From Sundarbans to the SAFF, a winning tale of Sathi Munda

No, I have yet to see her. She is Sathi Munda, a defender for the Under-16 Bangladesh National Women's Football team, who appeared to shoot the fifth penalty and scored to make it 3-2 with India at the sixth SAFF Under-16 title. 

However, I had the chance to meet her mother almost coincidentally when I was busy conducting a focus group discussion (FGD) in Datinakhali Munda Para, a Munda rural village at Shyamnagar in Satkhira.

It was a blazing hot day in late February when I, accompanied by some of our field staff at my present workplace, Biodiversity for Resilient Livelihoods at the Center for Natural Resource Studies (B4RL-CNRS), reached the gentle Chuna River of the Sundarbans on 27 February. 

Datinakhali Munda Para, the Munda village, is situated on the banks of the river Chuna, and on the other side of the river, there stands the magnificent Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world.

The rural village, however, offered us a picturesque view with small huts of mud that were all tidy. Women were sitting on mats in the yard, and I saw some lazy swans strolling beside the bank of Chuna on a looming afternoon. 

So our FGD sessions on 'Gender Needs Assessment' in the Shyamnagar, Satkhira area commenced. Initially, there were all the questions on issues like wage inequality among male and female workers as day labourers in the agricultural sector, the nutritional imbalance between the sexes in families, the mean age of marriage and education for girls in the area – followed by the expected answers. 

Women get lower wages than men or get less nutrition in the family, and often weddings take place with a fake birth certificate of the bride showing her to be 18 or older, etc. But as soon as I asked the question of whether girls are allowed to play as soon as they grow older, several participants pointed their fingers at a slender woman aged around 27-30. 

"She is Protima Munda. Mother of Sathi Munda, a girl from our village who is now [late February this year] in Kathmandu, Nepal, to play for the sixth SAFF U-16 title in the women's category," other women informed me.

So your daughter is representing our country in Nepal, and how was the beginning of her journey? "I had an early marriage at the age of 14, and now my daughter is 13 years old. She has loved playing football since her primary school days, but her father never agreed to it. 

Simply because our society, culture or community do not approve of girls wearing sports uniforms like boys and playing football after a certain age," Protima Munda replied.

But Sathi had an immense passion for playing football, and so she was adamant about continuing her sports despite being rebuked by her father, relatives or other people in the neighbourhood, explained her mother.  

"I too scolded her a lot," she continued, "but at one point I began supporting her. And Masum Sir, the sports teacher of her school, used to come to our house and persuade us a lot to send her to play and mention that she was talented in sports," recounted the emotional mother.

According to the local newspapers in Satkhira, Sathi Munda is the daughter of Pradip Munda and Pratima Munda. Being a student in eighth grade at present, this teenage football talent left for BKSP from Satkhira around two years ago. Her father is a landless day labourer, and her mother is a home-based tailor and housewife.

"Five Munda families were brought to this region by the local landlord Mahsin Saheb about 200 years ago from the Ranchi and Chota Nagpur areas of Bihar. Each of those five families was promised five bighas of land for cleansing dense forests in the Sundarbans, but the promise made to them was not fulfilled," said another Munda woman named Rahomani Munda, whose daughter Anjana Munda is also a teenage football player, and she is right now staying at Satkhira to play at the regional level.

"Today we are 28 families in total in this Datinakhali village where just five Munda families got settled during the British regime, and we are still landless," Rahomani added. 

Getting approval from family, community and society to play in childhood and adolescence is an important indicator of gender equality, which is actually overlooked in societies like ours. 

"Women from conservative, oriental societies often suffer from low bone density and other related problems because of their deprivation from taking part in games and sports or even get ample sun since childhood for various sorts of social taboos. 

B4RL-CNRS wished to address all these issues in their presently ongoing 'Gender Needs Assessment Study' in Shyamnagar of Satkhira, a region close to the Sunderbans," explained Mohammad Mahbubur Rahman, the project director of B4RL-CNRS, a project funded by the Embassy of Sweden.

Meanwhile, Anisul Islam, Director of CNRS, explained, "Although Article 10(g) of the CEDAW Convention recommends for girls the same opportunities to participate actively in sports and physical education, societal and cultural norms often debar our girls from exercising this right."

Former Bangladesh women's team footballer Razia Khatun, who was part of the Bangladesh squad that won the SAFF Under-18 Women's Championship in Bhutan in 2018, passed away early Thursday [on 14 March) after giving birth to a baby in Satkhira. 

"She suffered from postpartum haemorrhage, which proves how societal taboos push even highly successful girls or women in society to accept marriage as the ultimate destiny while putting aside all their ambitions and [how they] often perish in silence," Anisul added. 

In the next phase of the project, CNRS is planning to build a girls' and youth's sports and cultural club in this rural village to encourage the local parents to break the cultural taboos and endorse their daughters to take part in games and sports, according to M Mokhlesur Rahman, PhD, Executive Director of CNRS. 

"We will do it from our 'Gender and Social Inclusion' approach to uphold the 'Leaving No One Behind' principle," said M Mokhlesur Rahman. 

The project aims to sensitise and mobilise a total of 30,000 poor and vulnerable people from the local communities in the three Ecologically Critical Areas (ECAs) of Satkhira, Khulna (Dacop, Koyra), and Magura, as well as Narail districts.

Audity Falguni is a writer and currently working as a communications manager with  Biodiversity for Resilient Livelihoods at the Center for Natural Resource Studies (B4RL-CNRS). 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard