Monday 29th, a visit to a pre-intervention area - Sona Mia'r Tak Slum, Dhaka
In order to get a clearer understanding of the challenge of living without clean water and sanitation, WaterAid Bangladesh arranged for us to spend the morning of the 29th in a "pre-intervention" community, i.e. somewhere which has no water and sanitation infrastructure.
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| Entrance into Sona Mia'r Tak slum |
The designated community was in the Sona Mia'r Tak slum, on the eastern outskirts of Dhaka. The huts and shacks are built on privately owned land and the inhabitants pay a rent to the landlord, and although currently the authorities turn a blind eye to this arrangement it's technically illegal and the land could be cleared at any given time.
The majority of the inhabitants are refugees from the Bhola, a coastal area of Bangladesh which had been severely affected by climate change (in fact Bangladesh faces severe challenges in dealing with climate change, and we are scheduled to visit the coastal area of Shyamnagor later this week to find out more).
As this area lies beyond the main city there is no water or sewerage connection, families have to pay 100 Taka a month for the use of a tube well. To understand how this impacts on people I was led through the narrow, winding alleyways of the slum to spend an hour with the family of Khohinur, pictured below.
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| Khohinur & I outside her house. |
After being warmly welcomed into her home, and nearly overwhelmed by inquisitive kids I managed to ask Khohinur some questions around the challenges she and her community faces raising her family without clean water and sanitation (via an interpreter naturally!)
Khohinur is a motherof four, and lives in a two-room shack with her grandmother and mother-in-law. All eight of them rely on her and her daughter to collect the water for drinking and cooking. To do this she joins a queue at the communal tank at 4-5am, which as previously mentioned is privately owned.The water must be fetched this early to ensure the breadwinner, husband Kamal, has his breakfast prior to starting his shift as a rikshaw driver in the city.
The family are allowed two flagons of water in the morning, and one in the evening - if they run out then there is no provision for any more. In order to conserve water the family (and everyone else in the community) do their washing and bathing in the nearby river (1/2km away). This river is heavily polluted as it's downstream from the city centre.
Nearby open water is also contaminated from the latrines, these were very simply standalone latrines which were either over open water or a small tank to be cleared out.
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| Open latrine over water |
As a result of the above obstacles it will come as no surprise that Khohinour confirmed that illnesses were common in the community, and sadly some of the children and the elderly displayed clear signs of water-bourne illnesses on their skin and eyes. There are no medical facilities in the slum, and medical care would have to be in private facilities (and expensive).After speaking to Khohinour we had a tour of the community, and I hope the pictures convey the fact that while undeniably deprived of basic amenties we would take for granted, the atmosphere was cheerful and the people overwhelmingly friendly and the impression I got was of a very close community.
Having said that, on reflection the scarcity of clean water and no sanitation means that if a family breadwinner falls to one of the diseases caused by these factors, then the family would have no way of paying the rent, the water supply or for medicine - a sobering thought.
As I write this, it's gone midnight and it's been a long day, so I will return to upload a few more pictures at a later stage!
