Lucy Lawless: Five Days Banged in Bangladesh

LUCY LAWLESS: FIVE DAYS BANGED IN BANGLADESH

It was just several days after New Year's Day, 2005, that Lucy Lawless hugged her husband Rob and two young boys, Julius and Judah, at the airport lounge at Los Angeles International Airport, known as LAX. She was headed on a long flight across the Pacific Ocean not to Auckland, New Zealand, as she had travelled many times to and from LAX since 1995, but to the distant, dangerous, and impoverished country of Bangladesh. Travelling with her and meeting her there, at Dhaka International Airport, would be a filming crew from World Vision. World Vision had been founded in the United States in 1950, and was an an international organization of Christian relief and development whose goal was to work for the well being of all people, particularly children. It worked on six continents and was one of the largest Christian relief and development organizations in the world. Its budget in 2005 was 1 billion dollars.

World Vision was begun by a young Christian minister, Dr. Bob Pierce, who was also associated with the Youth For Christ organization. It was especially designed to help children and communities worldwide deal with poverty. The organization aimed to help people across the world in five major areas: emergency relief, education, health care, economic development, and the promotion of justice. Their activities included transformational development, emergency relief, strategic initiatives, public awareness campaigns and promoting Christianity. As a Christian organization, World Vision believed that witnessing for Christ was a fundamental part of their relief work and that God, in the person of Jesus, offered hope of renewal, restoration, and reconciliation. It sought to express this message through the motto "life, deed, word, and sign" and provided its programs and services to all people of the world despite race, ethnicity, gender or religion. All staff members in the US were required to sign a statement affirming their belief in Jesus Christ and sometimes background checks were made with a candidate's pastor or priest. However, offices in predominantly non-Christian countries did hire staff of other faiths, and in some nations even the most of the staff hired locally could non-Christians who were in sympathy with World Vision's ethos and objectives.

Such was the case in the very impoverished and politically dangerous nation of Bangladesh. Its poverty was a major factor which motivated WV to begin programs there, and the nation had one of the most active WV programs and development areas in the world. Its political turmoil, strife, and crime rate also motivated WV to assist there, as it was believed in helping to alleviate poverty by promoting justice. It supported community awareness of a collective ability to recognize unjust practices and to work for change. Issues such as child labor, debt relief, and using children as combatants in war were among those WV spoke out against and sought to change. World Vision International endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child importantly as fundamental expressions of the freedoms and responsibilities that should exist in every country, and advocated them. It also strove to reduce conflicts and help bring about peaceful ends to hostilities and and disputes throughout the world.

It was these goals, aims, programs, and efforts in particular however that would get the organization in trouble in Bangladesh. A heavily populated and mainly Muslim country, it was surrounded by India on almost all sides but maintained its own ethnicity and language, known as Bengali. The nation was part of India just decades ago, but after India was partitioned in 1947, the area became known as East Pakistan. A bloody war for liberation under Sheikh Rahman was successful in 1971 with Indian support. However, since that time there had been much political strife, turmoil, and violence, with thirteen different leaders and four military coups. It was very unstable and densely populated, and had the fourth largest Muslim population in the world despite its smaller area. It also had annual monsoon floods and frequent cyclones.

The Bangladesh Liberation War had been extremely bloody and violent. Muslims targeted Hindus in the area and hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, were massacred. This was sometimes referred to as a holocaust in the West, perpetrated by Muslims. This violence, hostility, and holocause against Hindus and sometimes intellectuals during the war continued today in the nation, as Muslims hated the Hindus and perpetrated great acts of violence against them to intimidate and drive them out. This had over the decades caused a Hindu diaspora from Bangladesh, as many of them fled to India. However, not all could afford to and did not wish to leave their families, so the violence and atrocities continued. This in particular, with WV's goals to promote justice and peace and end violence, had the organization alarmed, very concerned, and working hard in the region. Some of the most common atrocities, also used during the war, included rapes. Hindu women, wives, and sometimes even girls were targeted and brutally group raped by some Muslims, often young men. Group raping non-Muslim women was an old and very common practice taught to Muslims in their warfare and battle to spread Islam.

This situation was a human rights crisis and deplorable, and WV strongly opposed it and acted to end it. However, Islam did not tolerate other religions, which is why they victimized and strove to drive out the Hindus from the nation. Islam's goal was to expand across the entire world, and to convert everyone to Islam. In principle, it taught that non-Muslims who did not convert should be killed. It was a very violent and hostile teaching. This attitude was included to Christians. Once in recent years Muslims group raped a Catholic woman in Pakistan and demanded she convert to Islam. She had been repeatedly raped over the course of a few hours so badly that she was bleeding, could hardly walk, and had to be hospitalized. These cases had the attention of WV as well as other organizations such as Amnesty International. Muslims had more tolerance of Christians than Hindus yet their fundamental attitude and policy toward them was the same. WV being a distinctly Christian organization who was in Bangladesh to in part spread Christianity and end the Muslim efforts against Hindus would bring the relief organization trouble as it would be targeted.

