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A handwritten newspaper
May. 28th, 2023 07:15 amI get a lot of hope and ideas for ways things can be better from stories about what people are doing in so-called developing countries. Often they seem like things I myself could tackle, or I with a few friends--like writing a newspaper to cover events of interest or concern in my local neighborhood. Unlike Mohammad Hasan Parvez, I could even do it with aid from a computer. He writes out the newspaper by hand.
Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does various jobs--works as a brickmaker or goes to sea to fish. There are no newspapers in his area, and in any case the national papers have no interest in reporting on what goes on there, but a mentor of Parvez's, an award-winning journalist, suggested to him that he himself could publish a paper.
He calls his paper Andharmanik:
The paper has been running since May 1, 2019:
You can read the whole story here, in a story by Faisal Mahmud, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The story is published in a Turkish newspaper. I discovered it because it was tweeted by the mentor, Rafiqul Montu (and retweeted into my timeline by my friend Jaspreet Kindra).
I'm grateful to everyone along that chain, and Parvez himself, for this work and for the spark of energy it gives.
Parvez at work
Parvez lives in a small village in southern Bangladesh, and to earn money, he does various jobs--works as a brickmaker or goes to sea to fish. There are no newspapers in his area, and in any case the national papers have no interest in reporting on what goes on there, but a mentor of Parvez's, an award-winning journalist, suggested to him that he himself could publish a paper.
He calls his paper Andharmanik:
The river Andharmanik is known for some characteristics. The most common myth about it is that if someone splashes the river water in the dark, it emits light and creates an arc.
“Andharmanik means a ruby that lights up the dark. I want my paper to be like that — a beacon of hope for our community,” Parvez said.
The paper has been running since May 1, 2019:
In the past four years, Parvez has cultivated a team of 15 volunteers — labourers, farmers, and fishermen — who work as newspaper reporters, feeding Parvez with the daily happenings in different corners of their district. Once a month, they have a team meeting where Parvez gathers all the news from his volunteers.
Parvez writes headlines and gets them printed out in a big font from a local cyber cafe. He then pastes the headlines onto A3-size papers and writes the rest of the content with a fountain pen. He prints at least 300 copies from a Xerox machine. His volunteers also act as hawkers and distribute the paper in different villages.
You can read the whole story here, in a story by Faisal Mahmud, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The story is published in a Turkish newspaper. I discovered it because it was tweeted by the mentor, Rafiqul Montu (and retweeted into my timeline by my friend Jaspreet Kindra).
I'm grateful to everyone along that chain, and Parvez himself, for this work and for the spark of energy it gives.
Parvez at work
