Catalog

DISRUPTED LIVES (Clockwise from top left) About 30 million people in Bangladesh are displaced in weeks of flooding, many leaving their homes to seek refuge in flood shelters. Classes are conducted in makeshift classrooms as over a thousand schools are destroyed by the floods. As the floods linger, boats become the people’s primary means of transport, except for the very poor who cannot afford the price of a boat ride. Diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid from drinking polluted floodwater or eating stale food, and skin diseases from lack of safe water supply for bathing afflict more than 90,000 people, many of them children. Enterprising residents build boats on Dhaka’s busy side streets and earn money by ferrying people. Displaced families use plastic tents, provided by the Government, as temporary shelters.