Early on Friday morning, the start of Bangladesh’s weekend, 15-year-old Sania Mahabub Moon and members of her family travelled into Dhaka from a nearby village to spend their rest day sweeping roads.
They were among hundreds of school pupils, students and volunteers now managing the streets of Bangladesh’s capital following the sudden collapse of the autocratic regime of prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled the country on Monday after weeks of anti-government protests.
With police in hiding for fear of retributive violence, children and university students are cleaning and repainting Dhaka’s streets with revolutionary slogans, pulling over cars for inspection and even guarding Sheikh Hasina’s ransacked official residence, where stray dogs now wander through the flattened vegetable garden.