A Childhood in Hell the Slum Dwellers of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Are the Poorest of the Poor - but They Have Hope. You Can Help Justify Their Hope Through Our Christmas Appeal

Summary

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WELCOME to an unimaginable place. A claustrophobic world of filth, disease and hunger. A place where children cluster like flies, scavenging among heaps of rotting garbage inhabited by armies of rats and cockroaches. A place where washing means scooping up stagnant water from ponds full of raw sewage and swarms of mosquitoes carrying malaria or the dreaded dengue fever, an infection that often leaves its victims vomiting blood.

One in 10 of the children who inhabit this world will die before they are five years old. The 50p their exhausted parents might earn for a punishing 12-hour day breaking rocks or hauling a rickshaw in temperatures often in excess of 100F is never enough to buy them food, let alone the medicine that might keep them alive when they inevitably fall ill.

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Extract

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A Childhood in Hell the Slum Dwellers of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Are the Poorest of the Poor - but They Have Hope. You Can Help Justify Their Hope Through Our Christmas Appeal

For those who inhabit this teeming human wilderness, every single day is an unrelenting battle for survival. Welcome to lives lived on the edge of the abyss, where to sit down and give up is to fall headlong into oblivion and die. Welcome to the slums of Dhaka.

We had arrived in the neighbourhood of the Malek slum in the heart of this, one of the most populous cities on the planet, straight off a 12-hour flight from a freezing Scotland. Already the glitzy limbering-up at home for a Christmas of conspicuous consumption seemed like a distant and perverse mirage.

On the flight, I had read about how more than a billion people are n...

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