Mattresses, blankets, blackboard, paper, pencils etc. for shelter for children in Dhaka House.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, are a lot of homeless children. A Dutch man decided to move to Dhaka and help provide a better life for (some of) these children. From his own savings and some donations of people around him he hired a number of "huts" (made of golfplaat, riet, etc.) in the poorest neighbourhood of Dhaka.

At the moment 33 children are taking care of there, with the help of some volunteers that are themselves former streetchildren. Nobody gets paid for this work,not even the doctors who offer their help for free every now and again. De histories of the children are terrible: young children that are so heavily abused that they can't walk for weeks when they are brought in and whose rehabilitation will take a long time.

 
Some children wet their beds every night, two severe mentally handicapped children live permanently in a cage (a boy of 4 and a girl of 16)to prevent them of wandering on the streets with al the dangers thatÖÖ Of the 15 children that are physically handicapped, four are mentally handicapped as well.
Some are orphans; some have parents but don't know where they are. When the parents can be found, one tries to get the children back to them.


Some children just stay a few months and return to the streets after their health improved a bit. Around half of the children visited the local till it turned out that they were beaten by the teacher (they still use canes for that here!)because their collars were not clean enough. Can you imagine! Some of these kids are so poor they go without food for days! They are taken off school and now they are thought by volunteers. Two of the older children go to the technical school and help in the houses as handymen. Other volunteers help by giving a sort of sport lessons. By now Dhaka House manages to give the children two meals a day, which is a real luxury, by organising the shopping well (e.g. buying priced down vegetables at the end of the day. And there is a Dutch foundation that helps with paying for the food and the rent. But apart from this, Dhaka House urgently needs help for almost everything else. The list is endless; here we give you a selection:

For the schoolroom:
Tables and chairs
Blackboard, chalks, wipers
Schoolbell, paper, coloured pencils, schriften, etc.

For the houses:
Floormats (it can be cold here in winter), tissue for making mosquito-nets, 20 mattresses, a fan (for the children in the cage), blankets, 2 cupboards that can be locked, emergency lamps (for when the electricity fails, which is often), a bicycle.
Toys and games: a cricket set, dolls, cars, badminton sets, tricycles, bicycles, books..

Medicines:
pleisters, desinfection liquid, cotton wool (all relatively expensive here), dental care, two wheelchairs.