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Lucy Lawless: Five Days In Bangladesh
NZ Listener Magazine
28 January - 3 February 2006
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BY SARAH BARNEN
If
the World Vision ads have sent you to the edge of giving up coffee in order
to nourish a waif half a world away, Lucy Lawless: Five Days in Bangladesh
(TV2, Tuesday. 7.30pm) might send you over. Lawless, who has a passel of
sponsored kids spread about the developing world, decided (after 10 years
and three children of her own) that it was time to head to Bangladesh to
visit her first, who was about to leave the World Vision programme and move
onto higher education.
Lawless told the Listener that New Zealanders, by and large, "have the luxury of being able to care about people outside our immediate circle. And I think it's really important to strengthen this fabric of caring among human beings on the planet. We're not going to wait for our government to do it for us, or George Bush or bloody Wal-Mart or whoever, to come to the party."
Like other celebrity World Vision ambassadors, Lawless is
thrown in the deep end, first visiting families in areas that charity has
yet to reach. Watching a child who is rotting alive in a village where the
breadline is a fairy-tale - where the residents still scrape together a
"feast" for the visitors - who wouldn't want to repay the hospitality?
Especially when you see the difference it makes. Which is, of course, the
point. When child labour starts to seem reasonable In a scary way, it's time
to visit a sponsored area, where Lawless meets her adoptee. Bittersweet,
it's Intrepid Journeys with a purpose.