already and the children have opened me up to give and receive so much more love in my life than I thought was possible. I will never be the same person I was before I arrived.

We in the western world seem to forget sometimes how lucky we truly are. I know I never had to sacrifice food to study and I spent most of my time at school abusing the privilege of having education so readily available for me. When I see the way the JAAGO children study it makes me feel extremely guilty for my behaviour in my youth. One thing I do not ever want to forget is that although I cannot change my past I continue to appreciate all the privileges I have been born into and help those who were not so lucky to be born into a country like Australia.

I have had the pleasure of taking the art class amongst other duties whilst I have been here and I never get tired of walking into a room of kids screaming ‘Amanda miss’ with the most beautiful smiles in this world.

I believe art is a very important class for our students most of these children have experienced hardships that most of us in the western world never have to endure particularly at such a young age. When I look at some of these children I see the eyes of a forty year old woman on a four year old girl and it’s extremely disturbing.

I’ve found that for our students expressing themselves artistically allows them to show their feelings and hardships indirectly. It allows us to understand them and why they may have behavioural problems in class because of their environment at home or on the streets.

It is sometimes easy to forget you are working with children from the slums of Dhaka whilst we are within the school walls they behave like they have everything they desire and look very smart in their recently donated school uniforms from some extremely supportive high school students here. I big reminder of what type of children I am working with was when recently in art class I ask the students to do a dream exercise. I asked them to close there eyes and try and remember their dreams I asked questions like where were you in your dream? Where there aliens? Where you in the mountains or down the beach?

When all of the students had finished the lesson I had 40 drawings of a traditional Bangladeshi village. This was all the students knew and had seen.

During my time here I have also had the pleasure of taking some of the kids on their first car trip that felt more like an amusement ride rather than mundane a to b travel. The students were screaming “wow” every couple of minutes, and were soaking up images of places they had never seen before yet were not even 1km from where they live. For some of them however the wow didn’t last for long as motion sickness kicked in and they were forced to spend the rest of the trip with there heads out of the window.

Being with these children has me constantly stepping out of my own perspective and into a completely different world. JAAGO and the children teach me so much about myself and the world. The rawness of their lives here really makes me remember what is truly important in life and them giving me the gift of the ability to remember that everyday is worth so much more than any time and money I have and will ever put into the project.

For all the good times at the project there has also been some bad as with everything in life. I sometimes feel as though we are constantly on an uphill battle, constantly searching for funds, fighting off rising rental prices for the classrooms, and trying to convince people who really don’t care and have the ability to help can become disheartening at times. After we have done so much work to be turned down or the children not accepted by the wider community is extremely disappointing. However I guess if it was an easy thing to do I would not need to be here and if no one did anything to try and make it easier the world would be a horrible place.

I could talk for hours, days and years about what I have learnt at the JAAGO Foundation and in Bangladesh but I would like to end this on a quote from Oprah Winfrey.

“None of us in this world have made it until the least among us have made it”

Amanda Ryan