The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel

The holidays that changed me ‘Go and pick that chicken’ Nadiya’s American Adventure

Nadiya Hussain fondly recalls her trips to see family in Bangladesh, especially her grandad, a buffalo farmer

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Growing up, our travels usually consisted of going to Bangladesh every year. As soon as school was out, we’d go. Everything would be packed early in the year and we’d be gone for six or seven weeks.

We never did package holidays; we didn’t go to Europe or America. Instead, we saved all year to go see our family in a small village in Bangladesh called Mohammad Pur. I suppose because I grew up in a community of south-east Asians and British Bangladesh­is, where everyone packed up in the summer and went off on holidays to see their families wherever they were, I didn’t really know what I was missing out on.

Villages in Bangladesh tend to be made up of big families. My dad was one of 14 and my mum was one of eight – I am one of 67 grandchild­ren! And yes, I actually know the names of everyone. I’ve still got baby cousins coming. Everyone’s house is a stone’s throw away and you have one village leader who looks after everybody, and that person was my grandad.

The highlight of my life was to go and see my grandad. He was a buffalo farmer and a rice farmer who was the first to get up and gently got everyone else up. If you didn’t get up on time before the sun rose, he’d start a fire underneath your bed.

Because it was a working farm, the men would get fed first because they worked hard, long hours. My grandad worked on the farm until the age of 90. He said “when I’m dead, just stick me in the ground, d, I I’ll ll be fine fine”. . So that that’s s what we did, d, when he died we stuck him in the ground and that was that. He was working on the farm two hours beforehand.

I used to love ove helping out the women in the kitchen, but we [the children] ] would get under their eir toes. So my grandad, dad, in order to make e sure we were out of their heir way, would say, pointing inting at the 300 or so o chickens we had, “go go and pick that chicken.” And if we picked the wrong chicken, he’d say “no I told you to get that one with the red crown and the black foot”, or whatever. He was so clever – he would send us to get away from the women so that they could eat.

And after we caught the chicken, he’d say great, now kill it. So we’d have to kill the chicken, cook it in the pot and eat outside while the men ate. But if the chicken wasn’t ready, then the women would call us in and sometimes 40 of us would sit on the floor, we’d eat, then we’d tidy up, go off, and then the women would eat. It was a hierarchy of men, children then women. The women work worked just as hard as the men.

When Whenever there’s a situa situation wh e r e e ve r yone comes tog together and sits dow down and someone put puts something down on the table in the mid middle – that to me is hom home. So much of my tr trip in Louisiana [in h her new two-part s series Nadiya’s A American Adventure] was about family, about connecting, about home, about food and staying together, staying positive. That reminds me of my own family, because that’s how we do it. I think that’s how a lot of families do it. Especially now, I think we’re holding a lot of what’s dear to us very close.

My dad took us out there, because he said you need to see what poverty is, you need to see what poverty looks like. You don’t see it in this country [Britain] – it exists but we don’t see it. And there is help for people in this country, there are ways of getting yourself out, there are means. But in Bangladesh that doesn’t exist – there is no NHS, there are very few charities – especially in these smaller villages, the charities can’t feel their way through.

I think that that’s what brings my dad back time and time again, working with charities, giving back.

You know, we were a working-class family, who lived in a terraced house just by the train tracks and you would be woken by the trains going past at night. I didn’t grow up with any privilege. Dad would say to us you can’t always just get beans out of a can – sometimes you have to grow those beans, sometimes you have to nurture that plant, sometimes you have to wait, sometimes you have to have patience.

I think there were moments growing up when I would step out of my world, or I would go into town, or I would see somebody who seemed to have a little bit more money than us and I would think is this it, doesn’t it get any better for my family? I have to say, in those moments as a child and as a teenager, when we used to go back to Bangladesh, I would come back and really appreciate what we did have. And I think that’s a really important lesson to learn when you’re young.

is on BBC One on Dec 10 and 17 at 8pm Overseas holidays are currently subject to restrictio­ns. See Page 3.

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