Education comes hand in hand with shelter at Ashrayan

Until months ago, a roof atop his dilapidated hut was the abode of 48-year-old Shahidul, a landless farmer, while his prime concern was how he could keep it habitable for his six-member family.

“My main concern was to feed my family. But anxiety continued to chase me to keep the house erected as my abode,” Shahidul of Mahanpara village on the outskirts of Panchagarh town told this correspondent.

He was pointing to his now abandoned home, a structure of rusty tin walls and porous corroded tin roof.

He now owns a semi-pucca house with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a toilet and a veranda under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Ashrayan-2 Prakalpa while the education facility for himself and his three children came hand in hand with the new shelter.

“We were neglected in every sphere of life and my main concern was for a safer abode alongside the everyday meal but now the concerns for the abode are gone,” said Shahidul.

He added his major focuses now are the education and health matters of his family alongside routine livelihood issues.

Under the Ashrayan project, the government also extended its hand to develop a non-formal education centre targeting the school dropout children as well as the adults while a local NGO has been entrusted with the task of running the school as a community training centre in three shifts from morning to late evening.

“Male adults like me go to the school (centre) in the evening shift, the adult women go there in the afternoon while the (school dropout) children get their primary education in the morning shift,” Shahidul said.

This BSS correspondent found some 50 women of different ages in their classroom being managed by three female teachers, who themselves are college students and residents of Ashrayan abodes, and was offering their voluntary services in their free time.

“We want to disseminate everything we learnt they (students) are our younger brothers and sisters,” said Alpona Akhtar, a teacher of the centre, while her father Nazimul Islam, 65, is one of the beneficiaries of the project.