21.02.2020Trishal is a small town not far from the metropolis of Mymensingh. Mymensingh is an important transport hub on the Meghna River. Trishal has a university whose campus is growing…
A haor is a seasonal inland sea that receives vast amounts of surface runoff water during the rainy season from rivers and canals that flow into this flood basin. However, this wetland ecosystem almost dries up after the rainy season.
Khasi people, Peying River, 16.02.2020From India flows a river into northern Bangladesh, which is called Peyign / Goyain . Before that, the river is called Om. One of the features…
13.03.2019Pathi Char is a small island owned by only one family. The father of our PhD student at the Anthropology Department of the University of Dhaka uses the island with…
The Institute for International Climate Research and Modelling is taking this virtuela path as perhaps the first Saxon virtual research institute. It currently combines about 4 focal points: Bangladesh and the Ganges Delta, the Aral Sea, the Altai and the Far East of Russia. Teams from all over the world will gradually join. This is the task of 2021!
Satkira is the district capital in southwest Bangladesh and was considered by my colleague Hassan to be the museum of disasters. Most of what one can find here is caused by the devastation of the Ayla storm (2009) but also problems with arsenic in the water, the problem of waterlogging arose.
A one-hour boat trip by speedboat today brought us to a so-called char, a sandbank that appears everywhere in the delta and sometimes remains for centuries, but can also become…
In Munshogonge we visited a Mawali village, a community of landless storm victims, the seed bank of Arjuna Khanum, the head office of Barcik, and a Hindu community of mat-weaving women. Each time we drove over the area that the storm Ayla left shaved bare in 2009 and which is now populated almost exclusively by shrimp farms.
The people who live in the area north of manoura told us about their loss of land. Many of them have moved more than once to escape the water. Moving 6 or 11 times was not uncommon. For the fishermen of the island, who usually go for Hilsha fish (Bangladesh's national fish), it is now closed season. It is forbidden to catch this fish for 3 months (Feb. - May). While the fishermen wait, they work on construction sites on the island, help on the agricultural land for daily wages or move to other towns for three months to find work here. When the fishing season starts, they go out on the boats with new nets, boats and everything needed to fish.
The three islands of Bhola, Manpura and Hatiya were actually settled around the same time. It was about 200 years ago that people came from the east, from Sandwipp Island in particular. They were discovered in the 16th century by the Spaniard Domingo de Alvares. Later, the British claimed the territory and made the area arable. The islands were settled down to the last corner. Hardly a piece of primeval forest has been preserved. Almost everything here is garden and farmland, the garden close to the houses, the farmland between the homesteads.
