Mizan's and Tasfi's Wedding

My two favourite Bangladeshi people celebrate their wedding in Dhaka.

... and I can make it back from my field trip just in time to celebrate with them!

 

Though there are no drinks, no music, no "catch the bridal bouquet" or cake-cutting (actually, the main thing is eating meat, not cake), we are having a great time.

After meeting so many more amazing Bangladeshi people, I feel I should really stay here longer. Then I would have time to actually get to know my new acquaintances, to hang out at Dhaka University, or explore the city with them... 

But way too soon, it will be time to go back home.

Flood and River Erosion in Sariakandi, or: No Way You Can Stay

My second Field Trip goes up north, to Bogra, where the NGO SKS, together with UNDP, is implementing a project called "Flood-Resilient Recovery" in villages next to Jamuna, one of the three big rivers flowing thorough Bangladesh.(known as Brahmaputra in India).

The journey begins with my first bad Bangladeshi experience. People at ICCAD have warned my over and over again that I should be careful to always stay safe, especially when travelling on my own. I try to explain that safety is only a feeling, and I alway feel safe here - but I still agree when Mizan and his friend working at SKS suggested me to book this 4-Star-Hotel for the night I have to stay in Bogra while visiting the project in close-by Sariakandi Upazila.
Turns out I have to pay 3600 Taka for one night - which is about twice as much as the "slum" women I met in Khulna earn within a whole months. The supposed-to-be-existing pool and gym both are "currently under construction". The hotel is totally unbangladeshi, cold and steril, the other guests are business men.
And for WIFI, they want to charge me 300 Taka for each device! I feel like being back in Germany already.

If I had just taken an overnight bus - maybe I would have lost all my money to a pickpocket. This way, I loose all my money for sure. And it does not even go to someone urgently in need for it.

A very different setting next morning, when I finally visit one of the project sites in
Chanbanbaisha Union, Sarikandi Upazila. The houses in the villages scattered alongside the river Jamuna are run-down, many deserted. SKS-worker Ashraf tells me that about 70% of the 10 000 people that are officially registred in Chanbanbaisha have migrated in recent years.

Jamuna regularly bursts its banks after monsoon season. In recent years, however, bonnas, i.e. unexpected and unusually high and destructive floods, are increasing.

Community members tell me that a huge flood in 2014 destroyed their houses, and all their assets, leaving them homeless and deprived of any livelihood opportunity. 

The women are trying to recover from their losses, and learn to build resilience towards future hazards. With the help of SKS, they have formed "self-help groups" to achieve skill trainings, and develop business ideas. Women are taking the lead in these actions.

SKS and UNDP also provide the homless with new houses. As many people have lost their land, the project also tries to acquire government-owned khash land, which, according to law, should be provided to landless, but is often occupied for agriculture, or rented profitably. 

The houses can easily be taken apart, transported to another place and set up there. Projects participants construct the houses themselves, and are provided with trainings on how, and when they have to move their homes if the next flood will hit the area.

 

They provide a sheltering roof, solid walls, and a door to lock at night. Padina, 12 years old, and her aunt were living on the road since their house was washed away. "We still have no food", they say, "but at least we can protect our assets, and ourselves. We are able to sleep at night.
Padina has decorated the walls of her new home with drawings. For girls, being homeless in a destroyed area, surrounded by desperate strangers, is especially hazardous. 

But the new homes are a safe place only temporarly.
Yes, they can be removed easily when the next flood hits - but where to rebuild afterwards? The local government in Chanbanbaisha says it has already run out of khash land - and neighbouring Unions refuse to share their, keeping it for their own people. The displaced therefore depend on good-will of neighbours and relatives. But land is getting increasingly scarce.

River erosion is continously progressing. In front of our eyes, what used to be a house, part of a whole village, goes down into the water.
It is horrofying to see, and even more horrofying that there is apparently no way to stop this.

This school had to be evacuated and moved to a new place, further away from the river, two times already in the last year. Because the building is way too small, pupils are tought in two shifts, with teachers working from early in the morning till late at night. As Jamuna does not stop to expand, the children are already trained for the next evacuation.

I travel back to Dhaka with a sinking feeling of fatalism.

Flood-resilient, removable houses (including a latrine) surely are helpful for the people of this area. But when loss and damage hit, adaptation is just not possible any more.

