Floods are not Fairytales (Monday 6th August)

When I was young, the notion of a flood conjured magical images for me. I imagined being able to jump out of my house and go for a swim whenever I wanted in a never ending swimming pool, to row a boat over to a neighbours house and that a flood could pick up my whole house and transport it to a completely different place, fully intact, where new adventures could begin.

Of course, as I grew older (and wiser) I realized that floods were no fairytales. But it wasn’t until today that I fully comprehended what nightmares they can be.

As most of you would hopefully be aware, devastating floods have hit South Asia, particularly India, Nepal - and Bangladesh. Being located in the delta has meant that we have known the floods were coming, something that has been talked about matter of factly, without any signs of panic. And I guess when a country gets hit by floods every couple of years it does become normal. Even talk about the possibility of this being a “big flood”, that seem to occur in Bangladesh every 10 years (the last one was in 1998), has been focused around the fact that hopefully this isn’t it – as it’s a year early. A big flood will affect everyone. Right now, with almost half of the districts of Bangladesh being underwater, it is the rural areas and some of the poorer slum areas of the city that have been most affected. I think it may be a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for many people.

From my daily trip to and from my home in central Dhaka to work in the north of the city I haven’t seen any signs of the flood. If I hadn’t been reading the newspaper, I would have no idea that the country was going underwater and even then, reading about something is way different to seeing it.

Today I went to visit one of our project areas in the south of Dhaka that has been affected by the floods. I have included some pictures below of what I saw as they probably speak more effectively than anything I can write. We rode around the area in riskshaws, although a boat would have been far more effective. The water was about knee deep, but as the tide came in it rose quickly by another 10cm and apparently at night it rises up to waist depth.
Apart from the obvious problems of peoples houses and belongings going underwater, the major concerns are increasing prices of food and clean water plus the waterborne diseases, such as cholera, malaria, dengue fever, etc. The hospitals are being flooded – with diarrhea patients – and children have died from it. The drownings that are occurring devastate me – but deaths from diarrhea, which should be treatable, absolutely crush me.

While I looked on today, devastated by what I saw (as one of the photos indicate – I promise that wasn’t a posed look) – people seemed to be going about their lives and wading through the water that I was scared to stand in (the smell of it is something that still hasn’t left my nostrils) and looking for options of how to feed and shelter their families.

The children, like I once did, thought that the water from the flood was great fun – and were playing and dunking in it, their parents otherwise occupied looking for necessities.

My perspectives on everything seem to have become relative in Bangladesh. The only glimmer of hope for a fairytale ending now, is for the flood waters to recede soon and that a repeat of the ‘98 flood will not occur.

The only people profitting from the floods are the boat makers...