After her wedding, Sahia moved in with her husband and father-in-law to her new home in Singpur – a riverside village in Bangladesh, only a couple of hundred kilometers from the capital, Dhaka. She had been living there for a year when she witnessed her first home collapsing into the river. Riverbank erosion usually happens slowly, but occasionally a larger chunk of land suddenly falls into the water. When she noticed the deep cracks in the ground, she started carrying out her family’s belongings to safety. A few hours later, the house vanished.
Sahia and her family moved in with her husband’s uncle for a while. But it was not long before his house was swallowed by the river too. ‘’We then moved into an abandoned house, but are still living too close to the river,’’ Sahia tells me in a worried voice.
Sahia’s husband was a fisherman and the family got by on what he managed to catch. One day, everything changed. “My husband used to catch fish, but when the fish got some disease, he had to stop fishing…. Nowadays, there is hardly any fish left in the river”, tells Sahia.
Once their main income stopped sustaining them, the family was forced to change their livelihood. They decided to migrate seasonally to work in a brick factory in Aliganj, further up the river. Nowadays, they leave Singpur for six months every year during the rainy season to avoid being there when the village is flooded.
When the family returns to Singpur, they manage to live off of their savings from the brick factory. The work is hard and dangerous. The children miss out on school to work in the factory and it is only a matter of time before someone ends up getting hurt or sick from the hard work. Their savings would not sustain the family through a crisis.
By Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson, UNU-EHS Gibika Project
