Ronjon: Orphan’s Fate, Inscribed Both on His and Your Forehead
Many people in Bangladesh believe that one’s fate is inscribed on their forehead. In a way, it’s their destiny, and one can’t escape one’s destiny. Even Ronjon Soren, who is now 15 years old, believes this. His father died when Ronjon was 5 and two years later his mother died too. The whims of fate got him into a well-known boarding school, he was given substitute parents in a country 8,000 km away, and he learned he’s musically gifted. What else does his forehead say about his future?
Love you can’t forget
“It was raining once and my mom told me, ‘I have to go to work. It’s raining, don’t go outside.’ So I stayed home by myself for a while. But all my friends were outside, running around. I watched them
at first but then I went and joined them. When my mom came back, she knew right away I wasn’t at home, that I had gone outside, to play with my friends. She rushed out, spanked me, and dragged me inside by the hand. Then she washed me, dried me, gave me clean clothes, fed me, and said to me with love, ‘Please, don’t do anything like that ever again.’ And then I went to bed and fell asleep.”
That is the loveliest memory of his mother’s love for him that makes Ronjon smile every time. He was just a little boy then but he remembers her kind face to this day. He doesn’t remember his father, though. Ronjon only knows he died from a feverish disease of some kind that cost his family all their savings.
After their father died, their mother struggled to support her kids all by herself for two years. It helped the family money-wise when their daughter Sabina got married. But she stayed to help her mother with all the housework and to take care of her two younger brothers, Ukil and Ronjon.
But then their mother died too. That day there was no food in the house. Sabina’s mother in law told the children’s mother, “We have nothing to eat. Go to the lake and catch some fish.” So she went and on her way to the water, when she was struggling through the high grass, a venomous snake bit her. Sabina’s father in law rushed to help her and cut the snake’s head off. He then took her to a local shaman who knew a lot about snakes. But nothing helped. She died from the snakebite. When Ronjon found out, he cried and cried for several days. He loved his mother very much.
Orphan’s uneasy fate: work first, only then go to school
Sabina tried her best to comfort him. She was brave; she took care of both her brothers. But the people from their village disapproved of her staying in her late parents’ house. They summoned her to the council of elders and asked her, “Why are you still living in your parents’ house, and not with your husband?” They didn’t like her explanation and decided she must move to her husband’s village and start living with him. Before she left, she gave the boys her phone number and told them, “Call me if there’s a problem of any sort.”
So it happened that Ukil and Ronjon were left in the village all alone. Their father’s sister took them in but those times were very hard. They would get up at five a.m., milk the cows, clean the cowshed and the henhouse, make breakfast, and only then rush to school. “Sometimes we had to do so much work that there wasn’t any time left for us to have breakfast. We didn’t eat until we came back from school,” says Ronjon about the difficult three months at the house of his busy aunt..jpg)
“In the end Sabina started taking care of us again. We took our cows and left for her new home. It was quite far away, we even had to change schools. Everything was much better there, even though we had to do almost the same work. Sebastian, my sister’s husband, was always helping us: together we would take the cows to the pasture in the morning and then back in the evening, milk them, tidy up. Sebastian is a nice guy. We played chess and ludu and had so much fun. He loves us very much.”
The school helped him
Their family still suffered from insufficient income and the food was frugal. They managed to function like this for about a year. “There was this teacher called Robin Marandi in the new school and he knew about the SAMS boarding school. Sabina said to him, ‘Could you help us? I have two little brothers. Could you put in a word for them?’ And in 2011, we were really admitted to SAMS,” says Ronjon.
He didn’t know anybody at SAMS, had no friends there. Everything felt new to him. It was a shock. But then, among 800 kids, he came across a boy who used to live in the same village as he did. His name was Immanuel and he helped Ronjon get used to the new environment. Ronjon likes the boarding school very much now. He loves Bengali, has discovered his musical talent, and wants to be a singer when he grows up.
I will make my sister’s dream come true
There’s no question about Ronjon being a talented singer; he sings 
all the time. “My sister Sabina had wanted to become a famous singer but when our dad got sick, we spend all the money on his treatment. That’s why she couldn’t start a singing career. Since my sister’s efforts weren’t successful, I want to sing instead of her, for her.” Ms Biroy, Ronjon’s teacher, took charge of his singing. If he becomes famous, he plans to help the poor. And he’d also like to do something for people to live happily, not to fight, yell, or quarrel. We would very much like for Ronjon to make this dream of his come true. Like the one he started dreaming in 2011.
When Ronjon was admitted to SAMS in 2011, we in ADRA already knew he’d be in need of a donor and we introduced him to the world through our website. And so it happened that one day, a wife somewhere in the Czech Republic asked her husband, “How about we start supporting a child in Bangladesh so that they can go to school?”
“Why not?” said the husband.
After a minute or two, the wife, sitting in front of a computer, asked again, “Who should I pick?”
“The neediest of the needy,” was the answer to her question.
“An orphan maybe?”
“Sure, an orphan. They’re all alone!”
And that was how Ronjon got his parents in a country 8,000 km away who began to support his studies.
Fate inscribed on one’s forehead
It was a mere coincidence that the married couple were friends of 
Radek, the current director of ADRA, who told Ronjon about them when he came to Bangladesh. And it was then when Ronjon said he would love to meet them. By another coincidence, he actually met the husband in Bangladesh in 2014 for the first time. This is what he says about it: “Every time Radek came to Bangladesh, he showed me pictures. And already I wanted to meet you, speak with you, and play together. When you really came, it was so great. The students want to meet their donors whose help they cherish. I wished the same.”
Could it have been destiny? Ronjon is very clear about that: “I believe it was inscribed on my forehead that we would meet. I wanted it and it really happened. Everyone told me that if something like that happens, it must have been inscribed on both our foreheads.
But who knows what else is inscribed on Ronjon’s forehead, or anyone else’s, really... It might be that we can change the fate of the Bangladeshi children for the better if we gift them education. Well, one can’t escape their destiny and Ronjon might really become a world-famous singer. What do you think? ;)
