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Asia struggles to put her life back together. Photograph © CARE / William Dowell, 2007.
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Khatachira, Bangladesh, November 27, 2007—“We thought that we were all going to die,” says Asia, 40. When she talks about the night that Cyclone Sidr annihilated both her home and her village, the traumatic shock is visible in her eyes. “We didn’t think,” she says. “We just held on to anything that was there.”
Two days after the storm, Asia found the body of her niece three kilometers from the village. It had been swept there by a sea surge that was more than three meters high. The villagers in Khatachira, which was in the direct path of the cyclone, managed to recover 70 bodies. At least 200 villagers were missing. While relief supplies have been flooding into the areas stricken by the cyclone. it will take many months to recover materially, and even longer to overcome the trauma of what happened.
Like others who survived, Asia managed to resist the sea surge which followed the storm by holding on to a tree. Another family survived miraculously with 15 members hanging on to branches of the same tree. Khatachira is near one of the largest mangrove forests in the world.
As the level of the rose, eventually approaching 5 meters (16 feet) higher, the villagers held on to higher and higher branches of the trees. When the water level finally dropped five or six hours later, some people were clinging to branches that were so high off the ground that they didn’t know how to get back down.
Feroza, 35, who lives in the same village, lost nearly everything that she had. She tried to hold on to a tree, but was swept two kilometers (1.5 miles) away from the village. Her two-year old daughter drowned. Her five cows perished. Her clothes were torn from her body by the force of the current. She had to borrow new clothes from a neighbor.
Most of the survivors in what is left of Khatachira feel that it is a miracle that they are alive. But the fact that so many people survived this cyclone in comparison to earlier ones, means that Bangladesh now faces an immense challenge in trying to keep the survivors alive. The fishing boats that used to provide food for Katachira were smashed by the storm. The 200 or more houses that once made up the village were swept away, in many cases without leaving any trace that they were ever there.
For many people the period after the storm promises to be even more demanding than surviving the storm itself.
Khatachira’s only source of water is a stagnant pond, filled with blackened leaves. CARE is distributing both food and essential non-food materials needed for survival. But whether these efforts will be sufficient, will depend largely on donors and the public providing sufficient funding to reach the largest number of people possible.
CARE has been delivering emergency food packages along with supplies for emergency shelter to thousands of people displaced by the cyclone. CARE is also focusing on providing access to safe drinking water. In addition, CARE medical teams, working in cooperation with the Dhaka Community Hospital, have been operating mobile clinics in the stricken areas.
Media contact: William Dowell, tel: +41 79 590 3047
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