Cyclone Sidr and Bangladesh River Journey: Effects of Climate Change
Global Warming, green technology, and climate control. These are topics that we constantly hear about, from the media frenzy around Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth all the way to politicians discussing issues to implement energy conserving regulations. Although we hear and speak about climate control issues in our everyday lives, we rarely think about the vast negative implications on the everyday lives of citizens whose habitats are directly affected by such climate changes.
Photo BBC: Many children in Sharonkholur have lost parents in the cyclone, while food is in pitifully short supply.
Recently I came across the study being conducted by BBC which is working to document how global warming has impacted the rural areas of Bangladesh. Titled the Bangladesh River Journey, the project consists of a crew of BBC World Service members traveling along the rivers of Bangladesh in order to observe the effects of climate change on affected populations. And the moment Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh which has taken thousands of lives (and rising) and misplaced thousands more from their habitat, the team has been updating the harrowing ordeal of the local population. To remain updated read their entries at the following link:
“A harrowing day for the BBC team reporting on villages that were totally destroyed in the cyclone.â€
Although the BBC article The Bangladesh Journey highlights the good spirits of our people, as even the journalist notes, “It’s difficult to do anything other than admire Bangladeshis. Among the poorest people of the world, they are amazingly resourceful and cheerful.†is fairly concerning, “the sea in the nearby Bay of Bengal needs to rise by only a few centimeters for up to 20 million people to be displacedâ€.
The Adhunika team is asking everyone to keep people affected by Cyclone Sidr in their prayers, and to share name of organizations who are helping the people with the recovery.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Hello there,
If you are considering to donate, please check the following link of Drishtipat, it has list of names of organizations who are taking donations for the people affected by Cycolne Sidr.
http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2007/11/17/sidr-and-what-we-can-do/
Our prayers and thoughts with the survivors.
Thanks
Shahnaz
November 19th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
The death toll is rising, and millions are displaced in the Cyclone Sidr, please reach out to any of the organizations listed in the link.
Courtesy of Drishtipat: More ways to Donate for the Cyclone Sidr Survivors, http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2007/11/19/sidr-donation/
Courtesy of SpandaanB: SpaandanB Relief Efforts for Cyclone Sidr Victims in Bangladesh - 2007
http://www.spaandanb.org/cyclone.html
 And for updates news read here: BBC News: Aid Battle for Bangladesh News
Thoughts and prayers with the survivors.Â
thanks,
Shahnaz
November 19th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
As we are continuously updated in the news about the depressing situation in Bangladesh, one article feature in Time Magazine’s website especially intrigued me:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1685330,00.html
Essentially, the article states that the effects of global warming will inevitably “spark an exodus of climate refugees fleeing for the cities and for other countries.” Living conditions will become dire due to the effects of bad weather and climate, forcing a vast number of citizens to look for refuge elsewhere.
The author goes on to say that all this may be a silver lining for Bangladesh as “Bangladesh’s fleeing multitudes can help feed the West’s need for cheap labor as its own population ages.”
It’s at this point in the article that I couldn’t help but laugh at the audaciousness and lack of reality behind the statement. As great of a theory as it would be if it were true, with the West imposing Patriot Acts and stronger immigration laws, such an idea is most definitely whimsical. Which makes the provided facts even more worrisome that in the very near future, thousands upon thousands of Bangladeshis may have no place to call home.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I would ask all of u donating for the Sidr victims to be a bit careful when u choose where to give ur money. I m hearing all sorts of stories about the advantages sm ppl r taking frm diff govt. & non govt orgs while distributing the relief. When I was doing my research on where to donate my money I heard an incident where a 14 yr old girl was asked by a govt official if she’d go wid him if he gave her a packet of biscuits. Also a lot of the relief is going only to the centers while dere r many remote places where the victims have absolutely nothing while at relief centers the victims have food, water, water purifying tablets, clothes, medicine & so on.
November 30th, 2007 at 5:18 am
I agree with a lot of you and I truely feel for the bangladeshi people. I have personaly visited some disastor places and I was horrified by looking at the impact. I came to visit one of my nice friends who stays in dhaka but her village is from Putua Khali and I went with her to her village was a terrible site. I myself was horrified when I was at my friends home and the winds where thumping hard and the ground where shaking. If I feared this, imagine those people who met the cyclone face on, could imagine the trauma and fear they went through. Anyhow I have another friend in Dhaka working for an American company M2SYS and we all studied in the US. My Friend’s office in US was so generous they help sponsor us to make a website and few our friends from all over the world is helping us to support this website. It’s called Help Them Survive http://www.helpthemsurvive.org and it educated the people abroad what happen to bangladesh and that they need more aid and our website also helps all those aid agencies to get more aid and getting their message accross to all the people. So please people come and support our website as we are trying really hard to help the Cyclone Victims and get them their necessary needs.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
A Life So Secluded
While more than a few thousand people have died and more dead bodies are being discovered, I live a blessed life.
The cyclone first hit Bangladesh somewhere in the evening of Thursday while I was sitting in the safe haven of my office. The generators ensured that I didn’t even notice the power cut when it hit the city. Actually for a long time even the Internet didn’t waver. In fact as the storm was making its way towards Dhaka, I was very conveniently allowed to stream home in the safety of a CNG where I barely tasted the intensity of the upcoming storm.
In the safety of the housing compound I live in, the only giveaway of the situation all around was the fact that we had to light candles throughout. Ofcourse I had a few scented candles and few extra large decorative ones (colourful too) that cast a golden glow all around as we gathered at the dining table. If Martians had landed on earth that day and peeped in though the windows of our flat, they could almost mistake us for a merry midnight party, having a blast.
