She began screaming for help. When she ran outside, there was pandemonium. Sona Bhan Bibi managed to get a boat to take her and her family to safety. A few grass mats that she saved from the side of her house, provided material to make a flimsy one-room shelter on the side of a raised road where she now lives with ten members of her family. Shortly after, she received a relief package of rice and some candles. Since then, she has been begging for rice from other families camped out on the road. She and her family had breakfast in the morning. They won’t have lunch, and they are not sure of where supper, if any, will come from. Until a few days ago, they had been living on a small amount of rice that came in the first distribution of emergency relief. That temporary aid is coming to an end, and she has no idea of where she will get food in the future. Her son, twenty-five, is looking for work, but there is no guarantee that he will find any in time.
Women are particularly vulnerable when disaster strikes. Like thousands of others who were most affected by the floods in Bangladesh, Sona Bhan Bibi lived in the chars, islands that form spontaneously in the middle of the giant river deltas. Open land is scarce in Bangladesh, but it is possible to live on the chars without owning land, and when they are not underwater, the chars can be extraordinarily fertile farmland. The reason that the land is available is that the chars are frequently submerged during the monsoon season. To understand why flooding in the chars is so terrifying, it is only necessary to take a quick look at the Jumana River. In the flood conditions that are taking place now, the river is easily three to four miles across. If a flood suddenly covers the island, you can find yourself having to swim miles to the nearest shore. Near Baghutia, five entire villages were swept away completely by the flood, leaving no trace behind them. It is impossible to return to them. The river has taken the land that they were on. People in Bangladesh have nicknamed the Jamuna, the river that dances. In the current floods, the river opened new channels that never existed before, and in some places it shaved up to 500 meters off the shoreline, washing away all the villages that had been built there.
.gif){kind=icon}
