A key, a roof and a new life for 36 families

For years, rain was something Hamida Khatun feared.

When the clouds gathered over her village in Nandail, in the northern district of Mymensingh, she would look up at the holes in the tin roof of her home and wonder how much water would come through. 

The earthen walls had begun to crumble. During storms, the house shook enough to make her worry that it might collapse around her children.

There was little she could do except wait for the weather to pass.

Now, standing outside a newly built house, Hamida held something that had once seemed beyond her reach: a key to a home she could call her own.

“I used to live with my children in a broken-down house,” she told Daily Waadaa, “The minister has given us a new home.”

Hamida is among 36 vulnerable and homeless families in Nandail who have received houses under an initiative called “Dream Home,” replacing makeshift huts and deteriorating dwellings with modest semi-pucca homes.

On Friday, Yaser Khan Chowdhury, the state minister for information and broadcasting and the lawmaker representing Mymensingh-9, formally inaugurated the houses and handed over keys to the families.

For the government and local officials, the houses are part of an effort to provide shelter to people living in extreme poverty. For the families moving into them, however, the significance is more immediate.

Now they have a dry floor when it rains, walls that do not threaten to fall and a door that closes on a place of their own.

A house means more than a shelter

In poor rural communities, inadequate housing can magnify almost every other hardship.

A leaking roof can ruin food, clothing and schoolbooks. A fragile wall becomes a danger during storms. Families already struggling to pay for daily necessities can find themselves spending scarce money repeatedly repairing homes that were never sturdy to begin with.

For Hamida, the new house offers an escape from that cycle.

Standing before it, she spoke less about its construction than about the sense of relief it had brought.

“I will raise both hands and pray for him,” she said of the State Minister Yaser Chowdhury. “May they remain in power for many years and continue helping us like this.”

Another beneficiary, a widow from Syedgaon village, had spent years confronting financial hardship while hoping she might one day have a secure home.

“The minister has given us a roof over our heads,” she said. “I pray that he remains healthy for many years and continues serving people in this way.”

For Sabuj Mia, a vegetable seller supporting his children on a modest income, owning a safe house had similarly remained out of reach.

“We had to endure a lot of hardship with the children,” he told Waadaa, “The minister personally handed me the key to my dream home. We no longer have to live through that hardship.”

The houses are simple. But for people who have spent years living in structures vulnerable to rain and storms, the difference between a fragile hut and a permanent home can also be the difference between uncertainty and a measure of stability.

Local residents said the project could improve more than the physical living conditions of the families. Having a secure home, they said, could give people who had long lived precariously a greater sense of dignity and confidence.

Yaser Chowdhury described the programme as the beginning of a broader effort.

Ensuring that “nobody in Nandail was left hungry or without shelter had been among his election pledges,” he said at Friday's inauguration. Providing these first families with homes, he added, represented an initial step toward fulfilling that promise.

He said the programme would “gradually be expanded to other homeless residents across the constituency.”

Local sources said Yaser Chowdhury had personally monitored construction of the houses in different parts of Nandail, following the work from its early stages through completion.

Thirty-six homes, with 98 more to come

The first handover is relatively small in a region where poverty and insecure housing remain visible. But local officials say it is not intended to be the last.

Another 98 Dream Homes are under construction in different parts of Nandail under the rural maintenance programme known as TR, according to Atikur Rahman, an office assistant at the Nandail Upazila Project Implementation Office.

If completed as planned, they would substantially expand the number of families receiving houses beyond the initial 36.

Mizanur Rahman Liton, a senior joint convener of the local BNP, praised the initiative, linking it to the government's broader agenda.

“The Dream Home initiative undertaken by State Minister for Information Yaser Khan Chowdhury, through his own and government initiatives, to provide housing for homeless people as part of implementing the prime minister’s vision is commendable,” he told Waadaa, “I believe such efforts for homeless people will continue.”

For the families who received keys on Friday, however, the programme's larger political significance may matter less than what happens the next time monsoon clouds gather over Nandail.

In one of the villages, children who once slept beneath a leaking roof will have a different experience of the rain. Their parents may no longer spend a storm watching weakened walls or moving belongings away from dripping water.

A house built from brick, cement and tin is an ordinary thing for those who have always had one. For Hamida and the other families, it represents something harder won.

After years of living in a home that could not reliably protect her family from the weather, Hamida can now close a door behind her and know where she will wake the next morning.

The programme calls it a Dream Home. For 36 families in Nandail, it is simply home.

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