Throughout the rest of the night the howling wind kept me awake, and I sought refuge in shape of the telephone, keeping my best friend up to keep me company and distract me from my fears.
During that same night, over 3000 people lost their lives. That’s according to official sources; unofficial sources claim a much higher figure.
In the days following the cyclone, we didn’t have proper power for almost 3 days. Which led to a slight mismanagement of water supply to individual flats in our apartment block. By the third evening however, things were looking way better.
In the southern districts of Bangladesh, following the night of nightmare, hundreds of thousands of people stayed alive without food, water or any knowledge of whether or not their near and dear ones were alive or not.
They drank water from ponds in which bodies of other people, and cattle floated. They received rice as relief and cried there hearts out, because they had no means to cook that rice. How can anyone be expected, least of all elderly people grown weak by disaster, hunger and exhaustion, to eat those? So they remained hungry for a few hours/nights/ days more.
While reporting in newspapers of these events, we tend to become just silent spectators. Writing or editing pieces of human pain, there is sometimes no time for feeling that pain. We just do our job many a times. Or we feel bad about thing, but practicalities take over, and then we simply forget all about it.
As a spectator of this kind of life, I seem to find quite a lot of parallels between the mother mosquito in “Mosquito Town”. Every time a door opened and the mother mosquito swooped indoors with her following brood, another 15 ( or 20 or 5 or 9 ) of her children fell as the door closed again. I think I was 8 at the time I read the story, and I wondered how the mother lived on? Losing children at THAT rate and still moving on, in search of more food to survive.
Over 20 years after that, I have almost become something parallel to that mother mosquito! Four years ago when I visited Dhaka, I was working on a temporary project. Running from my home to my office, trying to get an impossible task get done in an insanely short period of time, Dhaka started to look too artificial to me. I actually asked my mum why there were fewer poor people on the roads.
Actually there wasn’t. I was being blind to it.
In my life that’s so sheltered and secluded, I had been moving only along the better roads of the city, going to interestingly upper class events in the evening, and hence largely oblivious to the real life. One visit to an ailing aunt living in Mirpur made me see in two hours what I hadn’t seen in over 4 weeks by then.
I can’t complain about my ignorance, as it is really a creation of my own. I live a secluded life, and I actually have turned into the kind of person I didn’t like much before. When I first returned to this country, I had to go to college in a three-wheeler, and this girl in our class would constantly ask me this:
“Did you come in a three-wheeler today? They say it shakes a lot, does it really?
She asked the same thing so many times repeatedly, that soon I was convinced that she wasn’t actually just being a snooty bitch(!) She actually lead a life so sheltered, that real life amazed her like fairies in fairy tales take up children’s imagination.
Have I turned into something evening little bit similar to that, I wonder?
Actually I get goose bumps every time I think about it.
When I come to think of it, natural disasters are not every day affairs, so these are unusual times. But doesn’t the slums in our city hold people with similar plights, and we tend to turn a similar blind eye to their problems and dilemmas.
I can recall this maid at my former bosses house (his office was located ground floor of his house, hence we knew a lot about his maids!) had a 30year old who got diarrhoea one fine day. Two days later she was dead.
The day after, the maid came to work. She was crying and wiping her eyes as she cooked. I asked her why she had come in work that day at all. She said she was afraid she would lose her job, and she had three more mouths to feed.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night for no good reason. I just wonder; just what my contribution has been towards maintaining the limbo in which these poor people find themselves? Surely a lot?
Had I eaten say, just one meagre meal less a month, worn one less outfit in a year, taken a bus instead of a cab just perhaps once a week or even month…would I be saving enough to make a change in these people’s fate?
Surely I would. Then why do many of us need a cyclone Sidr to remind us to be more generous, or even aware of the everyday struggle that poor people face day in and day out around us.
We are so blessed in our every day life, in so many ways we don’t even count our blessings. Why cant we all as just plain human beings do more to help those around us.
I know I have exaggerated the situation to try and explain it. I know I don’t turn a blind eye to the poor around us. I know I am not entirely insensitive to the distress in the air in this city. I also know many others aren’t.
But in a general sense many of us are still failing.
Else why would there be so many hungry mouths in our streets? So many women beaten in their own homes, so many children tortured, so many people out begging, so many faces deprived of their rights, so many people suffering all around us all the time, all the time.
Where do we go wrong? Living a life so secluded from reality, many amongst us grow lakhs and crores of currency in our bank accounts, today not even available to us. Look at our children…have they turned into human beings, or animals? Or semi-human beings…
Where do we start to rectify ourselves? We have too. Else when this problem grows in size and comes back to haunt us, will we have any defence against it?
Look at the country today, some say there was only a civil war in 1971, they say here cant be any war criminals in our country. Its not surprising that these liars who themselves are the criminals should say so. What is surprising is that many, many people actually believe it!
We all thought we were dealing with the situation by actually not doing much. We turned a blind eye to the faces of these criminals growing in numbers and activities and social position. We didn’t always have sleepless nights because they had gone unpunished.
We thought we were in control by living more, or less, a secluded life.
Many of us looked at things around us, and didn’t do anything about it. Many of us thought someone else would do something about it, and waited to be led. Many of us just learned to live with it.
Look where such an attitude brought us today.
In a worser plight where even the truth seems set to be denied.
Its time for all of us to really, really wake up.
A life secluded, isn’t a life at all!