Education and Training
Aims | Classroom education | Therapy for disabilities | Life skills | Farming | Metalwork and carpentry | Tailoring
Every child gets some training in farming and food preparation as part of the daily life at Bhola Garden.
The younger children get basic classroom education. The aim is to equip them, where possible, to transfer to mainstream school within three years.
If after three years they are unable to transfer to mainstream school, they are given the opportunity to stay on and train in one of these trades:
- farming
- metalwork or carpentry
- tailoring
The aim is that they should achieve a certificated standard which will enable them either to transfer to a college for more advanced training or to start employment in their trade.
School classes are held in the morning and afternoon six days a week. The children are taught reading, writing and arithmetic. They learn Western script as well as Bangla script. They are also all taught sign language.
Therapy for disabilities
Whatever a child's disability, we seek to help them with exercises and therapies appropriate to their needs. For those with cerebral palsy the emphasis is on developing their sensory and cognitive skills and coordination. For blind children, improving their sense of balance is important. Deaf children are taught to make vocal sounds and to control those sounds – especially the volume!
It is part of the ethos of Bhola Garden, which is inculcated right from the child's first day, that everyone should be respected and everyone can and should care for and help everyone else. They are also shown that, while life is hard work, it should also be fun.
Of necessity people in a poor island community have to be as self-sufficient as possible and where agricultural tasks are involved, such as weeding, planting and harvesting, every available hand is required. Everyone should do their share of the chores. For example, after Ali's weekly trip to the fish market, at least 25 kilos of fish have to be descaled, cleaned, cut into pieces and packed away in the freezer. Virtually nothing is wasted – the fish heads end up on someone's plate just like any other parts of the fish.
The children are taught to swim in the pond, to paddle a boat and play water polo. They are taken to the sea or riverside – nowhere in Bhola is much more than 5 miles from the Sea of Bengal to the East or the estuary of the River Meghna to the West, but often children in the villages have never seen either!
At present there are very limited opportunities for even the older children to learn computer skills, but it is hoped to provide proper facilities for this in the new building.
The facilities
At Bhola Garden we have:
- a pond with fish
- about 100 square metres of vegetable garden, and
- many mature fruit trees.
At Valumia we grow vegetables, fruit, timber and fish. There are over 9,000 square metres of productive fields and fishponds. There is a tube-well, a caretaker's hut and a shed for livestock. We have a tractor, trailer and rotovator. So we have the facilities to train in horticulture, arboriculture, aquaculture and to a limited extent animal husbandry.
Learning to farm and to make a profit
We grow two rice crops a year and one main crop of all the other vegetables. Beans are grown on nets over the fishponds, so not an inch of space is wasted. These provide year-round food – the actual beans are eaten in the summer and the shells are kept and then eaten in winter. Mango, papaya, guava, lemon, pomelo, litchee and other fruit and timber trees grow on the embankment round the fields.
We already produce a surplus of vegetables other than rice, which is sold in the market. But let us be clear: learning comes before profit. The trainees should be and are allowed to make mistakes along the way, so that they can learn from them, even though this costs us some profit.
Trainees stay occasional nights in the caretakers’ hut at Valumia to get experience of minding the farm 24/7.
And, remember this is Bhola. This is a paradise on earth, where the land is so fertile that plants and trees germinate and grow unbelievably fast – that is, until the next cyclone destroys everything and you have to start again from scratch clearing the land as in 2007 and again in 2010.
It is astonishing what our technical teachers have been able to achieve in the existing facilities – a small open-sided shack with a few tools and a welding machine.
For example, one child under supervision from the teacher takes about a day to make one window grille. All the grilles for the children's hostel – over 80 of them – were made by our children. They also made more complex items such as the sliding metal security gates. There will be plenty more needed as we build the new workshops and staff accommodation and after that we will make them for sale.
We make wooden chairs, tables, desks, beds and cupboards both for our own use and for sale.
Above all, we specialise in producing tailor-made assistive devices designed by Ali for children with disabilities.
We teach how to make clothes and table linen by hand-sewing or with a sewing machine. We also teach how to decorate with embroidery.
We want to raise the standard of the best trainees' work to a level where some of their work could be sold by the charity in the UK.
Every child has clothes made for them. At Eid everybody gets a new set of clothes and the girls are given some simple jewellery and make-up so they can have fun in their new outfits.
