Meet Laura
I gave birth to my half-British, half-Bangladeshi twin daughters Opi and Mahi in July 2019.
I spent the first half of my pregnancy in the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar in South-Eastern Bangladesh. Despite being one of the poorest parts of a very poor country, the local population have welcomed nearly 1 million Rohingya men, women and children who have fled across the border from Myanmar to escape human rights atrocities.
During the year I spent working on the humanitarian response to the Rohingya refugee crisis, I got to know some mothers from the host communities, and was able to hear directly from them how it was impacting their lives. I was prepared for animosity – with so many hundreds of thousands of refugees settling nearby, and the associated challenges making their lives even harder, surely they would be resentful?!
Instead, I was overwhelmed by their compassion. When I arrived at the home of one mother, despite struggling to provide for her own children, she told me she had shared some of her vegetables with the refugees, as she had heard that children were not being provided with enough during food distributions in the camps.
Working on the Rohingya refugee response was not my ONLY experience of Bangladesh.
I first moved there in 2009, to work for a donor-funded project that aimed to empower extremely poor women by providing them with the means to earn a small income….and I’ve lived there on and off ever since.
Time and time again, I’ve been amazed by the resilience and generosity of Bangladeshi mothers living below the poverty line.
It’s been a long-standing dream of mine to use everything I’ve experienced and learned over the past decade to start my own initiative, working directly with women whose position I could be in if circumstances were different.
When I became pregnant, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the opportunities my daughters would have, and how unfair it was that other mothers couldn’t give their children everything they deserve.
When my girls were born, they were gifted a large collection of traditional ‘kantha’ blankets.
I was a bit overwhelmed to receive so many, and wondered what we were going to do with them all!
However, I quickly understand their numerous uses: from swaddling the girls as tiny newborns, to functioning as pram liners, sun shades, mini playmats or even makeshift changing mats while out and about.
They washed really well and dried quickly – and their bright colours and traditional ‘kantha’ stitching made them really stand out. They were drawing compliments wherever we went!
I realised there could be a market for them, and this was how I could create opportunities for mothers in Bangladesh to provide for their children with dignity….and the idea for ‘Khushi Kantha’ was born!
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