The Revolving Fortune

Earlier in his life, poverty forced Aziz’s parents to send him from Noakhali in the Southern part of Bangladesh to Dhaka to work as a manual labourer in a jute mill. Regardless, in 1993, Aziz became seriously ill due to unfavourable work conditions, leaving him no choice but to quit both his education and work.

His adversity did not stop there. While Aziz was in Dhaka, his father passed away, placing the responsibilities of sustaining the family on his shoulders despite his frail health. 

After spending a few years back in his village, in 1998, Aziz returned to Dhaka in search of a better job and ended up working in several garment factories as an operator for the next seven years. However, he was later dismissed from his job for participating in a wage protest and was forced to, once again, move back home. In his village, he tried to set up a small grocery business, but Aziz was not earning enough despite working extremely hard. At certain points, he also made several failed attempts to go abroad, losing nearly all his savings in the process. 

In January 2014, with the money from friends and family, he was finally able to go work overseas. Hoping to get to Italy eventually, he first arrived in Egypt, where he worked for two months in a garment factory in Giza before embarking on his journey through desert and sea, without knowing about the hardships lying ahead. Facilitated by the smugglers, Aziz and his fellow migrants were often kept in cramped campsites located in the middle of the desert, where living conditions were worse than those in cattle sheds. Those who refused to submit to the middleman’s orders were then brutally tortured.

Aziz was one of the lucky few who quickly adapted to such conditions, evading torture by remaining silent. They walked for two nights to finally reach the Libyan border, where the group of middlemen held him captive in a house for the next seven days, demanding that his family pay more money for his release. The middlemen had a network of accomplices all over Bangladesh, and, out of the desperation to be taken to Libya and finally Italy, Aziz had no option but to transfer them BDT 150,000 (USD 1,366). During this difficult journey, he lost contact with his family and had to survive on dry bread for months.

Realising they were not going to get any more money from him, his captors in Libya finally released him, and Aziz managed to get a job at a factory in Tobruk. “I’d never faced anything like this in my life. Although I’d worked in factories without proper food in the past, the flat bread they gave us to eat was simply inedible! They treated us like animals. I didn’t think I’d be alive,” Aziz recalled. Hoping to make a decent living and earn enough to pay his debt to his family and friends, Aziz worked in Libya for more than three years. Nevertheless, due to the political strife in the country which led to a civil war, he struggled to make ends meet. 

In October 2017, after failing to earn a living in Libya, Aziz returned to Bangladesh.  Distraught, shattered and empty-handed, however, he was determined to rebuild his life at home. With the help of a few friends and his elder brother, he kicked off a small store in the Kaladarap bazaar in 2020. But since he had no savings, he could not buy essential goods to run the store – particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of his friends who is also a returnee and previously received support from the Prottasha project suggested he contact the local Prottasha Reintegration Service Centre. 

Initially hesitant, Aziz soon became comfortable when staff from the Centre in Noakhali warmly welcomed him. There, he received psycho-social counselling which helped him manage his emotional state and was referred to the Prottasha office in Cumilla for financial literacy training. Within the same year, Aziz was able to acquire in-kind support from Prottasha and started stocking a variety of goods, especially tea, in his store. With this support, his store at a prime location in the market is now running well, and he is able to sustain his family, including sponsoring the education of his children and saving for the future. 

With this positive turn of events in his life, Aziz wants to contribute to enhancing safe migration practices in his community. He became a member of the local migration forum, where influential personnel, including teachers, businessmen and returnees, provide advice on reintegration and safe migration processes. Through this platform, Aziz is also able to offer those in need with referral linkage support and initiate activities to raise the awareness in the community about the perils of irregular migration, while supporting returnees and community members to get access to different services. 

Funded by the European Union, the Prottasha project contributed to the sustainable reintegration of returnees in Bangladesh and the progressive achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 10.7 to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed policies. 

By: Md Sariful Islam, National Communications Officer, IOM Bangladesh