By bRuksana Rumi from Netrakona

On 16 June, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, 200 hand-made masks were distributed among the poor by adolescent girls’ organization of Fachika village under kailati union of Netrakona district. Apart from that they also have been implementing various initiatives for the last four years in raising awareness on health and hygiene issues for the children, adolescents and physically challenged people in their areas.

As part of Covid -19 responses, the adolescent organization has been working to raise awareness in the areas on hands washing, maintain of home quarantine, health rules, social distancing and distributed leaflets containing corona awareness. The organization distributed 100 soaps and 100 hand sanitizers to poor families with free of cost. They also assisted 10 elderly people in the village to get 10 KG of rice each from the local government (UP) and 8 elderly people for getting old aged allowance.

In order to keep themselves safe from corona infection, the members of the organization decided to use compulsory masks and sanitize hands regularly. They realized that many of the villagers do not have cash and many of them are not able to buy and use masks even if they want to. Almost all the members of this organization are teenager students, so they do not have much money to do something for the poor. In this situation, they sit together at the Adolescent Information Center in the village and decided to do something with their limit in fighting against virus.

Fortunately four of them among the teenagers knew how to sew. They came forward and expressed interest in making hand-made masks to distribute to the poor of the village and sell in subside cost. For that they required clothes, needles and thread. A member of the organization named Chandni Akhter expressed her desire to work on a sewing machine of her own. She has experience in sewing as she maintains her study expense by that way. She agreed to make masks if provided clothes.  Thus based on that the teenagers collected donations for buying clothes and prepared low cost hand-made masks for the poor of the village.  A total of 1000 masks have been made by them so far of which 200 were provided free of cost to the extreme poor and physically challenged people of their village. In addition while distributing masks, they also advice the poor how they could follow the health guidelines.

The initiatives of the teenagers through their organization have impressed the local people which contributed to prevent prevent Covid-19 infection.  Their initiatives are welcomed by the villagers.

Translated by ABM Touhidul Alam