Travelling to Bangladesh

29th September 2011

Our journey started from London Gatwick on Thursday afternoon 29th September via Dubai and Dhaka heading for Chittagong down in the south of Bangladesh.

The story though starts 6 weeks earlier when Mostafa Kamal from Unite Social Theatre for Action (UTSA) in Chittagong put out a call for assistance to an international drama email group. He told us about the tragic accident that had happened in July, in Mirasorai, killing 43 boys and injuring many more. Being an experienced leader in Social Theatre Mostafa knew of the benefits that drama and expressive arts would bring to help this community deal with their loss.

We read that email and saw it as a "Call to Action" and within 6 hours of saying "Yes" to Mostafa our first email went out to people telling them of our plans and asking for help to raise the funds we needed to go to Chittagong. By 11pm that same night donations had already started arriving, by the following morning we had received over £500. In the weeks that followed people donated from as far away as Siberia, China and Australia, all with much the same message "tell the parents my heart goes out to them, I'm reaching out to them through Dynamic Heart Project"

   Dawn over India

As well as personal donations we organised Dynamic Theatre workshops with proceeds going towards our trip, Filipe gave a fundraising concert in Portugal in early September, and so within 6 weeks we created the funds to travel to Bangladesh to be of service in the best way we could to the people of Mirasoai.

This trip was just the beginning, we have plans to return to continue our work with the people of that community who in the face of tragedy opened their hearts and homes to us. They found it at times difficult to believe that people from across the world reached out to them through us to help them in their time of need.

  Arriving into Chittagong

We arrived at Chittagong airport at 2.30pm on Friday 30th September. Mostafa was there to welcome us and take us to our guest house for a much needed rest before we started our journey into the soul of the people of Bangladesh. 

Thank you Mostafa for having the courage and the passion to live your dream through Social Theatre, and thank you all for sharing our vision of making a difference in the world through the Dynamic Heart Project.

This is our story....