At 72, Bangladeshi honey-hunter Mohsan Gazi has seen plenty of bad storms and hard times, but the stoical septuagenarian says nothing came close to Cyclone Aila that struck in May last year.
A year after the disaster, Gazi’s community of some 500 families still lives in a squalid, makeshift camp on a narrow spit of land surrounded by salt water.
They cannot farm or fish — the cyclone destroyed their boats — and have no fresh water.
“I have lived here all my life. There were big storms that I remember in the 1970s and in 1988, but not like this, with this one we lost everything — our water, our crops, our land, our houses and the embankments,” Gazi said.
“When the rains come, we will be at the mercy of God,” he added, referring to the start of the monsoon season next month.
Cyclone Aila slammed into southern Bangladesh on May 26 last year and while the initial death toll was low — less than 300 people were killed, compared to 4,000 by Cyclone Sidr in 2007 — a huge tidal surge destroyed the network of river embankments where people live in southern Bangladesh.
A year later the embankments have not been rebuilt, condemning 200,000 people like Gazi to lives in limbo — their land submerged and too salty for crops, their roads washed away and their water sources contaminated.
“The biggest problem is clean water,” said Gazi’s neighbor, Anjana Roy.
“There is nowhere near here where we can get water — ground water here is too salty, we can cook with it but we cannot drink it, the wells have arsenic in and there are also no latrines,” she said.
“The main road was washed away so even if we could farm we couldn’t get to market,” she said, pointing dejectedly at the small heap of mud and brick that used to connect her tiny village to nearby Khulner town.
Experts say Aila was more severe than the average storm in cyclone-prone Bangladesh because it struck when the sea levels were high from spring tides.
Although Bangladesh is frequently described as a country on the front lines of climate change, experts say the fall out from Cyclone Aila has exposed just how ill-prepared the South Asian nation is to handle natural disasters.
Government officials admit that Aila was mishandled from the beginning. It took three months for Bangladesh to declare an emergency and appeal for international assistance.
Rampant local corruption by contractors hired by the Water Development Board — which is responsible for the rebuilding of embankments — further delayed the reconstruction, local officials say.
Unlike the response to Cyclone Sidr, the army was not immediately mobilized to help the relief effort and donors took time to spring into action.
For Monium Sondar, a former fisherman who lost his house and boat to Aila and has been living under a tarpaulin on an embankment for a year, migration to a better life is a distant dream.
“Right now, I don’t even have the cash to leave — if someone could help me I’d leave this area tomorrow, but no one will give me a job or food,” he said.
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