Under The Poverty Line

All of we hear and read a common thing that most of the people of developing countries live below the poverty line. When hear or read about poverty we imagine that a poor boy or girl is collecting some food from a dustbin or a lady or man is begging or sleeping on the footpath. Sometime we think some other scenario. But most of our imaginations are running around the people who live in the city and the town.

Millions of people live in rural areas and thousands of poor people live here. How much we know about rural area. When we talk about rural area_ we draw a picture in our head_ there are a few cottages and long farmland. Someone owns the farm and the rest who work on the farm are poor and live under the poverty line.

There is a small group of people in my homeland (so called rural area) who survive in an area which is not their permanent water land.

There is no cottage, no farmland, no owners and also no poor farmer. But there is poverty. Do they embarrass poverty or poverty embarrasses them?

To find out the question some of my friends visit the area more than three times. The main occupation of those people is fishing. So we called them Fisher man. Locally they are called ‘Jailla’.

Their houses are made of wood and plastic paper contains only one room, socially we call it a boat. The boat isn’t their property; it’s a courier which carries their property like a camel in the desert. The camel has a life but their boat is inert. The camels are walking in the hot sandy desert but their boats are floating on water.

The owner of the boat lives with his wife and children. The children can live with their parents until a certain age. Then they get their new house.

When their parent gets old they never take any step to grasp their parent property like us. How unsocial they are! Most of the women work with their husband but not go fishing. Their works mainly attach to post production. Never think that their husbands are involved in business. Business is not their headache. This kind of pain only takes a great person, they call them ‘Sordar’ and we call them leader of the community. The rest of them is collectors and we call them fisherman.

Their leader is not living on the boat. He has a small cottage on the bank of the river and he is not poor and is not living under the poverty line. He is living under a Banyan tree!!

Some of the women break the tradition and work outside their boat. There is no one to hinder them. Because they brought some paper money for their family at the time when all fishes visit their relatives home in another river. Money makes a new tradition for them that in some cases women are eligible to work outside.

How cruel the women are! They have infant children but they don’t care. They leave them into the boat. Since they are not civil, the men take care of the infants in the absence of their mother.

They don’t pray to God. God must take revenge for their disobeying behavior. But the problem is that with a hundred of year they are not concerned about God. Now it’s complicated that from which religion they should get the curse. May be they get curse from all Gods of all religion. For this enormous pressure they are unable to cross the poverty line.

In every boat, there is an academician or maybe more. His teaching method is practical not memorizing. You need not to light up in the night to earn this learning. How energy saver they are! He teaches the student how to swim not night but in the daylight. They are swimming in the river without swimming suit.  How unsocial they are!

The main work of the children to collect fish in the very morning when there is low tide in the river. That’s all their work. The rest of the time, they are playing and fighting. They don’t know what is A or B. They aren’t hungry. So why do they need to know about A or B?