Tranquility in a tea garden

 

The terror attacks in Paris are deeply shocking and sad.

In the middle of grief solacing pictures from the tranquility of a tea garden in the northeastern part of Bangladesh.

A long, solitary walk in a tea garden should be mandatory to everybody. An unending, hilly forest of tea bushes is bound to make one a more thankful and better person. 

Once again, I was lucky enough to follow my husband to a meeting, this time to a little village called Lalakhan, close to the Indian border. 

The area looks like a paradise with beautiful trees, colorful flowers, a turquoise river, fresh air, shy children and sweet baby animals.

The night in Lalakhan was so silent that you could almost hear the stars twinkling. Accompanied by a large chorus of frogs, a wonderful combination.

Like in many other places in Bangladesh, here too people work extremely hard for very little money. 

But this is a beautiful place to struggle. 

People make a living on collecting low quality coal from the bottom of the river. And since labor force in Bangladesh costs next to nothing, everything is done manually. 

Men stand in the water, dive, catch and collect coal. The coal is sold to brick factories which use it as fuel.

Some fill sand bags sold to the construction business, others collect pieces of firing wood from the bottom of the river.

Sylhet is also the "Tea Bordeaux" of Bangladesh. Blame the British. They started tea gardens here and made the whole world addicted.

Lalakhal Tea Estate is now owned by a Bangladeshi company but it's still a showcase of the colonial time and style.

The tea company offers a small income, primary education, health care and no big future plans for the 5000 people living inside the tea farm. Many of them work, live and die there.

Most of them are hindus. Women work in the fields, they pick tea leaves and earn round 80 takas (less than a euro) a day.

Men work in the factory where the leaves are dried and cut. 

In the living quarters the tea workers have small houses, they get water from the wells for an hour twice  a day, they wash their clothes in the river. Many have cows and sheep, everybody has a mobile phone.