Archives (2nd May 2018): Rains, rains, rains

01/12/18 03:21

The rainy season has arrived to Dhaka, and to the rest of the country. Rains here are impressive. It just gets very, very dark and it feels like late at night, even if you may be in the middle of the day, and then it pours buckets of water… it carries on like that for 30, 40 minutes, and then it clears up. I love rain here in Dhaka, it helps keeping the air pollution down, and makes the temperature bearable.
Each time it rains, I am also getting scared though. Just 300 km south of Dhaka, we have one of the largest concentration of refugees in the world, living in camps that are among muddy and sandy hills. As you may expect, there is no proper infrastructure to withstand bad weather. Each rain session there potentially means floods and landslides - which can kill people, block roads - and thus access to basic services, and compromise sanitation systems - contributing to a possibilities of spreading diseases such as cholera… We are bound for the disaster in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. A part of optimistic me hopes things will not be that bad, but the optimism is based on nothing but wishful thinking. Things are very likely to be bad, and we may be experiencing emergencies within emergencies… Scary indeed.

I am going to be travelling to Cox’s Bazar and visiting the camps this week. The main reason for the visit will be an attempt of understanding what else we all could do to minimise the suffering of people, when the bad weather becomes a reality in the area.
On another note, we are still waiting for the news from the Canadians with regards to Tahir’s security and criminality clearances. I still have not managed to control being anxious. I wished so much that we already have some answers!

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Archives (2nd May 2018): Rains, rains, rains