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Brother Ronald Drahozal A mission apart The ceilings are festooned with shiny coloured paper and balloons dangle and sway in the late afternoon breeze. The showcase holds candles, all with ‘for sale’ and ‘homemade’ signs. Outside, deep voices argue about football. It’s Christmas day at Apon, and as we sit in a ground floor room, Brother Ronald Drahozal smiles benignly.    ‘Why do I do this?’ he asks, keen eyes twinkling in a wrinkled face. ‘Because if I help other people get to Heaven, maybe I’ll get there myself.’    It started in 1962, when Brother Ronald came to Bangladesh as a Holy Cross Priest and started teaching at the missionary schools of St. Gregory’s and St. Joseph’s. Back then, they would go around the villages of Bangladesh, offering to teach wherever they were needed. In 1987, Ronald went back to America where his father was dying of leukaemia. His father’s death provoked him to make the decision he had been mulling over for a while: he decided to move back to Bangladesh for good, wanting to do something for the people there. Brother Ronald went to Mymensingh and Madhupur, hoping to teach.    ‘When people told me about the problems with drugs in Dhaka, I had no clue about drugs,’ says Brother Ronald. Having grown up in a small, idyllic town in Iowa with about three taverns along his high school route, he had led a somewhat sheltered life, being exposed to no more than a few alcoholics on the way.    In February of 1988, Dhaka’s heroin problem was just beginning to surface in places like Tejgaon.    ‘One of the brothers told me about the drug addicts of Tejgaon and another went to see a rehabilitation centre in Kathmandu. So whilst one saw the problem, the other saw the solution, and that is how the idea of a counselling centre came about. I myself went to see centres in Calcutta and Kathmandu, and it became obvious that counselling, though effective in the short run, was not enough, and you needed to go deeper than that. You needed to keep these people with you,’ he says.    And so started a Tk 60,000 drug rehabilitation programme, which wasn’t really a lot of money. It started with a small house inside Harirampur in Gabtali, in the summer of 1988, with two heroin addicts, a doctor who was an ex-addict, and although free from addiction was not emotionally able to cope, and so would not show up on most days. 1988 was the year of the big flood in Bangladesh, and Brother Ronald woke up one night to hear people sloshing in knee-deep water inside the rehab. It was time to move.    And it continued. The operation then moved to Mohammadpur and whenever the number of people increased, it would move to a bigger house. In 1994, Apon took official shape, independent of the NGO it had been leaning on, and with the addition of people who were genuinely interested in the cause of rehabilitation.    ‘There wasn’t much money in drug addiction, in the sense that not many people wanted to donate,’ says Ronald. ‘This might sound strange but HIV AIDS actually came as a blessing to these drug addicts. It was so high among injecting drug users who were sharing needles that people at international conferences couldn’t help but take notice when the two were tagged together. There were only about 20,000 - 40,000 AIDS cases but about a few lakh heroin addicts who were at high risk because of the shared needles, and so money began to be diverted towards them.’    It wasn’t only about drug addiction. During the football sessions of the Apon members at the Green Herald playing field, Ronald started talking to the children and realised that the children living in streets were not going to school but to video game stores where they would play for hours and squander away their money. Plenty of heroin addicts were 10-15 years of age. And so Apon started its children rehabilitation centre.    ‘This is the high point of my life,’ says Brother Ronald. ‘I get fulfilment from helping all kinds of people, even from teaching, but helping street children has given me the best kind of fulfilment there is. They come in bedraggled, filthy little bundles, and literally, when you wash them, you throw away buckets of dirt. But underneath the dirt are brains so sharp and the edge that comes from living in the streets, that it makes you wonder. They know their streets and I’ve heard all of them say that they eat two meals a day, never three. That is what stuns me. Never three.’    Once, while he was returning to Apon, he saw street urchins surrounding something. Upon drawing closer, he saw it was a young woman, a drug user in her last hours before death. Ronald called Mother Teresa’s sisters, and they came and held her hand and said the last rites while she died. ‘It offered me some comfort, that at the end of a life that must have been miserable, this woman found some solace. This is one image that is forever etched in my mind. That woman, gasping for breath, while people stood there like scavengers, waiting for her to die, so that they could use her corpse to get money, saying it was for her funeral, and then discard it when they needed it no more.’    Apon opened a woman’s rehabilitation centre, the first of its kind. ‘It’s so much more difficult for women, in a country like this. They have nowhere to go, and the stigma is unbearable.’    The current crises among many centres is that good health is treated as a commodity to be sold, and is not regarded as a right, says Ronald. Apon is on its way to realising its dreams. A well-wisher has donated a large piece of land in Singair, Manikgonj. The construction starts there from next month and it plans to expand into separate male and female rehabilitation centres, a skill training centre and a health care unit.    ‘It will be called Apongaon,’ enthuses Brother Ronald. ‘Our village within a village. In a beautiful setting like that, the mind and the body can be healed.’    As I wish Brother Ronald Drahozal a Merry Christmas and walk out into the crisp winter twilight, I hear shouts of merriment from down the road. About a hundred Apon inhabitants are returning from their football game and they laugh and tease and jostle each other. Contrary to my anticipation they do not look ‘wasted’ or ‘emaciated’ in any way. Sturdy young men, they march up the street towards Apon with steady determination. Interview: Mashida R Haider / Photo: GMB Akash

HEROES    Muhammad Zafar Iqbal     A life in quantum leap    Professor Sirajul Islam     Making history    Farhad Mazhar     And the seed shall set you free    Selim Al-Deen     Telling our tales, our way    Shamima Khatun     Biralakhi to New York    Professor Rabiul Husain     Visionary philanthropist    Brother Ronald Drahozal     A mission apart    Kanak Chanpa Chakma     Brushstrokes of brilliance    Kazi Zahedul Hasan     The chicken king from Harvard    Rokun Ud-Dawla     Man on the street  FACES FOR THE FUTURE    Tamara Abed     Trendsetter    Dr Reyan Anis     Healer    KM Tanjib-ul Alam     Man of edict    Syeda Rizwana Hasan     Green crusader    Maqsood Sinha & Iftekhar Enayetullah     Garbiologists    Audity Falguni     Word artist    Arnob     Music maker    Javed Jalil     Expressionist    Mahmudur Rahman     FDI-getter    Razeeb Hasan Chowdhury     Visualiser    Khalid Mahmud Khan     Style merchant    Zillur Rahman     Umpire

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