Dispatch from Bangladesh: With Nothing Here, Still Children Come
Many of the children spent the night of the cyclone on what is called a “talla,” or a man-made hill, just under a mile from the school. Photo by Debasish Shom for CRS
Caroline Brennan, CRS’ regional information officer for South Asia, sends this dispatch from Bangladesh:
It may be hard to believe, but a certain mound of dirt in the Bangladeshi village of Tiakhali is special. It’s not for any historical significance and, should you make it here — which requires six ferries round-trip and a tractor ride through mustard-yellow rice fields — you may start to wonder if it was worth the hike. But, after stretching your legs and being generously offered a fresh coconut, you’ll turn around to see why it is.
Standing on top of this dirt mound are about 100 elementary-school children, who see this muddy swath as nothing less than their school. While most of us might hone in on the empty space where walls and a roof should be, or the missing desks, chairs and chalkboard, the students and teachers stand defiantly in the space of what Cyclone Sidr pulled to pieces one night in November. They have exams, they say; the cyclone should have thought better.
The view on all sides feels like a tropical twin of Kansas: it is flat country. Bangladesh is so flat that most of its land mass is less than four feet above sea level; with sea levels rising, the country’s population density is one of the highest in the world. (Imagine roughly half the U.S. population — 140 million people — squeezed into the state of Wisconsin.) Finding places of high ground during a flood is not easy or, in some places, possible. In villages like Tiakhali, these places have to be made by hand and are known as tallas (man-made hills), where people or animals can flee when waters start to rise.
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