The government is currently constructing a huge embankment, which will protect most of the houses in Sariakandi - though not the school and a couple of hundred other building situated close to the river bank.
Noone can answer my question, however, whether the embankment itself will be able to sustain river erosion - or just vanish into the water eventually like all other buildings did before.

Adaptation in Gurguria, or: What are "Climate Resilient Technologies"?

In Gurguria, a small village in Bagerhat District, we meet "beneficiaries" of an adaptation project ADAMS is implementing under the Community Climate Change Project (CCCP). These women have been introduced to "climate resilient technologies" for fishing, livestock activities and homestead gardening.

The village is located close to a river, and highly flood-prone. An embankment exists, but frequetly leaks or breaks down. On top of that, the area is affected by saline intrusion: Salt water is streaming inlands during high tides trough rivers and channels. Instead of producing rice, the farmers in this village therefore mainly switched to shrimp farming - a highly contentious business, because inundating former rice field with salt water further increases the salinity of the soil in the whole area.

The women of Gurguria keep some poultry, and grow vegetables. These stalls, raised on pillars, were provided under the CCCP project. The women also recieved training on how to protect their chicken and ducks from waterborne diseases.

As part of the project, nearly the whole village was raised on a plinth to protect it from flooding. The work has just been finished.

In our group discussion, the women emphasise that they are very satisfied with ADAMS and the whole project. They also feel their living situation has improved in recent years, because they changed from merely cultivating rice to diversified income activietes, including shrimp: "We have three meals a day now", "We have electricity now", "We can build a better future for our children", they say. 

Thanks to the experience of ICCCAD researcher Sarder, I realise the problems of the plithing project: 

• It is build out of sand, which is susceptible to being washed away by water. 
• The plinth is designed in the wrong way: The edges are right-angled and steep – if they were gradually inclining, they would be less erosive.

This plinth is thus endangered endangered to be washed away in heavy rain once the monsoon season starts. 

The vulnerability of plinthed houses to cyclones has also not been considered in the project. 

Experts from the government  implementing agency and technical advisers have been involved in designing and monitoring the project - but apparently, noone realised these flaws.

What I also don't like about the project is the fact that the community members (i.e. those defined as "beneficiaries") had to contribute 600 Taka on their own to have their houses raised. According to ADAMS, this is necessary to establish "ownership" of the project, and ensure maintenance. Consequently, though, not all houses were raised, and only some families got flood-resilient sanitation facilities.   

The houses that were not raised are now lower than the plinth, and even more endangered to flooding. 

If you aim to address the poorest, most vulnerable people with your project - I guess you need a different approach.

Field Trip to Khulna

Thanks to Sarder, our Field Coordinator at ICCCAD, I get the chance, together with other Visiting Researchers, to go on a field trip - fully organised and payed by our research institute.

We visit the city of Khulna, where the local NGO ADAMS is working with so-called "slum dwellers". Many of these women are climate refugees: They came to the city after cyclones had destroyed their homes and assets. Now they are working as housekeepers, earning 1500-2000 Taka a month.

The "slum" area is owned by the local government, which is renting houses here to about 15 000 to 20 000 people. This means that the housing condition is relatively secure - but for the costs of 700-1500 Taka rent.

ADAMS is providing microcredit for "slum" dwelllers (the major activity for most local NGOs in Bangladesh), but also offer pre-schooling for the children of microcredit recievers. Lamia is only 3 years old, Her mum accompanies her to lessons. She hopes to enable Lamia and her two sisters a better future by investing in their education.
Government schools are generally free of charge on lower levels, but for 9th grade education of Lamias older sister, the family has to pay a small fee. Better equipped private schools are unaffordable for the poor.

ADAMS is also running two training centres for skill development in Khulna city and in Mollahat Upazila within the Khulna division. These centres, as well as their guest houses, are pretty posh. I get the impression that giving microcredit to the poor is not such a bad business, after all.

While engeneering and construction trainings are offered to men only, women can take computer courses. Espat Jahat Lisa, 22 years old,  is taking this course because she wants to work in an office. She is not married yet. "I want to have a career first", she tells me.

The sewing courses are reserved for women. Some of them walk to the training centre for two hours to recieve the training.
After six months the course participants can apply for a microcredit to buy their own sewing machine, and start a small business at home. For stitching together one kameez, they will get about 30 Taka, and 80 for a three-pieces combination with pants and scarf.