Many Bangladeshi rulers had been assassinated or deposed in bloody coups since 1971. Despite the huge Muslim influence in the nation, its laws were based on English common law, not Islamic law. Two major parties including the BNP, or Bangladesh Nationalist Party existed in power. However, BNP was allied with Islamist parties in the nation such as Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and Islami Oikya Jot. The other dominant party was the Awami League, which rivalled the BNP and Muslim parties and was leftist and secularist. The rivalry saw much protests, violence and murder. Student politics was quite strong in the nation though, with highly politically active students, some of whom had been elected to the Parliament.

WV's biggest problems though would come from two radical Muslim parties who wished to depose the current government and replace it with a fundamentalist Muslim one, and were hostile to WV's aims particularly its Christiniaty and "interference." It would be seen as a "western capitalist" organization aligned with the "infidel western capitalist" United Nations. These groups did not recognized the UN's international standards of human rights. The groups were the Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, or JMJB, and the Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, or JMB. The latter group would be causing WV problems in particular very soon. Both groups would actually soon be banned that February. Since 1999 the groups had made bomb attacks, and hundreds of suspected members would later be detained in security operations, including the leader of the two parties in 2006. This would especially be due to what would happen with WV and one of the parties in a matter of days, soon leading to the parties being banned. It would not be long later that the first recorded case of a suicide bomb attack in Bangladesh would take place, in November 2005.

World Vision had asked the internationally famous actress from New Zealand, Lucy Lawless, best known for her role as Xena, Warrior Princess, to host a documentary they would be doing this January in the nation. Lucy had been raised a Catholic so she obviously met the standards, and her family, the Ryans in Auckland, had long been supporting WV through sponsoring children from an impoverished family in the nation. Lucy had continued by supporting a boy whose name was Even Banik throughout her years as Xena. She had actually began supporting him several years before Xena began, about the time her daughter Daisy was born in 1988. She had continued to and was very happy to learn that her support had really made a difference and Even was a grown young man now, off to Dhaka University. It had been through her help that he had been able to attend college. He was particularly good at math, and he would continue his studies there. His family was Hindu and while in college he thought he might join the liberal, secularist student movements and activists as many did though he would mainly concentrate on his studies.

Naturally when WV had asked Lucy to do the doco she jumped at the chance, and also the opportunity to meet with Evan whom she had been sponsoring for years. Evan and his family were also eager to meet Lucy, who had become internationally famous as Xena. She remembered when she was a child her family had a little blue-and-red box in the kitchen that read, "Two cents saves lives." The children including Lucy would take it to school when it was stuffed with two-cent pieces, and her parents still had the box. Lucy recalled her upbringing in NZ with good, loving parents, and though an average middle-class family she thought they were extremely privileged compared to the rest of the world. This inspired Lucy to go outside her environment and help someone else. Lucy didn't know much about Bangladesh yet, except that she didn't want to come home with a belly full of worms. Intelligent and informed, she knew it had terrible floods and that politically it was very volatile. Lucy thought that when one donated to a charity, it was very rare to see what their money does. But it would be a real privilege for her to go to see Banik.

She had been sponsoring Banik since he was a little boy and she would seen see and later write that he had grown into a fantastic young man, a great scholar and very good at math. He was hoping to go to university to study accountancy. A few years ago he had a health problem, which Lucy would note was one of the most horrifying medical afflictions she could think of, an awful flesh-eating disease she would say though she couldn't recall the name. She would praise the staff at WV as absolute heroes who took him to India for treatment. Lucy thought that when people got ill in that part of the world, they had to be careful because they could die of really simple stuff.

Lucy hugged her family goodbye, and Daisy who had been in the lounge with her boys, visiting Lucy in LA over on summer break from school in NZ, rushed up and Lucy hugged her. She told Daisy to help out her brothers in the mornings back at home and that she would be calling to check on them. Lucy then finally faced her loving husband Rob again and they shared a brief but passionate kiss on the lips, restraining themselves in public, before Lucy turned away with her bags and headed toward the ramp as it was time to board the flight. When Lucy entered the plane and sat down, excited to meet Banik, curious, and a little nervous, she sat alongside a few employees of WV. The plane soon took off that morning, speeding along the runway and entered the sky. Lucy normally read on plane flights or listened to music, but this time she flipped through her papers from WV that would prepare her to do the doco. It would be called "Five Days in Bangladesh" and they estimated she would spend just about a week there, at most. They would begin filming the doco as soon as she arrived at Dhaka Airport and it would take five days. After this she would fly home to her family in LA. Lucy was excited and also had the upcoming 10th annual Xena Convention to be held at Burbank in mind. She had talked with Sharon Delaney, president of the Xena fanclub and her friend and Xena co-star Renee O'Connor about it. Lucy was planning something special for the fans for this tenth anniversary. She planned for her and Renee to pop out of a huge layered cake in go-go bikinis and dance together to the tune of "Let It Whip". Entirely her idea, she hoped the fans would enjoy it. It also would recieve some media attention which would be helpful to her post-Xena career, showing she still had an incredible body. For the moment though, Lucy relaxed on the long flight with her thoughts, preparing to read for the doco. In just a couple minutes the plane had left the American continent and was flying southeast over the Pacific Ocean to Bangladesh. It had been chilly at the airport, in early January, though LA's climate was normally favorable and warm as it was near the ocean. She thought she would have to soon adjust to the warmer and tropical climate of Bangladesh, which had only a mild winter.