Fariha Sarawat
Published by the Daily Star on 14 October 2009.
MODHUMITA, a housewife and mother of two, hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since May not since her house and the small shrimp hatchery her family owned got washed away by Cyclone Aila and her two small children almost died.
The last time I was down in her village Shakbaria: a small community of about a 40-50 mainly Hindu families on the south-western coastal belt of Khulna her family of seven was still living in a makeshift house made of straw, fronds and plastic sheeting provided by Save the Children UK.
This was almost four months after the Cyclone had hit the house that got washed away. That was an NGO-prescribed “climate-resilient” variety of the kind that had been built to stand tall even against the onslaught of violent, tropical storms. It got washed away by the fierce tidal surge of unprecedented velocity. The early warning systems in place had only predicted the storm, not the ferocity of the tidal surge. The collateral damage was not caused by the storm, but by the mighty tidal surge that it had propelled. This shows once again that we need to scale up our disaster risk reduction efforts and hone our early warning systems.
I have worked with two different kinds of climate change survivors the ones who live at the forefront, on the coast, and deal with the frequent calamities, and the ones who have migrated to the cities because they figured survival, which is hard enough in this part of the world under normal circumstances, would just be easier if they didn’t have to fight a huge storm or flood every few months.
The latter group seems to be increasing in number. But not out of choice.
