Soon I will travel to Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh (September 17- October 15) with Surfing the Nations (STN), a Honolulu-based humanitarian organization that uses surfing to build relationships and serve communities within the 10/40 window, where the world’s neediest and most underprivileged countries lie. Along with Bangladesh, STN makes yearly trips to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, China, Israel and Egypt. They live by the motto of “surfers giving back,” believing that surfing can be used as a powerful tool to enact change in this generation.
Continually rocked by natural disaster, government corruption and massive population growth, Bangladesh remains a devastated country. It is one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, with more than 150 million people - that’s about half the total population of the United States - living in an area slightly smaller than the state of Iowa and 82.2% surviving on less than US$2 a day.
Add to that children given brutal beatings by police and rickshaw drivers, 1.3 million homeless kids sleeping on the streets, gross deformities of beggars holding out shriveled hands for taka, and you’ve got a dejected community ripe for change.
The young Bengali surfers seem to have caught the STN vision. Where surfers have gained the reputation of being self-centered, counter-cultural punks who take from Mother Nature without giving anything in return, the Bengali surf boys are learning what it means to be unselfish and to have concern for the poor. These young surfers are becoming leaders, possessing all the potential to heal the wounds of their broken community.
“It’s cool to see how the motto “surfers giving back” plays out here,” says Kalama, who went on the trip last year. “Surfing the Nations is meeting both the immediate need—feeding kids who are hungry, loving and valuing kids who are neglected - as well as satisfying a long-term vision by trying to create a sustainable change and raise people up as leaders in the community.”
It’s a daunting task to help everyone in Bangladesh, to feed every street kid, to save every beggar - to fix Bangladesh - but Tom is not discouraged. He often tells the story of a man walking along the beach, where hundreds of starfish have become stranded by the tide. He notices a boy picking up starfish one by one and throwing them back into the water. He tells the boy, “There are thousands of starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The boy stoops down and picks up another. Throwing it back into the ocean he responds, “It sure made a difference to that one.”
Although change for all of Cox’s Bazaar may seem a futile effort, it begins with just one.
