Mothers are back to teaching small cohorts of children in their homes after a COVID-19 lockdown was lifted in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
To help with this effort, a committee that includes several Sunshine Coast Rotary clubs has successfully applied for a Rotary district grant to raise a total of $10,000, which will be enough money to teach 25 mothers in the most poverty-stricken areas.
The group delivering the program is the Amarok Society. A mother attends an Amarok school each day. Then, after class, she teaches five neighbourhood children the same lessons at home, mainly on the mothers’ beds and floors.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, one mother in Dhaka could not be physically with the children attending her micro-school but supported them from a distance.
“Good news is that I have started teaching them again this month, in two groups, one with three children and one group with two, maintaining a safe distance,” she wrote. “We have had to make adjustments to our lifestyle.”
She writes of a new student, a seven-year-old girl, who lives with her mother and grandmother. She teaches her grandmother to count numbers and write her name. “She is very active and interested in learning so she can move into the upper grades.”
Despite the ongoing global pandemic, Rotary continues to do good in the world – in this case empowering women and children.
