Losing the fight against nature

By Roland Buerk BBC correspondent in Bangladesh

With more than half the country under flood water and an estimated 25 million people homeless, the people of Bangladesh are battling against disease and malnutrition.

Flood victims rescue their belongings from the capital Dhaka

The children skipped and laughed when the torrential rain began again, jumping in the puddles on the embankment on the edge of Dhaka, still finding fun in the monsoon that has brought this country so much misery.

In the shacks suspended above the water on stilts their parents were struggling to survive.

Already the flood was washing over the bamboo floor in the corner of Shilpi Shamantu's single room home.

She and the children lived in the slum just within the capital's defensive dyke because she thought there they would be safe from Bangladesh's annual floods.

But this year the rivers have overwhelmed man's efforts to hold them back.

Now the family's few possessions were hung over the beams to keep them dry, and Shilpi was trying to cook a lunch of rice over a fire laid in a clay pot.

She was using water from a well and hoped it was safe. Her overwhelming preoccupation was keeping the children from getting ill.

Stench of sewage

A packet of oral rehydration salts, the treatment for diarrhoea, costs about six pence a packet - more, she told me, than she could afford.

The air all around was thick with the stench of the sewage and the chemicals in the flood water.

Factories are still pumping out industrial waste but it has nowhere to go.

After half an hour in Shilpi's house, my pen which is made of silver had been corroded to a deep purple - just by exposure to the air inside.

Doctors check for diarrhoea or cholera to stop a waterborne disease outbreak

The family sleep with their noses just centimetres above the water every night.

A short distance away a man was swimming in it. He was diving down to clear rubbish from the inlet pipes of two pumps.

These ancient machines are being used to try to drain this part of the city, sending the water back over the embankment.

As the rain fell the engineers redoubled their efforts, winding the starting handle of one of the diesel engines round and round, trying to get it to fire.

As it stuttered into action and the water began to gush the children whooped and sat on the outflow pipe.

But in the contest between man and nature, the rain was winning.

In the capital people can still get around. Those who can afford it catch bicycle rickshaws where the water is knee-deep to keep their feet dry.

Boatmen wait for fares where the situation is worse. The rich roar through in their four-wheel drives, sending up a spray. In rural areas though millions are cut off.

Munshiganj, an hour's drive outside the capital, has been flooded for weeks, almost the entire district is underwater.

It lies at the confluence of the Ganges and the Meghna, the great rivers that cross Bangladesh.

Many people have moved onto the roads. Raised on embankments they are now islands of dry land.

Mobile home

The new arrivals were living in shelters made from plastic sheeting and bamboo.

Others were making their homes more permanent, hammering and crashing, adding roofs of corrugated iron, preparing for what could be a long stay.

The monsoon is due to last until September. Everywhere small boys were fishing. They were stalking in the shallows with homemade tridents, or setting up nets and driving the fish into them.

The floods have washed the stock out of ponds in fish farms across the country.

As we travelled on by boat we came across a single bamboo hut surrounded by water, horizon to horizon.

ASIAN MONSOON The word 'monsoon' comes from the Arabic for 'season' Describes seasonal reversals of wind direction From April heat builds over South Asia, creating low pressure areas Brings moisture-rich south-west winds in from the ocean BBC Weather: Asian monsoon

Josna had built it with her husband when they were flooded out of their house.

But they had chosen the wrong place, perhaps having underestimated how bad the flooding was going to get this year. It was up on stilts, but the water was flowing fast just underneath the floor, and it was getting higher and higher.

Josna's husband was away in the town trying to find work to earn some money to buy more bamboo to raise the hut higher.

She was looking after their baby son. I have to keep watching him all the time, she told me, if he falls in he will be swept away and I will never find him.

At a nearby relief distribution point people were pushing and shoving for the bags of rice being handed out by local government officials.

They were trying to keep order, shouting out the names of those known to be most desperately needy, calling them to the front.

The longer these floods go on, the greater the clamour will become for help.

Millions of people here are subsistence farmers, in good times they live from hand to mouth, now they have nothing.

For Bangladesh the floods are both a curse and a blessing. This is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and the land can only support all these people because of the silt that makes it so fertile.

It will be a good harvest next year, one man told me as he sat on the roadside in Munshiganj, waiting for his paddy fields to reappear from the water.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 31 July 2004 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.