Travel-Blogue Day 5: Monsoon Season

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 22

Today I visited a handful of villages about 45 kilometers east of Dhaka. The countryside is beautiful, with palms, teak trees, rice paddies, and tidy little roads where school children dressed in blue uniforms were walking and old folks tethered goats and cows. The villages were prosperous. That’s partly because of the proximity to Dhaka, where village people can find work if farming or their other local industries go slack, and partly because Grameen Bank and other micro-credit outfits are busy here. People live in houses built of wood and galvanized steel, with concrete floors. The village centers are bustling places lined with shops and clogged with rickshaws. What struck me was the remarkable resourcefulness of the villagers in this region—which is one of many parts of Bangladesh that floods in the monsoon season.

First, here’s what it’s like when it rains in Dhaka.

The monsoons come every year, so people learn to live with it. The roads, one-lane ribbons of asphalt, are built up on levees so commerce can continue during the rainy season, but many of the farm fields are swamped. Like these rice paddies.

When the farmers can't plant rice, they keep busy with other things, such as fishing in their rice paddies.

Here's a brutally efficient fish monger in Modonpur.

The locals make bricks in the dry season, and move the bricks by boat to the road in the wet season.

As you can imagine, boat-building is a big business here. Boat shop owner Bellal Hossain builds them out of teak, which is sturdy and resists rot.

Every four or five years, the region is hit with really bad floods, forcing many out of their homes. At those times they need the boats for emergency evacuations. For now, most of them are high and dry.

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