Many of the ADAMS so-called "beneficiaries" live in the village next to the training centre in Mollahat. It's a remote area, and people are striving for alternative job opportunities besides agriculture to improve their living conditions. 90% of the loans go to women.

Tania is a 25 years old mother of two children. She took a sewing course seven years ago, and is now running a small business in her house to supplement her husband's income as a driver.
Tania tells me that she borrowed 6000 Taka to buy the sewing machine, which she had to repay in weekly restallments, staring 15 days after recieving the loan. The condition was to pay back 7000 Taka within one year. Tania managed to do that - but no one at ADAMS wants to answer my question about what happens if you fail to pay back the loan.

Note: Bangladesh is divided into seven Divisions, which are named after the big cities within the region. Each Division is sub-divided into Districts, Upazilas, and Unions. So, there is Khulna Division, Khula Disrict, and Khulna city; and within the Khulna District, there are several Upazilas and Unions.

First Impressions from the Field

What I am learning:
- rephrasing all my questions, because terms like adaptation, stakeholders and evaluation mean nothing to community members
- focusing on their experiences instead of posing hypothetical "either-or" questions
- bring a gift - some sweets, like it is the habit here in Bangladesh. This is not a sweetener, but simply a matter of respect. After all, they are taking the time to meet me, when they have so many much more important things to care about
- I should have learned Bangla!! I can feel how much is getting lost in the translation, but cannot grasp these losses
- people in the worst circumstances can somehow manage to keep their smiles - and women can look so pretty because of their smile!

Challenges I am facing:
- how to define whether a project is a CBA project?
- how to define to which extend hazards are influenced by climate change?
- how to talk to community members about their feelings towards the NGO, or government representatives, while those people are present? Bengali courtesy seems to forbid any straightforward criticism...
 - what to do when faced with all the luxury back in the hotel/guest house, and how to deal with this glaring injustice?
- how to avoid this feeling of helplessness when realising the limits of adaptation?

Field Work, finally!

After living in Dhaka for nearly a month, and conducting interviews only in Dhaka, I finally start collecting data "in the field".

What does that mean?
- I visit local NGOs that are implementing CBA projects on behalf of different donors and international NGOs
- I talk to both the NGO staff members and go with them to the communities, where we meet with the so-called "beneficiaries": the community members participating in the project
- in groups, mainly with women (because most "beneficiaries" are women), I try to pose my questions on how the projects are conducted, and how they feel about it

... and why?
- research on community-based adaptation should be community-based, I guess
- the "sucess" of a project, if it can be examined at all, has to be judged based on the people's perception, I would argue
- to develop some sort of understanding of the reality these people live in - without running water, electricity, without accessable roads, sometimes without sanitation facilities, in constant insecurity of where to get their next meal from, how to raise their children, how to create a future for their family - you just have to actually be there, and see things with your own eyes

Dhaka: First Impressions - updated

What I like:
- the people - everybody is just so incredibly friendly here (not just compared to Hamburg or Dortmund)
- the climate change community, which has its own language, full of abbreviations (IPCC, UNFCCC, CCA, DRR, BCCSAP), and in which people come together from all over the world, with everybody knowing just Bonn in Germany (home to the technical sessions of UNFCCC negotiations each June)
- the mangos! the lychees! the bananas!
- among friends, colleagues, and even acquaintances, you always share your food
- there are no fixed prices: foreigners pay more than locals for transportation (Rickshaw and CNG), and steady customers get better prices in restaurants: some contribution to "financial justice"
... I could add so much more.

What I don't like:
- the weather: just way too hot, and humid; the rain in between doesn't really help
- the habit of people just dumping their trash on the street, and of spitting out all the time (especially men, but also some women)
- the traffic - I know it's cliché, but to go 10 kilometers in rush hour, you might need one hour. This is not to talk abut the fumes, and the dust, and the continous honking
- the incredible poverty of some people you see in the street, and the strict distinction between rich and poor - me living in a sort of "gated community" here in Baridhara, among politicains, diplomats, tourists, and everyone else who can affort to escape from the crowded and dirty streets
- people in Baridhara having their servants - sorry: employees - wash their big facy cars every day, while there is scarcity of fresh water supply in some other parts of this country!