Displaced #8 – Bangladesh
Evocative stories of people who have to leave their homes due to climate change.
Our DISPLACED project started exactly one year ago with our trip to Senegal. In the meantime, we have visited 10 countries, experienced numerous adventures and met countless people who have lost their homes due to climate change.
Another country we wanted to visit for this project was Bangladesh. After our first trip to the Southeast Asian country in 2009 for “The Human Face of Climate Change”, it was clear to us that we also wanted to cover Bangladesh for this project.
Almost two thirds of the country is located in the river delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the largest delta of its kind, and large parts of it are less than 10 meters above sea level, which means that Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Back from Southeast Asia, we are now in the middle of processing the very extensive material. The first major exhibition of this work will open in less than 4 months, and there is still a lot to do before then.
Mathias & Monika
BRASCHLER/FISCHER
+41 79 205 0330
visualimpactprojects.org
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Hellgasse 4 – 5103 Wildegg
Bangladesh is 3.5 times the size of Switzerland and has almost 20 times more inhabitants. It is not only the country with the highest population density in the world, but also one of the countries most threatened by climate change.
We landed in Dhaka on the day of the Bengali New Year. As luck would have it, we were already in the Bangladeshi capital on this special day for our last project. This time, however, we were picked up at the airport by the World Food Programme, and from there we set off for Khulna, the third largest city in the country. After a five-hour drive, we arrived in the million-strong city in the south-east of Bangladesh.
The next morning we made our way to Nalian, a small village south of Khulna on the Shibsa River. First we had a 1.5-hour drive by car and then a 40-minute boat trip on the Shibsa, as Nalian can only be reached by boat. At least that was the theory. In reality, the journey took almost twice as long. The roads became smaller and narrower, but the number of animals, motorcycles, tuktuks and pedestrians was inversely proportional to the size of the roads. So we arrived in Nalian just before 12 noon, which was a problem because the UN has a rule that its vehicles are generally not allowed to drive after dark. Which would have given us exactly 2 hours on site, but that was of course far too short. Fortunately, Kun, the WFP officer who accompanied us, was very supportive and “forgot” this golden rule that day.
As in most places in the south of Bangladesh, the inhabitants of Nalian are struggling with the massive consequences of climate change. Like nearly the entire south of the country, the village is only just above sea level. The rise in water levels is particularly noticeable during full and new moons. Properties and houses are then repeatedly flooded, which also leads to salination of the soil and groundwater. This in turn leads to a decline in agricultural yields. The situation is particularly bad for the inhabitants when a cyclone occurs, which have increased in frequency. The water level then rises even higher and entire areas and villages are flooded.
One family we met was in the process of bringing in whole boatloads of mud blocks. They want to use them to raise the ground on another plot of land and rebuild their house there to protect themselves against the increasingly frequent flooding.
As in Nalian, countless people in southern Bangladesh have lost their homes and their modest possessions in recent years. We saw what their fate can look like when we visited the slums of Khulna over the next two days. According to the World Bank, 52% of Bangladesh’s population lived in slums in 2020. Around a third of the approximately 1.5 million people living in the greater Khulna area call a slum their home. For example Fatema, an old woman who does not know her exact age and has been living in one of the roughly 300 slums of Khulna for 10 years because she lost her house in floods.
Or Rina Khatun and her 5-year-old daughter Faiza. Six months ago, their house was destroyed by a cyclone that also killed their cows so that they and their family lost everything. Her husband moved to a slum in Dhaka because he could earn more money there as a day laborer. She moved with her two daughters to the Notum Bazar slum in Khulna, where the older daughter could not stand the difficult conditions, would only cry, gave up school and ended up staying with relatives. Rina and Faiza now live in a spartan room of just under 8 square meters. The only piece of furniture is a hard bed. There is no running water. They have to wash themselves at a communal water tap, and to reach the simple outhouse they have to find their way through countless winding alleyways. The slum is overcrowded with countless people of all ages. There is no privacy.
For Rina, it is clear that she wants to be out of there as soon as possible, back to her village. However, as the income potential is low and more and more land is being lost in southern Bangladesh, the prospects for slum dwellers to get out of them are usually grim. For Rina, too, it will be a Herculean task to reunite her family and return to her village.
Another consequence of extreme poverty, which is exacerbated by the effects of climate change, is the fact that many girls are married off extremely young so that they are no longer a financial burden on their families. For example, Reshma, who we meet in the Balirfield slum, was married off to an older man against her will at the age of 13. She told us poignantly how bad it was for her to be married as a teenager, with all the obligations that entailed. But her family had also lost their house in a flood. They managed to stay in the village, but due to the shrinking agricultural land and the increasing salinization of the soil, it was difficult to make a living, so Reshma’s father decided to marry her off as an adolescent. We also noticed that this practice seems to be widespread when we visited Nalian on the first day. There, too, we met women who were married off at the age of 12 or 13 and often became mothers shortly afterwards.
In addition to the extremely helpful WFP, we also received a lot of great support in Khulna from local NGOs via the World Food Programme. Kun Li, the head of communications at WFP Bangladesh, who accompanied us, was very impressed with the way we worked and the portraits we shot, and so wanted to take the opportunity to use us as lecturers for the people she was working with. At short notice, she drummed up representatives from most of the local NGOs one evening so that we could give them a photography workshop. Our presentation was met with a lot of interest and it was a great pleasure for us to give back a little for all the support we received.
We just managed to make this trip before the monsoon set in. In Khulna, the first rain of the year fell just as we had our last shoot. But only after gale force winds had kicked up huge amounts of dust, covering all our equipment in a fine layer of dust.
After an intensive week in Bangladesh, we made our way home. At the airport in Dhaka, we fortunately took the advice to get there early enough seriously. Just to get into the airport building, we had to queue for a quarter of an hour, only to end up in the longest queue for check-in we had ever seen. And the final passport control also involved quite a bit of waiting.
But the lasting impression of this journey, however, was that we met so many incredibly friendly people who live in the most difficult of circumstances through no fault of their own. And that the situation for the people of Bangladesh will become even so much more difficult as climate change progresses.
