July 31, 2007	Tuesday	Rajab 15, 1428

DHAKA: Yves Marre, a Frenchman with a passion for the sea, decided in 1994 to sail an unwanted barge from France to Dhaka with a vague plan to donate the boat to a worthy cause. Then he would return to Paris and resume his life as an Air France cabin steward — or so the original plan went. Today, after 13 years in a tiny aircraft, hundreds of feet above the swirling waters of Bangladesh’s mighty Yamuna river, Yves Marre points though the haze to a tiny dot on the horizon.

As the plane descends, the speck in the distance slowly comes into view, revealing itself to be a brightly-painted red and white barge moored incongruously amid the river’s bleak and desolate landscape.

Now known as the “floating hospital,” 10 years ago this former oil tanker, which Marre sailed from France to Bangladesh in the hope that someone might put it to a good use, was nothing more than a rusting hulk that no one wanted.

Today it is a symbol of hope, dispensing healthcare to thousands of the country’s poorest and most deprived who live on the river’s many chars, or islands.

“The chars are terrible places to live, the population is expanding more than anywhere else and you see all these children, but there is no future for them,” says Marre, a Frenchman, whose mild-mannered demeanour belies a steely resolve to do whatever he can for the largely forgotten char dwellers.

“There are not even the most basic medical facilities. Sometimes they are so poor they cannot afford even to take the boat to go across to the mainland, and if they get there they can’t afford to see a doctor,” he adds.

The plane comes into land, skimming noiselessly along the water’s surface and coming to a halt a stone’s throw from the hospital.

A large crowd has gathered to watch. Skinny children wearing baggy homemade shorts gaze in wide-eyed wonder at the plane and its passengers.

Among the poorest of the poor in one of the world’s most corrupt and impoverished nations, char people are used to being cheated and exploited and are naturally wary of outsiders. So when Marre first arrived in 2001, the people he hoped to help, instead of welcoming the hospital, reacted with fear and suspicion.

“In one place people started to come and they were telling us ‘why are you stopping here with a big ship like this? What do you want?’” he recalls.

In an attempt to allay their fears, he invited local leaders aboard for a tour of the boat.

“They were thinking we had some ulterior commercial or political motive so we invited them for tea. We let them look at everything in the boat. We told them ‘this hospital is for you’. They couldn’t believe it,” he adds.

The vast Yamuna River in northwestern Bangladesh is dotted with hundreds of chars. On these constantly shifting silt and sand masses live an estimated 6.5 million people who cannot afford to live anywhere else.

In a country where 40 per cent of the population of 144 million lives on less than one dollar a day, char dwellers have to fend for themselves. In addition to a lack of health care, there is no education, no sanitation, no work, and no access to electricity or water supplies. Worse still, they face the constant threat of losing their simple bamboo homes to floods and river bank erosion.

Each year, around six million people, many of them char dwellers, are left homeless by the loss of around 2,400 km of river bank.

Often families will have lived in a particular spot for several decades.

Unaware of the plight of the char people, but with a strong desire to make a difference to some of the poorest in society, Marre in 1993 set about securing an old barge under a French government scheme to recycle boats that were no longer economically viable.

Today, the converted 45 metre vessel has a six-bed ward, an X-ray machine, facilities for minor surgery as well as for obstetric, gynaecological, and essential dental care.

A medical team of two doctors and four nurses is often reinforced by visiting specialists who give up their holidays to volunteer on the boat.

Together they treat thousands of people a year, many of whom have never seen a doctor before.

The boat, managed on a day-to-day basis by Marre’s Bangladeshi wife Runa Khan, travels around the chars staying one or two days at each island before moving on.

Great care is needed to navigate the treacherous currents and channels of the river, where, as Marre puts it, “one wrong move and you can be stranded all winter”.—AFP

To be concluded