A mother’s persistence
Seizing opportunity, changing her family’s future
Editor's note: This story appears in the spring | summer issue of A Common Place magazine. If you've already read Rina’s story of devotion and resilience there, we invite you to explore more photos of the Deuri family, then and now, here.
Rina Deuri had a dream that drove her. It pushed her through days of dipping sheaths of handmade paper into vats of dyes whose colors she carefully mixed to a specific hue. It fueled her through evenings when she made paper products at home for extra income.
“It was my target,” she says. “That I make my children educated.”
Today, her son Anjan leans over a patient in his dental clinic in the rural southern Bangladesh community of Agailjhara, where he was raised.
And that’s not all.
“I wanted to be a nurse, but I couldn’t,” Rina says. “But my daughter is now a nurse.”
Her daughter Antara moves easily among colleagues on a floor of one of the most renowned hospitals in Bangladesh’s capital city Dhaka, balancing her shifts and caring for a newborn son she hopes will someday be a doctor. “She sacrificed everything for the two of us,” Antara says of her mother.
Like parents across the globe, Rina wanted her children to have what she could not.
“I wanted to be a nurse, but I couldn’t. ...
Rina Deuri (pictured in 2002) has been a papermaking artisan at Biborton Handmade Paper in Agailjhara, Bangladesh, since 1993, earning income that has changed life for her and her family. (MCC photo/Matthew Lester)
... But my daughter [Antara Deuri] is now a nurse.”
- Rina Deuri
Antara Deuri (wearing a sari) is with colleagues at the hospital in Dhaka where she works.
(MCC photo/Julie Kauffman)
Growing up as the oldest of seven children in Agailjhara — a rich, green landscape of rice fields and waterways, prone to flooding and cyclones — Rina thought of how she would care for all the people through nursing.
But her father had few resources, and she left school at 13 when her parents arranged a marriage for her.
Her husband Anil’s education ended when his father died, leaving him without the money to finish. His brothers, who by the culture he would normally turn to for help, had migrated outside of Bangladesh.
Anil found what work he could, but it wasn’t enough for the young family.
Early in her marriage, Rina says, she didn’t fully understand her situation or the challenges she was facing.
Then, as she did, “I grew more and more frustrated, because I realized my father is poor and my husband has no education.”
“What can I do now?”
Rina took action.
She had seen Biborton Handmade Paper, then an MCC job creation project, and showed up there in 1993, asking for work. Her husband had asked her not to go, she says.
As she met with the manager, “I told him I need the job very much,” she recalls. “I must work here.”
MCC began the Biborton Handmade Paper project in 1993 as one of a number of MCC job creation projects in Bangladesh, including five in Agailjhara. (Today it operates under an independent fair trade enterprise, Prokritee, which grew out of MCC’s work.)
The aim was to provide sustainable income for rural women and to empower them — a great need in a region where incomes were low, hunger frequent and education most often out of reach.
Rina joined the ranks of papermaking artisans. After collecting water hyacinth, an invasive species growing freely in the area’s numerous canals and ponds, they chop it and transform it into handmade paper and paper products sold across the globe through retailers and organizations like Ten Thousand Villages.
The changes in her family’s life were tangible and immediate.
Rina, in a 2002 interview, shared that with her new earnings, her family could eat twice as much rice as they did before she worked with Biborton.
She could pay school fees and meet other needs for her children, then 12 and 5. And her income helped her husband to grow a business hauling people or supplies in a flatbed bicycle cart, and to find other ways to improve his earnings.
She sacrificed everything for the two of us.”
Antara Deuri
But the growth wasn’t just in her home life.
When Biborton needed to produce a new color sample, the task went first to Rina. She would mix the environmentally safe dye, then swirl it with water hyacinth and recycled paper until the color was uniform.
Her trained eye helped to match precise shades of color to customers’ specifications, and then she would teach the other artisans how to reproduce that hue.
Rina had never traveled to Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka until Biborton sent her to training workshops and to serve as a craft demonstrator at an international trade fair.
Meanwhile, at home, her son Anjan, then 12, would lean over his English homework in the evening.
In the years to come, as Anjan and his sister Antara grew, Rina lived up to her commitment to herself to keep them in school.
Rina stresses that Biborton was a powerful support, with leaders walking alongside her and her family. Biborton provides a regular infusion of savings for each artisan. Artisans can add to that fund and take out loans.
But even with her steady income and her husband’s, making ends meet and paying for school was a stretch.
Her determination pushed her to find a way forward.
The steps to success began to add up — finishing secondary school, going on for higher education and training.
But so did the costs. Rina and Anil took out loans. They sold their house and land, moving to a smaller plot and working to pay off the money they had borrowed.
Today, though, the tide is turning. “I see a change in my life now that my son earns money,” Rina says.
Anjan has his own dental clinic — and dreams of opening more clinics.
After finishing his studies and training, Anjan came back to Agailjhara where he was raised, seeking to provide affordable dental care to the community.
He relishes his time with his parents, both in the daily rhythm of life and in holidays and special celebrations. He, his wife and two children live with Rina and Anil as he saves money to build a new house.
Just as he once walked his younger sister to school, he now takes his daughter Angela.
He points to the homes surrounding the land where the family lives. With all these homes around, he says, he is one of the few who is educated.
Everything I got from my mom.”
Anjan Deuri
He gives his mother the credit — for what he’s gained, and for what he’s been able to provide for his children.
“Everything I got from my mom,” he says.
The giving and growing that Rina has done doesn’t stop there. It’s on display daily at Biborton as she invests in training younger artisans, hoping they too will earn income that can change their families.
“And they will be able to send their children to school. And their children will be educated just like mine.”
The Deuri family: then and now
MCC staff first met Rina Deuri and her close-knit family in 2002. Learn more about them and view more photos from then and now.
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